worker-owned cooperative Concepts

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly · 7 Jan 2025 · 293pp · 104,461 words

that value community ownership and democratic governance—and her ongoing work involves connecting the dots between those concepts and the arts. That could look like worker-owned cooperatives, participatory arts budgeting, or mutual aid networks, to name a few examples. “It’s not just about what we’re against,” she once told me

Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation

by Elandria Williams, Eli Feghali, Rachel Plattus and Nathan Schneider · 15 Dec 2024 · 346pp · 84,111 words

1980s, artists in various countries across Europe who had precarious working conditions chose to cooperate to obtain professional recognition and more predictable contracts. They formed worker-owned cooperatives that allowed them to gain access to social protections and strengthen their sense of community. One of the longest running artist cooperatives in Italy is

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adopted in Switzerland and the Czech Republic, and similar forms exist in Morocco and Tunisia. As ever more jobs are absorbed by the gig economy, worker-owned cooperatives represent a viable means of mitigating the isolation and unreliability faced by increasing numbers of workers. Working together instead of working alone, artists and cultural

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–PRESENT WHO ARTISTS AND OTHER CONTINGENT WORKERS SCALE INTERNATIONAL LEARN MORE REPORT “All for One: Response of Worker-Owned Cooperatives to Non-standard Employment” by CECOP. (2019) cecop.coop/works/cecop-report-all-for-one-reponse-of-worker-owned-cooperatives-to-non-standard-employment ARTICLE “Platform Cooperativism in Italy and in Europe” by Francesca Martinelli, Samuele

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its promises of fair wages and meaningful work for its members through its organizational structure. It is a limited-liability company that functions as a worker-owned cooperative, drawing members from across three states. It is part of a long legacy of African American cooperative networks that provide necessary resources, economic opportunities, and

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider · 10 Sep 2018 · 326pp · 91,559 words

his 1885 initial endowment were instructions to promote “the right and advantages of association and cooperation.” As a US senator, he championed legislation to support worker-owned cooperatives, which he saw as preferable to the investor-owned enterprise that had made him so wealthy. He told the university’s first class of students

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by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC (2011). 19. E.g., selfhosted.libhunt.com and ioo.coop/clouds. 20. Anand Sriraman, Jonathan Bragg, and Anand Kulkarni, “Worker-Owned Cooperative Models for Training Artificial Intelligence,” CSCW ’17 Companion (February 25–March 1, 2017). 21. José María Arizmendiarrieta, Reflections (Otalora, 2013), sec. 486. 22. John Geraci

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

by Rebecca Henderson · 27 Apr 2020 · 330pp · 99,044 words

the United Steel Workers, the National Cooperative Bank, and the American Sustainable Business Council.67 In Preston, England, the local council is actively experimenting with worker-owned cooperatives as a step toward the revitalization of the city.68 In the United States the Publix supermarket chain is the largest employee-controlled firm with

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, or help them understand how to go about doing it—as organizations like Proforest or Leaders’ Quest do.26 Michael Peck founded 1worker1vote to support worker-owned cooperatives all over the country. Sara Horowitz founded the Freelancers Union, raising $17 million to start an insurance program for her more than four hundred thousand

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

by Kate Raworth · 22 Mar 2017 · 403pp · 111,119 words

working week are all the more likely to happen if the employers are the workers themselves: from the Great Depression to the 2008 financial crisis, worker-owned cooperatives have proven more adept at preventing lay-offs: they tend to share reduced working hours between all members instead – an excellent example of an adaptive

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

by Ben Tarnoff · 13 Jun 2022 · 234pp · 67,589 words

tapping the procurement budgets of public and quasi-public “anchor institutions.” As a model, they point to the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, a cluster of worker-owned cooperatives including a laundry, a greenhouse, and a solar energy company that count two major medical centers, a university, and the city government among their clients

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high unemployment, in large part due to deindustrialization. The GLC responded by investing public money in unionized firms, as well as encouraging the creation of worker-owned cooperatives. It also established five “Technology Networks” in different locations across the city. These were prototyping workshops, similar to “makerspaces” or “hackerspaces” today. People could walk

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream

by Alissa Quart · 14 Mar 2023 · 304pp · 86,028 words

paycheck. It was also a collective enterprise that was starting to find more political support. In 2020 and 2021, California Representative Ro Khanna publicly championed worker-owned cooperatives on a federal level. (He was a longtime supporter of the practice and had often hosted roundtable discussions on them.) At a town hall in

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outside of the city to set up a barter system: labor for food. (The co-ops back then made more than just food, though—the worker-owned Cooperative Industries of Washington, DC, for instance, ran a laundry service, shoe repair, and cannery.) The movement that offered an estimated three hundred thousand people in

