Workplace Democracy

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.

This week, workers and community supporters launched the Pittsburgh Progress, “a cooperative news organization, owned and democratically run by its workers and members… dedicated to looking out for, and telling the stories of, the working-class people who form the heart and soul of our diverse communities.”

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.

GEO is returning to print after nearly two decades. Here's why we're doing it.

Ever dreamed about starting your own business with like-minded creators? A worker cooperative is a business that is owned and controlled by its workers. It is an underused model in the cultural industry that channels the creative power and freedom of the workers to build a world grounded in solidarity. Join us in this discussion on how Creative Workers Cooperatives function and how you can make one too! 

In this chapter, Luis Razeto identifies the key to the democratic transformation of the market – “the formation of a new social block, a subject of transformational action, the bearer of a new structure of social action” – and analyzes the various theoretical and practical obstacles that must be overcome in order for it to occur.

The GEO is back in print after 19 years! 

Unfortunately not everybody's experience of cooperatives is positive. For Elle, their time in co-operatives was both transformative, but also painful, marred by classism that often goes unnamed.

The new approach that Razeto proposes here is made up not through federation of cooperative businesses but association of individuals in small groups or base communities. This is his movement-building perspective: cooperative organizing from the grassroots, with a clear distinction drawn between representational and operational functions.