TL;DR There are many pieces to our culture and capitalist economy that make this difficult, but somewhat surprisingly to me, also many legal hurdles to formalized democratic corporate structures.

I've taken a few steps to talk to lawyers and contact advocacy/support groups for worker-owned co-ops and things, and there are a number of surprising hurdles for this type of formalized corporate structure.

In particular, whether a member is considered an "employee", an "investor", an "owner", or some combination of the three differs in jurisdictions, often at the _county_ level, not just the state and country level (experience primarily in the US).

US law gives a massive number of very specific rights to investors, making it difficult to pull someone's ownership shares if they leave the organization in some jurisdictions. Additionally, the tax implications for individuals can be extremely complicated.

Talking to a lawyer, they said one of their clients had been working for ~10 years to hire someone across state lines and hasn't managed to do it yet because of the legal complexity (some kind of employee-owned construction company in Northern California that wants workers from Oregon I think).

For the time being, my own structure is on hold, but I'm thinking of simply formalizing the structure in the equivalent of an employee handbook and putting legal ownership into some kind of blind trust then paying members at a rate tied to net income without formally specifying that it's a dividend, but I have no idea how many laws that might be inadvertently breaking.

In any case, Mondragon is an interesting case study, as they are (to my knowledge) the largest worker-owned cooperative in existence at the moment, but workers outside of their home country (France, I believe?) are not able to participate in ownership and profit sharing for legal reasons.