Worker Cooperatives

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.

Reem’s California is a worker-owned restaurant. It is democratically run by local workers. Using worker-ownership, the restaurant challenges the long-standing inequality and violence prevalent in the restaurant industry, and provides an empowering and transforming workplace for those who have faced the most barriers–people of color, queer, formerly incarcerated folks, and undocumented individuals.

Chris interviews worker-owners at the 2024 Worker Co-op Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

How a group of metalworkers ended up creating an alliance with farmers is a fascinating story. Drawing on anthropological and sociological approaches to work, political economy, and social movements, this article uses the RiMaflow case to understand recovered enterprises in Italy and to shed light on the conditions under which solidarity against capital—conflict—and solidarity among the oppressed—mutualism—emerges when workers attempt to secure their livelihoods.