Worker Cooperatives

A survey for cooperators, reflecting on the worker cooperative movement on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the founding of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

Cooperative development is the most important social change work that a person can do.

Bernard Marszalek joins us to discuss the history of the Hawthorn Works and his new book: Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit.

For growing numbers of media companies, employee ownership offers journalistic freedom and job stability.

Bethany and Tim of the Cheeseboard Bakery and the Arizmendi Association of Co-ops talk about the model of worker co-op development they have been successfully pursuing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Linda Wurzbach recently retired from a successful 12-person education consultancy using an employee ownership model.

Since their emergence in the late 1990s and early 2000, these firms have proven to be intensely transformative for their workers, faced as they are with having to quickly learn how to self-manage their new worker cooperatives that were the formerly crisis-riddled investor-owned firms or sole proprietorships that had previously employed them. More broadly, Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises show how the creation of new worker-run firms has many positive externalities for the revitalization and wellbeing of surrounding communities.

In this episode of Punchcard, we speak to Rebecca Kemble, an experienced cooperator from the US, who is a member of Union Cabs Worker Cooperative in Madison and co-founder of the Solidarity Economy Principles Project.

I want to share a framework that explains the different varieties of tech worker cooperatives. This framework helps us understand the various pathways tech workers can take to join the tech worker cooperative movement.

Whereas traditional firms can simply lay off or decrease the hours of workers, those sorts of options aren’t really available for a lot of worker co-ops.