Let’s immediately acknowledge that the title is lighthearted, and that “communist company” is an oxymoron. The better choice would’ve been, “which is the most worker-owned, egalitarian, power-structures-free cooperative?”, which SEO experts told me was too long of a title. With that said, let me tell you about Igalia and other tech cooperatives
I remember Huawei claimed that its employees owned the company. It would be nice to have a list of these “kind of odd” companies
Indeed they do
Ownership
Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd. is a private company wholly owned by 151,796 of its employees and retired beneficiaries, as of December 31, 2023. Mr. Ren’s investment accounts for nearly 0.73% of the company’s total share capital.
So this Mr Ren is the founder? How did they get to that? They’ve got a lot less employee owners than total employees?
Mr Ren is the founder, and the company was started as a cooperative as I recall. The total size of the company is 207,000 people, but typically people have to work at a company for a bit before becoming part of the cooperative. Hence why there non owner members.
Wonder:
- How do they handle someone who may not be performing as well as others?
- What’s the process for conflict resolution? Both professional and inter-personal.
- Not sure if they’ve been through a big global recession yet. That’s usually when companies and their policies get tested.
Not to take away from their unique model. Just curious how the idealism handles the messy parts of human nature.