> Sorry, I don't agree. Owners are less important. They don't need to be there for most businesses to continue to operate just fine.

I'm afraid that this is not true. Owners are not just the ones who enable the business to be initiated in the first place, but are the ones who bear risk on an ongoing basis in order to keep the business up and running. Firms that need ongoing capital infusions to expand operations, or that incur debt in order to get past short-term financial bottlenecks, absolutely need someone to be responsible for the inherent risks associated with doing so.

Eliminating the business owner as the risk-bearer, and setting up a business in which "workers" are the responsible parties makes workers themselves bear all the risk. In the status quo, the worst risk exposure that workers face if the firm faces financial difficulty is that they will just lose their jobs -- i.e. that the customer that has to that point been purchasing their services will simply cease making further purchases. But in a situation in which these service providers were the owners, and therefore responsible for the firm's obligations, they would not only lose their jobs but would also be on the hook to repay its debts and/or will suffer the loss of whatever funds they put into it to ensure it had sufficient capital to operate.

Workers generally don't want to do this, and usually prefer to just receive an agreed upon rate for services rendered for as long as the relationship persists.

You may note that the industries in which worker-owned co-ops are relatively common are the ones that have low risk inherent in the business model -- markets with predictable demand, long product life cycles, and relatively inelastic price sensitivity, e.g. grocery stores. Industries with high volatility, rapid technological change, short product life cycles, high need for capital, and elastic demand simply don't work well under a co-op model.

> Organisations which are in the last stages of an exit do not act in the interests of the workers or the customer - they act in the interest of the party that is set to buy them and the major stakeholders set to profit the most.

Ultimately, everything is just a proxy for consumer utility. A business that is acting in the interest of a potential buyer needs to ensure that the firm is performing viably, since the buyer usually aims to operate it (or, if they aim to liquidate it, the current operators need to maximize the liquidation value).

In either case, the only way to do that is still to satisfy market demand -- we may frown at the tactics they use to do so, but ultimately, they will only use tactics that are effective in terms of encouraging customers to actually purchase their goods or services. At the end of the day, it's still customers assigning more value to the product than to the money they are exchanging for it that enables the form to earn a profit.

> Studies show that cooperatives produce more stable, sustainable businesses which are not designed for short-term speculation.

Per my point above, I believe you have the causality inverted. Co-ops are only suitable for stable, sustainable businesses that have low risk exposure and low capital requirements. The correlation you are seeing is because co-ops generally don't participate in more volatile markets in the first place.