Worker Cooperative is Better Than OS
‘Worker cooperatives are the sweet spot. They combine good parts of capitalism such as incentives to work, but employees are not exploited as they democratically control the company’.
Worker cooperatives are interesting and have proven to be successful, at least in some cases. This is quite surprising given they are competing and against non-worker cooperatives which in theory should be more efficient as they are comfortable exploiting their workers to be more competitive.
Worker cooperatives are definitely an improvement over DC as they counter wealth inequality, exploitation of workers and unethical lobbying (since workers as a group are unlikely to vote for unethical practices).
However, they are more in the vein of evolutionary improvements to DC. When compared to OS they are not as efficient as you still have multiple companies expending resources competing against each other, reinventing the wheel, legal battles etc.
Good step for DC? Definitely. However, a fully cooperative system like OS which can be thought of as the whole of society being a worker cooperative, must be more efficient. At the least we should explore the viability of an OS like system.