Skip to main content

Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

Worker Cooperative Creation As Progressive Lawyering?

by Gowri J. Krishna, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, Vol. 34 no. 1, 2013

 

Abstract

Community Economic Development (CED) scholars posit that creating worker cooperatives – businesses owned and managed by their workers – is a progressive approach to CED with the potential to go beyond job creation and spur grassroots political activism. Yet many workers’ rights organizations and workers’ rights advocates, especially those serving low-wage immigrant workers, struggle with connecting worker cooperatives to broader efforts for economic, political, or social change. This Article argues that forming a worker cooperative that acts as a change agent requires more than simply structuring the business as a worker cooperative. Although cooperative corporation laws and cooperative principles set a floor – typically, one person, one vote – that floor alone does not guarantee political activism or broader change; collective organization does not inherently lead to collective action. Worker cooperatives face challenges in connecting to broader movements and serving as more than job-creation vehicles. These challenges include the inherent tension between a co-operative’s identity as a business and that of a values-oriented association of people, the limited scale of cooperatives, the significant resources required to start and maintain them, and concerns over member priorities and retention. Creating worker co-operatives as progressive institutions requires surmounting these challenges and actively prioritizing broader aims when incubating, recruiting for, structuring, governing, and operating cooperatives.

 

Read the whole piece at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2188620

Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
CAPTCHA This question is to verify that you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam.

What does the G in GEO stand for?