Platform Cooperativism Consortium
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.
Introducing CLEO—the Rutgers Online Employee Ownership Library: What Business Owners Can Learn
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
Race and Gender Wealth Equity and the Role of Employee Share Ownership
Even before the pandemic, many workers struggled to build wealth. Divisions between men and women, and between white households and households of color, are particularly striking. The pandemic has exacerbated and heightened awareness of these inequities, and there is a mounting sense of urgency to find practical solutions. Increasing participation in business ownership can help … Read More
How Economic Democracy Impacts Workers, Firms, and Communities
This paper presents findings from a national survey of 1,147 workers in worker cooperatives and follow up interviews with 15 participants conducted in 2017.
Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy
This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or conceptions of organizational possibilities, with a focus on collectivist-democratic organizations that operate in capitalist markets but place more authority and ownership in the hands of stakeholders other than shareholders. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees: Emphasize social values … Read More
Becoming Employee Owned: A Small Business Toolkit Website
Becoming Employee Owned is an initiative of the Democracy at Work Institute, a movement-based think-and-do tank supporting worker cooperatives to grow to a scale that creates meaningful change in the economy. The website includes resources for small businesses and company profiles.
Who Should Own Your Business After You? A Guide for Business Owners
This booklet helps business owners evaluate employee ownership. Thousands of business owners have decided that employee ownership is the best way to preserve the job security of their workforces and protect the character of their companies while providing them and their families fair value. In “Who Should Own Your Business After You?,” several of them … Read More
Reflections
This short book presents reflections from Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, the founder of the Mondragon worker-cooperative conglomerate in the Basque country of Spain. His reflections contain economic insights. But these aphorisms and fragments reveal that his central motivation was spiritual—not to the exclusion of the practical, but with the recognition that plutocratic capitalism, also, is … Read More
The 7 Cooperative Principles: An Interactive Course for Cooperative Members
This interactive course introduces the seven cooperative principles: voluntary and open membership; democratic member control; member economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training and information; cooperation among cooperatives; and concern for community.
Policy Strategies to Build a More Inclusive Economy with Cooperatives
This report describes the role cooperatives can play in building healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities, and explains how to advance that work through federal, state, and local policy. The policy objectives presented are intended not to simply grow the field of cooperatives, but to enhance the work of cooperatives that address economic and racial disparities … Read More
Teaching Employee Share Ownership
In this workshop, “Research and Teaching about Equity Compensation, Employee Share Ownership and Profit Sharing in Organizations,” expert professors describe a variety of different ways they teach about employee ownership and equity compensation in their university courses–and the resources, videos, and case studies that they use. This workshop features Daphne Berry, Joseph Blasi, and Ed … Read More
Race, Equity and the Transformative Power of Employee Ownership: A Conversation with Todd Leverette
This interview with Todd Leverette explores how employee ownership could address the racial wealth gap and benefit Black and brown communities. “Employee ownership gives Black and brown workers the ability to both build wealth and improve the quality of their jobs through actually having a voice in not just their day-to-day activities but in the … Read More
Datasets on Employee Ownership Available to the Public
This is a list of datasets, all accessible to researchers, that enable the study of employee ownership.
The Sociology of Worker Ownership: New Data Sets and Research Approaches
In this video workshop, “The Sociology of Worker Ownership: New Data Sets and Research Approaches,” leading researchers introduce datasets that enable the study of worker ownership. The workshop opens with comments from Joyce Rothschild and Joseph Blasi, and is moderated by Adria Scharf. Janet Boguslaw, Laura Hanson Schlachter, Nancy Weifek, and Joseph Blasi present. Sarah … Read More
Latinx Co-op Power in the U.S.
Latinx people have long been an influential and integral part of the U.S. cooperative movement. Several Latinx-led organizations, such as Prospera in Oakland and Green Worker Cooperatives in the Bronx, have strongly influenced activity and models of cooperatives in their own localities and nationally. Furthermore, individual cooperative members who identify as Latinx bring their own … Read More
Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development
Cooperatives have been central to the development of New Orleans. Anne Gessler asserts that local cooperatives have reshaped its built environment by changing where people interact and with whom, helping them collapse social hierarchies and envision new political systems. Gessler tracks many neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, … Read More
The Case for Employee Ownership
The case for employee ownership is undisputed. As philanthropists and government leaders grapple with how to address both long-entrenched and newly-emerging forms of economic insecurity, there is no better time to look to effective but lesser-known solutions, such as employee ownership. Even before the economic crisis brought on by COVID-19, income and wealth inequality and downward economic mobility for frontline workers were truths so obvious that one could visually observe them in most communities. Now, more than ever, we need solutions that create economic resiliency for workers and local economies.
COVID-19 Resources for Worker Cooperatives, Small Businesses, and Individuals
To our members and the wider cooperative community. We are thinking about you and strategizing about how best to support your businesses and people during the evolving situation. We know that at this point, many of us are receiving information from a multitude of sources, which can feel overwhelming. The USFWC is actively working to curate … Read More
A Cooperative Story N° 8 Up & Go, New York, USA
Up & Go is a digital platform where people can book cleaning services. It is also a cooperative owned by worker-owned cleaning cooperatives. This video includes voices of immigrant worker-owners, and reflections about the importance of organizing workers in the digital gig “platform economy.”
Pennsylvania Center for Employee Ownership YouTube Channel
Series of videos about employee ownership produced by the Pennsylvania Center for Employee Ownership. The Millionaire Grocery Clerk At the grocery chain WinCo Foods, grocery clerks become millionaires. How? WinCo is employee owned through an ESOP. ESOPs are a win win win win – businesses get significant tax breaks, owners get paid full fair market … Read More
Interview with Daphne Berry
In this short video, Dr. Daphne Berry describes why she teaches her students about worker cooperatives and participatory ESOPs.
2019 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector Report
The 2019 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector is a report on worker-owned business in the United States. This report, a co-production of Democracy at Work Institute and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, draws upon the latest developments in the field. It includes an updated map of metro areas home to concentrations of worker … Read More
WEconomics: Italy
The Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy has one of the highest concentrations of cooperative businesses in the developed world. The capital, Bologna is an industrial powerhouse, where prosperity is widely shared, and cooperatives of teachers and social workers play a key role in the provision of government services.
Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy’s Exploitation
This article focuses on worker-owned apps, specifically Up & Go, and how they are the new best thing for labor economies. It walks through what worker-owned apps are, what obstacles there might be when making one, and how to build it with the workers at the forefront of designing.
Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión
In Workers ‘ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the emergence and consolidation of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs or worker-recuperated enterprises), a workers ‘ occupy movement that surged at the turn-of-the-millennium in the thick of the country ‘s neoliberal crisis. Since then, around 400 companies have been taken over and … Read More