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
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
We continue to fail to adequately compensate most essential workers even as corporate profits remain high and wealth inequality and race and gender wealth gaps persist. Employee ownership has continued to emerge against this backdrop and across party lines as a potential strategy for building an economy where prosperity is more equitably shared. Awareness about … Read More
Wages don’t cover the bills. Wealth inequality is growing. Social trust is eroding. There are endless debates about what to do, but one key factor is inexplicably left out: who owns the companies that drive the economy? Ownership matters. Ownership by a few means benefits for a few. But if you spread ownership around, you … 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
In 2001 Argentina experienced a massive economic crisis: businesses went bankrupt, unemployment spiked, and nearly half the population fell below the poverty line. In the midst of the crisis, Buenos Aires’s iconic twenty-story Hotel Bauen quietly closed its doors, forcing longtime hospitality workers out of their jobs. Rather than leaving the luxury hotel vacant, a … Read More
Currently, there is renewed interest in organizations providing greater economic benefits to its members given the widening divide among social classes. A major source of alternatives to capitalist organizations in the U.S. was the co-operative movement sponsored by the Knights of Labor during 1870–1889. This study examines cases of the Knights’ producer cooperatives to understand … Read More
These resource slides are designed for teaching faculty who teach about organizational “alternatives” to dominant corporate and bureaucratic forms of organization. The slides include links to recommended books, films, organizational case studies, sample syllabi and other resources appropriate for a wide variety of college-level classes. Individual slides are tailored to specific classes, including Methods, Theory, … Read More
The global Covid pandemic and the Third Reconstruction and renewed labor activism within the U.S. challenge us to find more humane, sustainable, and egalitarian ways of living and working. Those in the labor movement and the cooperative movement, who have been working to build union cooperatives, offer a vision for one type of more humane, … Read More
In this inside look at worker cooperatives, Joan Meyers challenges long-held views and beliefs. From the outside, worker cooperatives all seem to offer alternatives to bad jobs and unequal treatment by giving workers democratic control and equitable ownership of their workplaces. Some contend, however, that such egalitarianism and self-management come at the cost of efficiency … Read More
This free video-based educational program is designed to help minority business owners learn about employee ownership strategies for business succession planning. Developed by the Rutgers University NJ/NY Center for Employee Ownership, with the support of the Kellogg Foundation, this program will help business owners assess the relevance of establishing one of two employee ownership models, based … Read More
Worker cooperative practitioners and developers often claim that democratic worker ownership advances egalitarianism within and beyond the workplace, but most of the empirical evidence in the U.S. is based on ethnographic case studies or small-scale surveys. We leverage the first national survey about individuals’ experiences in these unique firms to ask if claims that co-ops … Read More
This free online course from Start.coop is for entrepreneurs building cooperatively owned businesses. Modules include: Lean Co-op: The Basics Defining the Problem Designing the Solution Designing Your Business Model Designing Your Ownership Model Next Steps
The Worker-Owner Workbook can help teams develop cooperative businesses and worker-ownership culture. The book teaches the nuts and bolts of running a co-op business, from business financials to conflict management to team building. It also contains essential information about the co-op movement, labor movement, and the Mondragon cooperative network of Spain. The Worker-Owner Workbook is … Read More
This primer focuses on one set of tools the labor movement can utilize to build power, expand wealth, and deepen member engagement in the years ahead: worker ownership. It explores: How Unions and Worker Ownership Work Together How Worker Ownership Can Build Power for Workers The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: Overcoming Challenges Looking … Read More
The United States business sector is dominated by small businesses that create new jobs at a rate considered faster than that of their larger competitors. Remarkably, military veterans own nearly 13 percent of small businesses. However, only eight percent of all veteran-owned firms are minority owned. The low percentage of minority-owned veteran businesses is perplexing … Read More
In Co-operative Struggles, Denise Kasparian expands the theoretical horizons regarding labour unrest by proposing new categories to make visible and conceptualize conflicts in the new worker co-operativism of the 21st century. After the depletion of neoliberal reforms at the dawn of the 21st century in Argentina, co-operativism gained momentum, mainly due to the recuperation of … Read More
Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives’ variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieties of Capitalism and … Read More
Job quality has received increased attention from academics and policy makers across industrialized countries. Yet, there has been limited assessment of how job quality is impacted by different organizational forms, including cooperatives and employee-owned businesses (EOBs). Although there has been growing interest in how cooperatives/EOBs impact on employee outcomes, comprehensive assessments of the range and … Read More
Labor unions and worker-owned businesses share the objectives of generating better jobs and giving workers control over their workplaces. The scaling of worker ownership paired with unionization offers pathways to expanded worker power and wealth-building for working people. The purpose of this paper is to show strategies used by labor unions to support the creation … Read More
Isthmus Engineering is an example of a highly democratic worker-owned firm operating in an industrial sector that one might not think of as fertile ground for participatory democratic governance—the design and manufacture of highly technical custom automation machinery. From the beginning, membership in the cooperative has been open to any worker, regardless of role or … Read More
In Croatia in 2005, a machine tools factory was occupied by its workers. Since then, they have operated collectively, becoming the only successful example of a worker occupation in post-socialist Europe. Today, as they seek a new model of collective ownership, the world of the factory clashes with the forces of the globalized market economy, … Read More
Platform cooperatives make possible a more democratic digital economy. They offer an alternative to extractive “platform capitalism,” one based on cooperative principles such as democratic ownership and governance.
The redesigned Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership (CLEO), the online library dedicated to employee share ownership, features more than 600 resources—including company case studies, links to scholarly research articles, informative videos, and policy reports. This webinar introduces this free online library and highlights resources of interest to business owners who are considering employee ownership. Research … Read More