You also don’t have to make redundancies once the contract’s finished. It’s a universal fact that being a co-op is a tick in your favor.

I’m interested in specifics on this. If the co-op is purely doing contract work and the contract ends, how are they able to continue to pay workers on the bench? How long are workers allowed to be on the bench if they can’t be place on contract work?

We did some work with a couple of corporates and our developers hated it. So, we said we’d focus on charities and NGOs, the public sector and education.

There are a limited number of charities and NGOs, and many times these customers are the most squeezed for budget, meaning lower amounts of income to the co-op.

Another significant hurdle is salary competitiveness. Generally, programmers can secure higher wages outside the tech worker co-operative sector in both countries.

I think this is the buried lede. How much is income reduced to tech workers vs traditional employers? Without strong social safety nets in the country a co-op with a much lower salary may not be a viable option because unemployment would leave the former workers without resources to live on.

If anyone has any experience with tech co-ops and can fill in the gaps of my understanding, I’d be interested to hear it.