I've never actually seen them criticized here but I'll bite since I've worked for one.
Worker owned companies are just a different shade of typical corporate politics. I worked for North America's largest sewer inspection and cleaning company. The company did about equal volumes of each type of work but since inspection is more technology based there were far more cleaners than there were inspectors and analysts. I'd been there about a year and I'd noticed that we were so far outpacing cleaning that we'd started to lapse on some of our contractual inspection storage commitments which required about ten years storage of raw inspection files. The inspection files were raw video with annotations. I drew up a proposal to build out centralized storage arrays and upgrade video processing site internet connections. Pretty baseline stuff to meet the needs of our contractual obligations. It went up for a vote because it'd effect the yearly budget which impacted dividends checks. It was unanimously voted down by the cleaners. I realized then and there that any business that's worker owned will be primarily be influenced by the largest in quantity labor group and haven't worked for one since.
Long way of saying that I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than other management structures.
There are different ways to structure worker cooperatives and decision making. Have you seen the consent-based framework sociocracy uses (rather than majority voting or consensus)?
It's hard to say without turning back time that this would've changed things. I could see a seasoned cleaner arguing that the diff of x and y dividends would be impactful to their lives and that I could be pressured to build a less efficient, decentralized system that compliments the existing decentralized system because when I signed up inefficiency was already built in.
Having voting power didn't actually change my position as someone making a proposal. It actually made it worse because now instead of convincing one slightly less informed king I'm trying to convince a room full of even lesser informed peasantry. It'd be like if the cleaners tried to convince me to buy the new line of vac truck with technology advancements that can clean a complex sewer in ten minutes instead of 30. Reflexively, having never dropped down in waders into a sewer I'd say, "Well, what's 20 more minutes of contractual time?"
That's ultimately the social mechanics that were at play: "Okay nerd, why do you need better efficiency and audit ability? This industry has gotten by just fine filing physical hard drives into physical filing systems for a long time." Without being required to empathize with the problem, and without being necessitated to have experienced decision making it's like democracy with pure bureaucracy and no subject matter experts.
https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/
A reply would've been better. I'm not going to read an entire website after putting that much effort into a reply.
Your reply was premised on a misinformed understanding about consent based decision making so I shared how it works. Ok if you’re not interested. Have a good one
My reply was based on my experience at an actual company that makes money and holds a dominant market position, not a website or an idea. You have a good one as well.
Ok