cooperative economy

A look at how a worker co-op with 140 members, a flat pay scale, and no hierarchy functions.

This is a story of how the makers who create a living off their hard-earned skills, banded together to challenge this dominant business ethic, and about the cooperative they built that’s just now getting off the ground. It is a venture that aims to grow at the speed of trust to serve the makers, the customers, and the staff who run it.

A co-op educator and activist, Halena Wilson used her position as president of the Chicago Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to show Black women the path to economic self-sufficiency through cooperation.

The International Centre for Co-operative Management offers management education in a multi-sectoral format that brings managers from producer, worker, and consumer co-ops and credit unions. The students learn together and share their models of co-operation. The result is a dynamic and engaging educational program that creates a unique management paradigm for the co-operative enterprise model.

Chapter eight of Cooperative Enterprise and Market Economy.

An online panel facilitated by co-op researcher-practitioner Emi Do that brings together presenters from several such projects: CoTech, Exit to Community Collective, Platform Cooperativism Consortium, SPACE4, Start.coop, UnFound Accelerator, and Union Cooperative Initiative. These projects advance democratic business formation and co-op theory-building, and they offer valuable lessons on the promises and challenges of accelerating worker ownership today.

Today I’m talking with Matt Hancock, who’s been heavily involved with the co-operative movement in Emilia Romagna – the region of Italy around Bologna. There’s a huge, very successful co-op sector in ER. I want to try to find out in this interview is why – what’s special about ER, and can it be emulated elsewhere?

What form should member ownership take in a worker cooperative? How is the form of ownership related to the economic viability of the enterprise? How is ownership of equity allocated and measured, what impact does ownership and accumulation of equity have on distribution of surplus? In this chapter, Razeto offers an economic theory of ownership and distribution of surplus in worker enterprises, proposing the issuance of “labor shares” representing individual members’ ownership of equity.

Last week’s seminar with guest speaker Professor Vera Zamagni explored the various forms of value generated by Italian social cooperatives.

There has been an effort to dissociate accumulation from distribution, resulting in a contradictory and confused understanding of the relation between the two in cooperatives, with very serious practical consequences. In this chapter we examine this nexus and all its implications, demonstrating the importance of understanding accumulation as a necessary element of rational economic behavior in cooperative enterprises, and revealing the distortions caused by failing to do so.