Retail Trade

Ohio's Casa Nueva Restaurant: Worker Ownership for 25 Successful Years; Builder of Regional Economy; Model for Food Literacy

ajowa — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:42:38 -0400

This story by Karen Thomas, of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, is reprinted from the Winter 2011 issue of Owners at Work. It is the story about how eight workers took over a local restaurant, and turned it into a worker cooperative called Casa Nueva. But the work did not stop there. In the 25 years that it has been operating, Casa Nueva has also helped build a regional economy. The Athens, Ohio area where they are located is a national model for food literacy because of their work. For more information, visit the OEOC website at http://www.oeockent.org/. Click here for the story.

HuffPost on worker co-operatives

michaeljohnson — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:09:19 -0500

a Bay Area template that works in the US

News from Food for Thought Books Collective

michaeljohnson — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:15:30 -0400

We are writing you today because that is what friends do when they need help. We want you to know that we need your help now and that we are thankful for all the support that you have given to us in the past.

Vermont Co-op Summit Resources

michaeljohnson — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:31:08 -0400

New England summit highlights Crowell and others

Mondragon Diaries: Day Five

michaeljohnson — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 12:34:35 -0400

Our first stop is another component allied with Mongragon University called SAIOLAN. It's an incubator project for helping to launch new coops and high-tech businesses as well as training new entrepreneurs.

Mondragon Diaries: Day Four

michaeljohnson — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:28:07 -0400

Most new small businesses fail. That's a fact, whether they are in the Basque Country or in the U.S. Or anywhere else. Yet the Mondragon Coops, which all started as small worker-owned businesses, have hardly ever failed. Why? The key is in Father Jose Maria Arizmendi's original founding conception of cooperatives as the interlocking of school, factory and credit union.

Mondragon Diaries: Day Three

michaeljohnson — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:49:07 -0400

Our topic this morning is the wider range of the cooperative movement, both in the Basque Country and Spain. Mondragon is a part of the Basque Cooperative Confederation. There are currently 755 cooperatives in the Basque Country, and only 80 of them are the worker-owned MCC coops. There are a total of 537,000 members of all the coops, but only 54,919 are worker members, and 37,860 of these are the MCC worker-owners.

Mondragon Diaries: Day Two

michaeljohnson — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 14:18:04 -0400

...As we left, many in our group were debating the pros and cons of global economic justice. I shared their concerns, but I also saw something else. Here was the beginnings of some of the most advanced productive forces in the world, the means of both economies of abundance and the means of clean and safe renewable energies and far lighter ecological footprints.

Mondragon Diaries: Carl Davidson's Five Days Studying Cutting-Edge People and Tools for Change

michaeljohnson — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 21:16:22 -0400

I'm with a group of 25 social activists on a study tour organized by the Praxis Peace Project. Our focus is the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a 50-year-old network of nearly 120 factories and agencies, involving nearly 100,000 workers in one way or another, and centered in the Basque Country but now spanning the globe. We're here to study the history of these unique worker-owned factories, how they work, why they have been successful, and how they might be expanded in various ways as instruments of social change.

Park Slope Food Coop Impresses Fortune Magazine

michaeljohnson — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:05:31 -0400

The Park Slope Food Co-op (PSFC) earned $39.4 million in its last fiscal year, reports Fortune, which translates into a per-square-foot average of over $6,500. By comparison Trader Joe's leads its competitors with an average per-square-foot earning of $1,750, while one estimate has Whole Foods's doing less than $850.

The Fortue story examines how PSFC does it.