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From the outside of a stalwart brick church in the north end of Brandon, Manitoba, you might not know it has a brightly-coloured basement that hums with activity.

Men and women, adults and children, hunch over sewing machines on long collapsible tables. They came to Manitoba as refugees from Eritrea, Somalia, and elsewhere. Over their shoulders peer the keen eyes of skilled Hutterite women, checking their work and giving them pointers on creating yoga bags and bread bags, aprons and baby hats.

Gig workers lack basic employee benefits such as a guaranteed minimum wage, overtime pay, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. And Proposition 22, which California voters recently passed after a historic spending campaign by gig companies, creates a new sub-employee category for those workers, codifying the lack of protections.

This report sets out to show that the co-operative model is a real alternative to competitive and individualized patterns of work. Building on Dave Boyle and Kate Oakley’s reflections on why co-operatives and creative industries are a good fit, this report is based on research we carried out in 2019 and 2020 on co-ops in creative industries in Canada, the UK, and the US. We designed and distributed an online survey completed by 106 co-ops and interviewed 12 members of worker co-ops.

The co-op hopes to boost driver income “by returning profits to drivers and establish basic employment rights for workers in the sector” as well as save drivers’ money through a credit union partnership as an alternative to “predatory vehicle financing”.

It will also offer a route back into work for drivers who have been delisted by Uber and Lyft. The co-op accused the platforms of doing this “without due process based on specious and often racially biased customer complaints”.

Although women across the nation bear the brunt of household and agriculture work, they are still sidelined due to limited representation in decision-making and minimal interactions with markets. Kamdhenu Cooperative, through its well laid principles of self-reliance for women, has been a major contributor to empowering women.

If the Erreka Group operated like most businesses, the pandemic would have delivered a traumatic blow to its workers.

Based in the rugged Basque region of Spain, the company produces a variety of goods, including sliding doors, plastic parts used in cars and medical devices sold around the world. As the coronavirus ravaged Europe in late March, the Spanish government ordered the company to shut two of its three local factories, threatening the livelihoods of the 210 workers there.

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, information about new Health Department requirements, CDC guidelines and State mandates came at us at a furious pace. Sometimes changes would be announced while we were meeting to discuss implementation of the ones from earlier in the day. Added to that was the intense amount of shopping in the store, creating product shortages and uncertainty in ordering. Who knew that toilet paper would be the new gold standard?

...with only $600 being offered through Congress’s stimulus plan, the future is looking pretty bleak.

Amid all of this, there is a broad movement of grassroots organizations throughout the country that are taking their community’s well-being into their own hands. Mutual aid organizations have been working to provide food, supplies and services to the most vulnerable populations throughout the country.

By applying a cooperative model to the scale of the web, there’s an enormous opportunity to democratise wealth and power  and create tools that are better aligned with our common interest. In many ways, it’s an exciting and provocative way of rethinking both corporate governance and human organization. 

Collective community ownership in tech is more than an altruistic aspiration, it can be good business. Co-ops keep wealth within communities, are more responsive to community needs, and are remarkably resilient businesses. 

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Providing the latest research on the economic and social contribution of Australia’s co-operative, mutual and member-owned firms.

With the research collaboration of the University of Western Australia.