Worker Cooperatives

Ebony Gustave writes about touring several cooperatives in the Hudson Valley as part of the Cooperative Leaders & Scholars Fellowship.

The unique communities described in great detail in the recently published Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy are utopian in vision but thoroughly practical in their everyday functioning.

This talk shares stories of the emergence of solidarity economy movements in Massachusetts. Loh traces how these movements, many of which he has been involved with, have been fighting for and building over the past fifteen years around projects such as worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, community investment funds, mutual aid, and more.

Investor Owned Firms will continue to seek regulatory treatment similar to cooperatives but without having to adhere to any type of democratic and fairness principles. Competitors of cooperatives can also be expected to search for ways to try to undermine member solidarity.

This month’s guest is Rob Callender, co-founder of Kin.coop, a platform designed to help people start and manage cooperative savings clubs. What would it look like to organise money collectively? 

An introduction to the US Cooperative Movement from CooperationWorks!

Within the framework of the Universidad Popular by Poder Emma, an industrial sewing workshop is underway. For now, they offer free classes in Spanish to the local Latino community. In the future, they plan to turn the space into a worker-owned textile cooperative that elevates the sewing trade and creates dignified jobs for the community.

This Co-op Conversation contextualizes the recent surge of unionized worker co-ops, or “union co-ops,” in the United States within the structural aims and orientations of the respective movements.

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

What appears to be a proof of the economic viability of the cooperative enterprise, turns out to be an argument for the potential of cooperativism, as part of a larger movement of movements, to constitute a force capable of overcoming the crisis of the State by re-founding political democracy on new, distributed and democratic foundations.