Worker Cooperatives

We need our national and international organizations to join us. I call on others to participate in building the movement while reframing and redirecting the Federation to become a member-controlled and -focused organization once again.

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

Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving.

Usually, cooperatives are created by people as a reaction to specific, most often local, conditions. Through their joint action individuals show collective or social agency and the conviction that they must work together to pursue their shared interests. In this way, each new cooperative is an experiment and an attempt to change and innovate.

Unions and co-ops go together. This session outlines the practice of labor neutrality — when an employer commits to taking no position for or against their workers organizing and to voluntary recognize a labor union without requiring an election facilitated by a third party (commonly through a "card check" process) — and how workers in cooperatives can benefit from their employer proactively supporting their rights.

Across all conversations, participants described continually negotiating how and when aspects of their identity were disclosed, adapting to the needs of the people they supported while simultaneously managing their own sense of authenticity and professional identity.

workerowned.info is a free, searchable marketplace that indexes products from worker-owned businesses and puts them in one place.

We are Green Halcones, a social cooperative owned by formerly incarcerated individuals based in Los Angeles, California. We are working to make neighborhoods beautiful, grow healthy food, and protect the environment for future generations.

In this episode of How (Not) To Do Business, Chris King sits down with Cherry Haynes and Siôn Whellens of Calverts, the East London design and print co-operative.

This session will explore the power of cooperatives working across three very different contexts: Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Cooperative, Cecosesola and Ventures. It will explore how the cooperative economic model provides benefits both for employees and the communities they serve.