As my earlier research on worker buyouts of businesses in Italy and Argentina’s worker-recuperated companies has shown, businesses that convert to co-operatives represent a tried-and-true rescue and succession strategy.
However, our new study shows that in Canada it’s still a largely overlooked option by most owners of small- and medium-sized enterprises and employees, unions and policy-makers.
The combination of a lack of succession planning and the failure to consider the co-operative-conversion solution is tied to a related finding from our research — only 30 per cent of Canadian small business owners are familiar with co-ops, and many of them have mistaken ideas about them. Those include misconceptions about inefficiency due to the democratic governance of co-ops and assumptions that they lack competitiveness.
Decades of research into the co-operative model’s advantages and strengths shows that these concerns are unfounded. Co-operatives offer stable business models that provide good jobs.
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