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Let's immediately acknowledge that the title is lighthearted, and that "communist company" is an oxymoron. The better choice would've been, "which is the most worker-owned, egalitarian, power-structures-free cooperative?", which SEO experts told me was too long of a title. With that said, let me tell you about Igalia and other tech cooperatives.
Igalia is an open-source consultancy with Spain headquarters focusing on browsers, "client-side web technologies, " and much more. They're the company contracted to work on Servo, the open-source independent browser engine after Mozilla dropped it. So far so good. The company was founded in 2001, and now employs 140 people in 25 countries; they are a pretty big player in the open-source space.
They've also been the second largest contributor to both Chromium (after Google) and WebKit (after Apple), have a partnership with Valve to work on the SteamDeck, and much more. So, what's different about them?
Well, in Igalia there's no CEO, no managers, no bosses, they all make the same amount of money, and they all have equal decision-making power. It's also fully worker-owned. This is a pretty interesting pitch, isn't it? But how does it work?
Now, very quickly: I'm not paid by Igalia to talk about them, I don't have any ties to them at all. I just learned about how they do things and thought it was worth highlighting.
Stages
When you are hired to work at Igalia, you enter the "Staff" stage, which lasts a year. It's similar to an onboarding year. Then, you become a pre-partner for two years, which renders you a full decision-maker. After the third year, you become a partner, which is a full co-owner of the company.
The goal is for everyone to eventually become a partner; most people are partners, which contrasts with "normal" companies, where only a few people have full decision-making powers.
The partners and pre-partners compose the Assembly of Igalia, where choices are taken; I will talk more later about this. Igalia makes a point that waiting for a year before giving new hires access to the Assembly gives time for everyone to fully trust the new hire, yes, but also for them to trust that the Assembly is indeed operating in their best interest.
Partners are also paid "slightly more to account for their additional legal responsibilities", which is reasonable.
Before we talk about the Assembly, I do want to mention that they also provide some solid benefits to those working at Igalia. Not only they are very remote-friendly (again, 140 people from 25 countries!), but all parents (of any gender) receive 8 weeks of paid parental leave, you can design your own work schedule, they cover work-related hardware costs, and more.
The Assembly
Every two months, the Assembly gets together and holds two half-days of meetings to discuss anything and everything about the company. Otherwise, all topics are discussed in an email list.
This is pretty crazy when you think about it: it means that the entire management of the whole company is done through, (a) a mailing list, and (b) half a day of meetings per month.
The scope of the Assembly is to keep Igalians informed about the status of the company, discuss problems that need to be solved, get feedback on company-wide proposals, and eventually approve them. This includes whether to accept new clients or contracts, whether to hire new people, whether to change salaries, make donations, change the working conditions, and so on: it's all done through the Assembly.
There's also rarely a "voting" moment for these Assembly proposals; instead, they work on a consensus-building model where a small group of Igalians creates a proposal, gets feedback on it, maybe run some non-binding polls to gather the opinion of the colleagues, and eventually the adjusted proposal becomes part of the Agreements. Oh, let's talk about those.
The Agreements
The Agreements are the documents that contain the values of the company, their bylaws, terms of employment (such as salary and vacation days), benefits, and so on. They are written down and version-controlled.
It contains information about how to progress through the stages of Igalia, as mentioned earlier on; but it also contains information on how to handle difficult financial times, how to amend the agreements, which decisions need consensus from the assembly, and so on.
Amongst the values in the Agreements, there's Free Software: it specifically states that Igalia will give higher priority to the projects (both internal and external) where the outcome of our work is licensed and published in an open and free way, and it prefers the usage of free and open source software (when possible).
The Agreements can be changed, but some parts require full consensus; the fact that everyone is paid the same is an example. Imagine the Assembly unanimously voting that some people should be paid less!
Teams and Commissions
If there are no bosses and managers, there's still an open question about how work is managed and distributed between people. The answers are teams and commissions.
Firstly, there are technology teams that are consultants for a specific kind of technology; currently, the teams are: web platforms, compilers, graphics, chromium, webkit, core, multimedia, and systems. Each team both has "consultant" people (such as programmers), and "support" people (who manage sales, contract negotiation, running team meetings, and so on). Some people also do both, because why not?
Then, there's an entire support team (which includes some people from the technology teams, and more), which does some more company-wide work. These maintain the finances and payroll systems, do system administration and work on internal tools, run assembly meetings and polls, do communication and marketing, and more.
Igalians are also assigned roles within their teams; these are things such as "work on sales", "work on strategy", "recruiting and interviewing", "communication", and so on. It's work that should only take a few hours a month, and that's shared by both consultants and support people.
Then, Assembly members can create a commission throughout teams. These work on company-wide coordination tasks; examples are the DEI commission, the strategy commissions, the Corporate social responsibility commission, and so on.
As an example, the Corporate social responsibility commission, or CSR, donates 0.7% of their income to NGOs and non-profits decided by Igalians. As an example, they donated to native re-forestation efforts in Spain!
The roles, commissions, and teams are "voluntary and dynamic", meaning that they change based on the interest of each person, the need, and encouragement. Some commissions rotate through members, which have a limited-time mandate in them.
I love this quote: at Igalia, you're not hired to a specific job description to fit like a gear to a machine, whether or not you like the parts of it or you're even good at the parts of it (that are listed in that job description), you don't have a boss that's micromanaging you or interested in offloading specific kinds of work to you.
Is this working?
Well, there are a few issues that they are dealing with. Firstly, on-boarding and training new members is difficult, especially brining in junior developers; you "kind-of have to be pretty good at learning by yourself". There's an effort to address this, but it's an ongoing problem.
Overall, though, it does work. Igalia has an employee turnover rate of 5%, i.e. the number of people who leave divided by the average number of employees that year. The industry average is 13%, almost three times as high. And, Igalia does keep growing and has been alive and well for more than 20 years, never experiencing a single year of contraction, where they had less employees than the previous.
There have been issues in the past; as an example, there's a mention of one time when they lost a big client that, back then, was a good chunk of the revenue of the company. No one was fired, but they had to "adjust" salaries until everyone was fully booked again, and that money was eventually paid back. So, it worked out in the end.
Is it legal?
Spanish law does provide for cooperatives, similarly to most countries. However, that comes with some extra requirements, such as having 85% of the partners be from Spain, a limitation that Igalia did not want. Thus, they are not registered as a cooperative, but rather as a limited-liability corporation.
If you are from Spain, you can be a direct employee of Igalia; if you are outside of it, you'll be a freelancer. After three years, you have the option to become a legal partner in the business, purchasing an equal share of it at a fixed price. It's not mandatory, but it's expected.
Technically speaking they do have some legal administrator, since that's required by law; however, the position rotates every three years.
Finally, I want to mention that there are a lot of tech cooperatives, all working in different ways. You can even endless lists around the web! However, I believe that Igalia is the biggest cooperative that has had such a direct impact on the FOSS world, and I love how they work!
