At the end of the day, an employee is just a special class of vendor -- scrape away all of the normative cruft that gets injected into these discussions, and you have a fee-for-service relationship between a customer and a supplier.
And lots of people would rather just be that supplier, who gets paid a specified amount of money for a specified provision of service, and not be forced to bear short-term risk or to hold out for a long-term upside that depends on lots of stuff they have no control over working out for the best.
Well, they're different in that they're vendors and also vendees. The theory behind employee ownership is that it makes them better vendees on top of maybe making them better vendors.
And lots of people would rather just be that supplier, who gets paid a specified amount of money for a specified provision of service, and not be forced to bear short-term risk or to hold out for a long-term upside that depends on lots of stuff they have no control over working out for the best.