Alternatives to Capitalism

by Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright · 167pp · 50,652 words

configuration of capitalist empowerment, not socialist empowerment. Figure 9 A Configuration of capitalist empowerment: Corporate capitalist self-regulation 5. Cooperative Market Economy In a fully worker-owned cooperative firm in a capitalist economy the egalitarian principle of one-worker / one-vote of all members of the business means that the power relations within

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higher costs than capitalist corporate rivals; and so on. Symbiotic strategies directed at public policy could address all of these issues. Given the potential for worker-owned cooperatives to help solve problems of unemployment, deteriorating tax bases, and unstable communities, new rules of the game to support cooperatives could gain political traction. Even

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and state sectors of the Venezuelan economy largely in place, and concentrate instead on building a new sector they call “the social economy” comprised of worker-owned cooperatives, neighborhood clinics, food stores, educational “misiones,” municipal assemblies, and most recently, communal councils. In that context Erik’s approach makes all the sense in the

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not grant workers self-management in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Vietnam invariably generated similar antisocial behavior and rising inequality. And the dilemma worker-owned cooperatives face as they try to reconcile commercial and cooperative goals when subjected to market competition are well documented. Real Utopias and Transformation While Erik and

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era

by Ellen Ruppel Shell · 22 Oct 2018 · 402pp · 126,835 words

good. But decor, the surface of things, was never Addison’s priority. What mattered to him was work he could own. And Evergreen was a worker-owned cooperative, built on the utopian vision that Robert Owen imagined so long ago. “They told me that after six months I could buy into the place

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is cofounder and president of the Democracy Collaborative, a modest think tank based at the University of Maryland. The collaborative pioneered the concept of creating worker-owned cooperatives to serve “anchor institutions”: hospitals, universities, museums, schools, nursing homes, and other facilities that by definition are moored in a particular neighborhood. The idea was

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you? As the primary example of how this all might work, they cited the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC), a federation of more than two hundred worker-owned cooperatives clustered in a lush mountain valley in the Basque region of northwest Spain. * * * — Mondragon’s creation story goes something like this: Long ago, in the

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sustainable job creation. (This is also typical of cooperatives in Italy, where in the prosperous Emilia Romagna region 40 percent of GDP is generated by worker-owned cooperatives.) To its many admirers, Mondragon is living proof that the modern corporate model—where the demands of investors trump the needs of workers—is ripe

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in Amarillo,” he recalled. In his speech, Howard envisioned Amarillo’s anchor institutions—hospitals, colleges, even the large meatpackers—as customers for a slew of worker-owned cooperatives in transportation, cleaning, and food services. When he finished his talk, the city’s Republican mayor shot up a hand with a question. Howard braced

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from lean years. Robert Owen’s New Harmony, though not itself a rousing success, inspired hundreds of manufacturing worker-owned cooperatives to emerge in response to industrial age struggles over wages and working conditions. Worker-owned cooperatives were also a key element in early labor unions: in the mid- to late 1800s there were more than

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of Worker Cooperatives, believes we live in one of those “bad” times. There are about 350 worker-owned cooperatives nationwide, and interest is growing rapidly. That is partly due to the resounding success of a handful of worker-owned cooperatives, notably the Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA). Based in the South Bronx neighborhood it also serves

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. Robert Beyster Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, is an expert on corporate governance. He reminded me that while true worker-owned cooperatives are relatively rare, worker-owners are not. “Although I believe this is a special moment in time for cooperatives, we have to avoid tricks to

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a groundswell of support for the form: since 2015, Colorado, California, Missouri, New York, and Massachusetts have all passed legislation lowering barriers to incorporation of worker-owned cooperatives. These and similar efforts reflect a growing awareness that broad-based ownership of work holds the potential to deliver more wealth to more of us

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Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed June 20, 2018, at research.stlouisfed.org/dashboard/770. 40 percent of GDP is generated by worker-owned cooperatives Christopher D. Merrett and Norman Walzer, Cooperatives and Local Development (New York: Routledge, 2004). thousands of acres of vacant land Kathy A. Carr, “Urban Farmers

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

by Douglas Rushkoff · 1 Mar 2016 · 366pp · 94,209 words

, the businesses remain small but also agile enough to retool if market conditions change and networked enough to get support if they need to pivot. Worker-owned cooperatives can even scale. The oft-cited Mondragon Corporation began in the Basque region of Spain in the 1950s when a Jesuit priest and seven of

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offshoring, and a few push for growth as ardently and self-destructively as any traditional multinational corporation.89 But Mondragon’s success does prove that worker-owned cooperatives aren’t just for making organic jams; they can scale vertically and horizontally and compete with any shareholder-owned corporation on the block—without sacrificing

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embraces and enriches broader constituencies of stakeholders. Where an industrial approach to networking yields the platform monopolies of Uber and Amazon, a distributed one yields worker-owned cooperatives at a level of complexity and security unimaginable before digital technology. Where the digital industrialist’s financial strategy is to extract money through increasingly abstracted