Researchers

The Democracy at Work Institute/USFWC Press Kit includes information about worker cooperatives, why they are important, examples of existing cooperatives and development organizations, city government initiatives, frequently asked questions, and more.

This is an overview of the University of Winnipeg's anchor-led model for community economic development. It positions the Winnipeg model as a robust example of an anchor institution strategy, and includes a broad survey of US worker cooperative development and movement-building efforts of the last 30 years.

 

 

 

This book is an anthology of reports and papers from the 2007 U.S. Social Forum. It shares a wealth of new economic alternatives springing up in the USA and globally.

This article examines the role of ESOPs in transfering wealth to employees and the financial impact of ESOP legislation.

This report quantifies the economic impact of S corporations that sponsor employee stock ownership plans on the US economy in terms of jobs, income, output, and tax revenue.

The Alliance to Develop Power (ADP) and Nuestras Raíces (Our Roots) are two longstanding community organizations growing in the fertile social soil of the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

Philadelphia is the site of an innovative program, which promises to have profound effects on the future of the employee ownership movement in the United States. The program is led by a union. United Food and Commercial Workers, but that in itself is not unique. Local 46 of the same union was the precedent setter with Rath Packing Company in 1980; United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local 736 followed in 1981; establishing employee ownership for Hyatt-Clark Industries, a former General Motors plant. The pathbreaking features of the Philadelphia program are these:

The cooperative ownership model is used in a wide variety of contexts in the United States, ranging from the production and distribution of energy to delivery of home health care services for the elderly. Although cooperative businesses have been responsible for many market innovations and corrections of market imperfections, little is known about their impact as an economic sector. