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
This is a list of datasets, all accessible to researchers, that enable the study of employee ownership.
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 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 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 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.
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
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.”
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
In this short video, Dr. Daphne Berry describes why she teaches her students about worker cooperatives and participatory ESOPs.
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
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.
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.
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
CFL’s app, Up & Go, is the first booking app in the United States owned by domestic workers, empowering them to increase wages, build assets, and compete in the digital gig economy. This video introduces the app as well as its owners/employees.
Work organizations are commonly studied as sites that produce and reproduce inequality. But we know much less about how organizations promote equality. This article examines efforts to broaden access to power, opportunity, and resources in Hotel Bauen, a worker-recuperated business that was converted from a privately-owned company into a worker-run cooperative. Drawing on extensive ethnographic … Read More
In this book, Gregory K. Dow asks the question: “Why are labor managed firms rare in modern economies?” Dow emphasizes the fact that capital is alienable while labor is inalienable. This distinction, together with market imperfections, explains the rarity of labor-managed firms. This book uses modern microeconomics, develops formal models, exploits up-to-date empirical research, and … Read More
With the emergence of worker-owned apps, where they own and run the marketplace themselves, the on-demand labor apps are seeing a new light. It’s a trend that could save the gig economy from itself. One of these apps is Up & Go, which lets you order house-cleaning services in New York City. The cleaners are … Read More
CoopGateway is the world’s largest digital library on cooperatives and mutuals. Created by the Alphonse and Dorimène Desjardins International Institute for Cooperatives of HEC Montréal, CoopGateway aims to promote access, development and sharing of knowledge on cooperatives and mutuals in the digital age.
Co-opLaw.org is an online legal resource library supporting democratic, worker-owned businesses from the Sustainable Economies Law Center.
This article focuses on the unique organizational structure, ownership model, and decision-making process at Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest consortium of worker-owned cooperatives.
The origins of the next radical economy is rooted in a tradition that has empowered people for centuries and is now making a comeback. A new feudalism is on the rise. While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us are expected to live gig to gig. But, as Nathan … Read More
With a growing prominence of sophisticated econometric research in a much-expanded field of New Economics of Participation (NEP), it is of particular value to learn about real-world examples of participatory and labor-managed firms in the advanced market economies through extensive case studies. In this volume of Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms, … Read More
The closure of Fagor Electrodomésticos in October 2013, the most iconic cooperative in the Mondragon Group, not only cast doubt on the economic and social management of the cooperative itself but also called into question the very viability of the overall cooperative model.
The chapter reinforces the fundamental roles of information-sharing and participation in enterprises with shared ownership, while making key distinctions between shopfloor and office workers experiences and perceptions.