implying what? that "workers" can't start something? Even if we imagine there's a category of people that are suited to be "starters" or "entrepreneurs" that category is still plenty numerous, easily 10-35% of the population, if not more.
http://www.arizmendi.coop/about-arizmendi-association.html
IMO, the reason you don't see more is that us financing is quite conservative and unwilling to risk "unusual" business models.
(Similarly, finding a mortgage for shared housing requires a lot of extra work, because the mortgage brokers only like nuclear families... Even when you show up with four incomes and no kids, it's still considered risky because unusual.)
Which is to say... The smallish number of worker coops in the US has nothing to do with the rarity of magical founder people... I'll say that the folks I've known in housing and worker coops have a much higher rates creativity, grit, and organizational chops than anyone I've met from a business school. And, indeed, many of them are now run their own businesses in a wide range of endeavours.
We could turn the government into a giant VC. I'm not bullish on the results.
Of course, the government could subsidize co-ops to the degree that financial incentives of starting a co-op outweigh the financial incentives from starting a traditional business, and maybe they should do that, but it's not how our curent market is structured.
If there are distinct phases, and certain people or topologies are good at just one of those phases, then it follows that people starting restaurants must be bad at running them once they've established.
(You have to be insane to whip something up and get it moving. Some thrive doing just that, but suffer under steady state stagnation.)
Technically if there's no company yet there is nowhere to work and thus no workers. You need "founders" to get the company started for there even to be workers. Now those people have to decide if they want to never hire anybody new, 'give away' a a piece of 'their' company each time they hire, or give up on the worker-owned idea all together.
Of course most "founders" used to be "workers" and often become "workers" again after the company is founded, but the act of founding a company is fundamentally different from the act of working at a company
There is of course different work to be done at every stage of development of a company and this means that founding a company may require skills running it may not or vice versa but there is no reason someone who is good at founding companies should continue to call the shots or pocket most of the revenue once the company is fully operational. That's an expectation tied to the return on investment primarily and our system being set up in such a way that founders are owners and workers coming in later are not.
