I see many people complaining in this sub. What I always wondered, why so little people is willing to set up a coop? Specially for less capital intensive sectors, like IT workers that work for consultancy etc.
In my city there's an IT coop wich is kinda famous in the IT world for the open source work they do. There's also a very big and famous supermarket chain which is a coop. The milk, cheese, yoghurt, chicken and olive oil I buy are from coop companies.
In coops you get the fruit of your work (but you also deal with the consequences). In principle, it's a democratic system, although in practice I've seen that in most coops workers delegate the majority of decisions into voted managers, and they get meetings every months or every year to decide important topics.
In northen spain the catholic church took the initiative with a lot of coops. Some failed, some are still today up and running. There's pretty much none of that culture left, but I wonder if people should think about shut setup again, and demand better conditions for coops in general, as they seem to withstand crisis better and fix population better than regular companies, for what I've read.
This should perfectly viable in the US too. In fact, I know that there are many banking coops across the country, so if it's possible with banking it's possible with pretty much any other business.