I appreciate alternate methods of business, but some of your statements here are worrying.

there is the temporary furlough route,

but you also said earlier…

and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire at “the top” needing a second yacht.

Furlough sounds like another name for layoff here.

but ideally there is savings for such eventualities. savings and / or loans can be used to ride out dry spells.

Ideally sounds like wishful thinking. They’re already limiting their work because they only work with NGOs or non-profits, which are usually cash strapped. Further, the lower pay to tech workers mean that the workers have less of a financial cushion should the work dry up for a time. This goes back to my first post that tech workers that don’t live a country with strong social safety nets may find tech co-ops a risky employer.

more stable than typical corporate businesses simply due to the lack of a billionaire class extracting profits and making big decisions on their whims

Yeah yeah fuck the rich, but billionaires are a small fraction of the owners of IT consulting companies. The majority of them are small boutique firms rather than giant fortune 500 companies.