Except last month I met someone who worked there and got TUPE (involuntary contractual transfer of employment) to Wipro (Indian outsourcerer) a few years ago.
So even though this corporation is owned by the employees, and is one of the best examples of this in the UK, it seems you also need some kind of management structure that is also immune to the usual senior leadership trolls to avoid it turning out to be shitty.
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.
While there are some pretty easy examples here, the easiest one is probably health care: The country that pays the most - by far - for 'average-ish' health care is the one where the system is privatized.
This works because the actual service is not monopolised by the state but rather a large pool of providers.
This doesn't apply to other services.
And public schools. And public communication infra. The list just goes on and on. It's not 'just healthcare' and the amount of data on this is so staggering that to suggest that the private sector running things somehow results in an efficiency gain of some kind is borderline brainwashed rhetoric from Fox News more than it is any kind of defensible position.
Do you have any numbers to support this? Governments spending stupidly higher than private sector for this, I know this as a matter of fact.
Same for the other claims about "public schools. And public communication infra." Per unit of service provided, governments spend upwards of 2 to 5x in major western countries.
For example they tend to be more stable during crisis, because workers tend to vote for lowering salaries/benefits temporarily rather than doing layoffs. So they retain talent better. But they also tend to have difficulty to grow quickly, for obvious reasons.
Besides full on coops, there are also plenty of examples that are hybrids (partially worker owned).
> they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
You're possibly of assuming that a company needs to have an adversarial relationship to their workers in order to be competitive. I don't think that's generally true. This approach has advantages in specific situations, but disadvantages in others.
That’s exactly why you don’t need worker owned companies
I am Swedish, in Sweden, and we are a market economy combined with unions. Companies can do layoffs but for a 3month agreement, they have to notify basically, WARN.