We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream, is a 2012 documentary film about three American businesses that have embraced various forms of employee ownership. This case study offers a closer look at DPR Construction, one of the three featured companies, and was published in January 2025 by the Rutgers Institute for the Study of … Read More
We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream, is a 2012 documentary film about three American businesses that have embraced various forms of employee ownership. This case study offers a closer look at Namaste Solar, one of the three featured companies, and was published in January 2025 by the Rutgers Institute for the Study of … Read More
What would be the contribution of cooperatives to work and employment? What is the achievement of cooperatives in developing decent work so far and what will be the challenges in the changing world of work? How can cooperatives provide the younger generation with workplaces and tools for realizing their dreams and ambitions with decent work … Read More
In the last two decades, scholars have proposed that implementing democratic practices and ideas in organizations results in significant improvements in employees’ attitudes and behavior. Using two widely advocated and debated dimensions of organizational democracy (empowerment and communication), the study provides empirical evidence of the mentioned relationship between organizational democracy and employee outcomes (commitment, citizenship … Read More
The idea of bringing democratization to the workplace has been present in management literature for decades. To further explore this underpinned concept, the present study aims to refine and develop the organizational democracy construct. Using in-depth literature analysis published in the last three decades on organizational democracy, ten dimensions (freedom, fairness, integrity, tolerance, shared responsibility, … Read More
This brief reports on interviews with eleven Black small business owners focusing on their expectations around succession planning, and the impact that awareness of worker cooperatives would have on their decision-making process to sell their business to a worker cooperative when they decide to exit their business. An exit from their business also includes retirement … Read More
This book brings together a number of theories under the umbrella of humanistic governance to develop a persuasive alternative perspective on governance, particularly for democratic organizations such as co-operatives. It examines how we can move beyond a profit-first approach to governance, into a framework that prioritizes human dignity in all aspects of an operation. This … Read More
Pete Stavros was on a high after his latest experiment with employee ownership. As the head of industrial investments for KKR, Stavros orchestrated the sale of CHI Overhead Doors, which turned into KKR’s best investment in more than two decades and created $360 million in wealth for CHI’s blue collar workforce through broad-based employee ownership. … Read More
This case examines the decision by private equity firm KKR to grant equity to every employee at portfolio company CHI Overhead Doors upon purchasing the company in 2015. The case explores whether this initiative will create shared value, growing profits through better incentive alignment while creating wealth for low-wage manufacturing workers. While CHI witnessed some … Read More
KKR’s sale of CHI, the garage door manufacturer, made headlines for being one of KKR’s highest returns since the 1980s and the life changing pay-out of CHI’s hourly employees and truck drivers. After a movement led by Pete Stavros, Chairman of CHI and Co-Head of the Americas Private Equity platform at KKR, CHI management gave every employee … Read More
KKR’s sale of CHI, the garage door manufacturer, made headlines for being one of KKR’s highest returns since the 1980s and the life changing pay-out of CHI’s hourly employees and truck drivers. After a movement led by by Pete Stavros, Chairman of CHI and Co-Head of the Americas Private Equity platform at KKR, CHI management gave every … Read More
The field of broad-based employee ownership within corporations is a specific application of the foundational topic of property ownership. It is situated at the intersection of a broad range of scholarly disciplines including economics, law, finance and management. Each discipline contributes vocabulary and distinctions describing this field. That broad spectrum of disciplinary inquiry is a … Read More
How we structure ownership and work in healthcare matters. As a society, we underpay and under-support—under-care-for—the very workers we rely on to provide health and care services to others. The COVID-19 pandemic briefly spotlighted this fact as health workers braved risks to care for the vulnerable. The worst of that crisis has passed—but the extractive … Read More
With fifty successful years behind Acadian Ambulance Service, now known as Acadian Companies, the focus was clearly on the future. The company had a history of steady organic growth and external growth through strategic mergers and acquisitions. The company now was comprised of six successful and profitable divisions, all synergistic but unique in their management … Read More
Contingent workers make up a large part of today’s healthcare workforce, and the healthcare industry is America’s most contingent worker-dependent industry. While contingent healthcare workers overall earn low pay with few benefits, contingent work burdens fall most heavily on women of color, due to deep race and gender-based inequalities that have long plagued the healthcare … Read More
Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) holds a significant place within the U.S. worker cooperative and long-term care landscape. For decades, it has been the largest worker cooperative in the country by some distance. CHCA workers are also members of the largest union in the country, 1199Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers East (1199SEIU). Through its … Read More
Founded in 2012, Golden Steps is a Brooklyn-based worker cooperative of immigrant women of color, all of whom have roots in Central and South America. Providing services to those who do not qualify for Medicare or need more than what Medicare will pay for, Golden Steps operates in a part of the market where home … Read More
Obran is a cooperatively owned holding company with a related financing arm. It recently acquired a 50-person home health care business based in Los Angeles and the cooperative is under letter of intent (LOI) for a 100-person home health business serving the Bay Area. With this unique model, the cooperative’s leadership seeks to create quality … Read More
The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry’s partnership with Cleveland Clinic is perhaps the best-known example of an “anchor institution” approach to economic development in the United States. The worker-owned business is the primary laundry vendor for the Cleveland Clinic’s entire northeast Ohio area. Their experience to date suggests that it is indeed possible for a health system … Read More
This case study examines Five Point Holistic Health, the Chicago health center organized as a worker cooperative. The center offers acupuncture, psychotherapy, and bodywork treatments and services. From its earliest days, the worker-owners of Five Point have prioritized making its services affordable and accessible to the community. After years of hard work, they have achieved … Read More
No other state has as many individual home care cooperatives in operation as Washington. Although small and limited to date to serving the private pay market, Washington’s home care cooperatives suggest that “another way is possible” for organizing home care provision in the state. The business model they are piloting breaks with dominant, extractive, models … Read More
This case study examines the only physical therapy practice in the country to be structured as a worker cooperative. Founded in 2010 by 12 coworkers who left their previous employer to start their own practice together, PT360 has grown to become the largest independent physical therapy practice in the state of Vermont. It now has … Read More
Can a nonhierarchical organization set its own rules? Can it avoid reproducing hierarchy and exploitation in order to better support its clients and workers? Can it survive, as a consensus-based organization, within the system of capitalism and within institutional settings that expect hierarchy? This case study examines Alliance Collective, an anti-authoritarian therapy collective of practitioners … Read More
The purpose of these chapters (Parts 1 and 2) is to show why and how one firm integrated Servant Leadership, among other initiatives, into its growing socially responsible culture, through the eyes of its designing CEO. The firm is a 50-year-old, US nationwide environmental consultancy, which is now 100% employee-owned and a legal “public benefit … Read More
This Kent State University course is motivated by the broad question: what role can workplace democracy and employee ownership play in creating an economy that works for all? Workplace democracy and employee ownership take a multitude of forms and are receiving renewed attention from public officials, the business community, social movement leaders, and academics. Nearly … Read More