Worker Cooperatives

In recent years, there’s been renewed interest in the worker co-op model. The Earthworker cooperative network focused on Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. The goal: find new types of employment and products in a coal area undergoing transition.

Are you a business owner who is retiring or transitioning out? Don’t just close the door—pass the torch.

When is a “Coop” not really a cooperative? The short answer is whenever the actual activity of the “cooperative” is not carried out by the members but by employees. The problem is, of course, not in cooperation per se but in the hiring, employing, renting, or leasing of people to carry out the supposedly “cooperative” activities of the “cooperative.”

An interview with Andy Bowling of comp.coop and Co-op Cincy.

This timeline presentation goes over the highlights of 20+ years of worker cooperativism in the United States. 

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.