In America, at least, any group of workers are free to form a coop. It's perfectly legal. Why not give it a try, and report back to us how it worked out?
To be clear, I didn't say that I believe a coop was the better system. But as an American, in my experience every one of fbn79's criticisms could equally be applied to private corporations. What matters is the relative difference and the overall economic context. And if he grew up steeped in a system that was heavily oriented toward the coop, I couldn't give him the benefit of the doubt, either, in the sense that it may not have been obvious to him that a more traditional private enterprise system could have outcomes that were even worse--like greater unemployment with at least as much political corruption and wealth skimming.
Also, I spent half my childhood growing up in the heavily unionized Chicago area, and half in the vehemently anti-union Deep South. In both regions adults always complained about the corruption and inefficiency of unions. Which always perplexed me because as a naive (though arguably objective observer), both private and public works projects in the Deep South were immensely more inefficient than in the Chicago land area. They took longer and seemed of lesser quality even though often less ambitious. And while as an adult I understand the truth in the complaints about unions--there often is corruption and especially inefficiency and back-scratching--the outcomes aren't necessarily worse than in non-union systems, and sometimes much better. It depends on the larger context.
That said, there are plenty of worker-owned coops in the U.S. I recently discovered that Litehouse Foods is one such business. I wanted to know if Costco would keep selling Litehouse's awesome and reasonably priced freeze-dried herbs, so spent an evening Googling everything Litehouse related. I've been buying Litehouse freeze-dried herbs at Safeway when on sale for a couple of years. The grocery retail prices (sale or not) are competitive with online and mail-order freeze-dried manufacturers, but the Costco prices were so incredibly low-priced that I was curious how sustainable it could be. I never could figure out if Costco will continue selling those herbs, so last time I was at Costco I bought enough freeze-dried garlic, basil, parsley, oregano, thyme, dill, green onion and red onion to fill up two entire shelves in the kitchen.
So the main problem that co-ops have is that they don’t have access to traditional forms of capital. You can’t get VC funding as you can’t give out equity, obviously, and banks won’t lend to you. The co-ops that I’ve seen in recent years have been started on Kickstarter funding based on support for e.g. pop-up stalls that the co-ops ran in early days, and that only goes so far and only works for certain types of companies.
I'm not sure why it's a crippling problem. (Most SMEs outside the tech industry do not sell equity to raise funds, and the general point of a co-op tends to be to provide a living for its workers, not to take over the world.) The crippling problem is that nobody will lend to you even where traditional businesses could borrow.
