Summary
The purpose of this book is to consider some consequences of worker participation in production and to provide an accessible economics perspective on two groups of worker co-ops in the Pacific Northwest: the plywood co-ops and the forestry worker co-ops. Their experiences are fascinating and are highly relevant to several classes of issues in social science, including the research on the internal activities of firms, on market structure, and on the operation of labor markets. Above all, there is the question of why firms that are owned and managed by their workers are unusual. There has been a long and highly respectable research literature on worker cooperatives, and I have designed this book as a contribution to this work.