Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives Report
Members gathered together for our annual meeting on June 27. Members created strategic goals for the year that leverages our assets and programming to achieve our goals and act on opportunities...
From Clans to Co-ops
From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management.
Worker Cooperatives and Revolution
The capitalist mode of production does not permit a socially efficient allocation of resources. Resource allocation is determined by the twin structural imperatives of having purchasing power (on the demand side) and of chasing profit (on the supply side). If one has a need but lacks the money to back up that need, as for example the billion children worldwide living in poverty do, one’s need will not be met by the market.
Sparking a Mini-Movement of Worker Cooperatives in Southeast L.A.
Gutierrez was determined to spur economic change and, to that end, decided that her neighborhood needed more community-minded businesses in which workers shared management and ownership — in other words, it needed more worker cooperatives.
Can big co-ops live up to the movement’s values and principles?
Failure to understand and implement co-op values can lead to co-op failure. A 2016 study by Peter Couchman and Murray Fulton – When Big Co-ops Fail – indicates that co-ops which fail present similar early warning signs. These include falling silent on co-op identity and having managers with no interest or belief in the model.
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Co-op values in the modern world
It may seem like the soft side of business, but values are at the heart of every example of co-operative excellence – and core to the advisory work of Co-operatives UK.
The International Co-operative Alliance has codified 10 values – six co-operative and four ethical. The co-operative values – self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, solidarity – describe the design of the business. The ethical values – honesty, openness, social responsibility, caring for others – describe its operation.
Free Online Course - Economic Democracy: The Cooperative Alternative
What would happen if workers ran their own businesses? Would worker-managed firms make the same decisions as their capitalist counterparts? Could such an economy be efficient? What policies could be deployed to promote a cooperative sector?
The Solidarity Economy: An International Movement
Abstract:
This article describes the appearance of a solidarity economy movement in different national and continental contexts, stressing the diversity of practices within civil society at local and international level. Emerging in the last decades, these initiatives, which are both political and economic in nature, have extended and renewed the social economy, thereby offering a concrete alternative at a time of capitalist crisis. As such, the movement cannot be overlooked in the quest for a new economic model and public action.