Have an upvote to counter the downvotes. Everyone loves to crow about "democratizing" so-and-so as a positive development, but look at you like you've got two heads when you propose democratizing our feudalistic corporations. Employee-owned companies are a thing, and before anyone asks, no, that's not what communism is.
Putting aside complaints about not understanding Feudalism the main issue with the concept that they also tend to scale worse, and for better or worse scale has been king since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The most common form of a co-op are small agriculture related.
These arguments could have been levied against democratic governments as well. Dictatorships are always more efficient than democracies, but it turns out that "being efficient" is not what produces the best outcomes for citizens. Our modern corporations sure are efficient... at lowering product quality while stuffing the pockets of the C-suite.
Yeah. Amazon wouldn't be Amazon if it started as a co-op.
If you're okay with way less profitability and all the other issues of "employee democracy", go start/join a co-op. You just won't find many of them. And, if you start one, you'll probably start questioning your decision once your employees start telling you what you can do with your own capital. :p
> once your employees start telling you what you can do with your own capital
Except that the whole point here is that the employees have a proportionate share in the company, so it's not "your own" capital. This sort of misunderstanding reinforces my point above about people seemingly being unable to wrap their heads around a non-dictatorial corporate structure.