What is an Employee Cooperative? How Does It Work?: An Introduction for Employee-Members
An employee cooperative is a membership organization set up to market the labor and skills of its members through owning a business.
The 1042 Roll-Over Cooperative in Practice: A Case Study of How Select Machine Became a Co-Op
On September 30, the seven employees of Select Machine, in Brimfield, Ohio, began to purchase their company from the two retiring owners, Doug Beavers and Bill Sagaser, using an employee-owned cooperative.
Productivity in Cooperatives and Worker-owned Enterprises: Ownership and Participation Make a Difference!
The survival rate of worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms in market economics appears to equal or surpass that of conventional firms. But they typically return a different combination of economic benefits to their member-owners than do conventional firms…
Davey Tree Stands Tall with Employee Ownership
Over 25 years, The Davey Tree Expert Company’s employee owners built a good small company into one of the premier companies in its industry, with an entrepreneurial zest for new products and acquisitions. The company’s development would have pleased its inventive founder and provably surprised the family members who sold it to hesitant employees in 1979.
Third-Sector Development: Making Up for the Market
Nonprofit corporations, cooperatives, and credit unions constitute an alternative avenue of hope and action for communities that have come up short in the normal operation of the market economy. These organizations comprise the third sector, which accounts for approximately 10 percent of U.S. economic activity.
Labor Markets and Firm Benefit Policies in Japan and the United States
This paper presents finding from our most recent research on the transformation of participatory employment practices of Japanese firms in the 1990s, during which the Japanese economy slowed down considerably. The operation appears to be of particular public policy interest for many countries considering participatory employment practices as a way to improve their productivity performance and thus competitiveness.
Jet Rubber: Ten Years of ESOP Success
The fifty employee owners of Jet Rubber Company, a manufacturer of custom molded goods and rubber-to-metal parts founded in 1955, celebrated the 10th anniversary of their ESOP in March 2003.
Worker Participation: Lessons from the Workers Co-Ops of the Pacific Northwest
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.
The Ownership of Enterprise
Henry Hansmann explains why different industries and different national economies exhibit different patterns of ownership forms.
Cooperative Firms in Theory and Practice
Cooperatives are not, as everyone at this conference knows, just a peripheral or incidental or anachronistic or culturally limited form of organization. Rather, they are big business of a distinctly modern type.
Cooperation Works!: How People Are Using Cooperative Action to Rebuild Commuities and Revitalize the Economy
Fifty case studies of new types of cooperatives, from healthcare, camping gear, trailer courts, buffalo, hardware, housing, sports teams, credit, carpet, even manure and beyond highlight the almost limitless ways people are using cooperative action to rebuild community, revitalize their economies and secure their lives.
Participation and Productivity: a Comparison of Worker Cooperatives and Conventional Firms in the Plywood Industry
A perennial issue is the study of organizational behavior is the impact on productivity of participation by workers in a firm’s decisionmaking. The question has returned to the foreground is the recent debate over policies to increase U.S. productivity growth.
Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Producer Cooperatives: Will Ever the Twain Meet?
Producer cooperatives (hereafter, PC) have existed in Western economies since the advent of the factory system. The oldest surviving PCs in the U.K. and Italy are over one hundred years old. By analyzing the theoretical properties of PCs, economists hope to assess whether popularization of the PC form, or transplantation of some of its characteristics into other organizations, would benefit or harm social welfare.
Rick Surpin (A, B, C)
A long-time community development worker creates hundreds of jobs for low-income women and minorities by forming a for-profit home health care cooperative, Cooperative Home Care Associates…
Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex
This book gives a valuable insight into the history and formation of this unique undertaking as well as a wonderful portrait of the far-sighted Basque priest who master-minded the original project.
The Viability of Employee-Owned Firms: Evidence from France
This study examines data on French producer cooperatives for the years 1970-79 to test the widely accepted theoretical prediction that employee-owned firms either will fail as commercial undertakings or degenerate into capitalist firms as the proportion of hired workers who are not members of the cooperative firm increases.
“People’s Factories”: Worker Co-operatives in South Africa
The aim of this article is to investigate the recent emergence of worker cooperatives or “people’s factories” in South Africa. The development of South African worker co-ops is situated in terms of key aspects of the restructuring of the economy and society during the 1980s. New production forms such as producer cooperatives are linked to … Read More
Workplace Democracy: The Political Effects of Participation
The concept of workplace democracy has long been vitally important to theorists and activists of the democratic Left. The author here tests some of the claims made for this system, asking: Do such alternative forms of work organization really decrease workers’ sense of alienation? Does participation in a democratic, cooperatively run business encourage political participation? Does such a workplace foster class consciousness as a strategy for superseding capitalism?