Skip to main content

Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

Is Cheese Board’s Coop the Labor Model of the Future?

Sometimes you wonder if economists ever step outside their lecture halls. Monopolies aren’t businesses, they’re a series of curves on a graph. Consumers aren’t people, they’re utility functions. 

Not only do these models oversimplify and dehumanize, but they generally fail to hold up in real life. Look no further than David Card’s famous minimum wage paper, which illustrated that raising minimum wages actually increases employment in some sectors. This completely contradicted the theoretical status quo that raising wages should reduce employment

The empirical application of economic theory to real markets is now almost ubiquitous among researchers. In this tradition, I interviewed Vanessa Vichit-Vadakan, a worker-owner at Cheese Board—everyone’s favorite Berkeley pizza place—to learn more about the real-world applications of labor models.

Read the rest at Berkeley Economic Review

 

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?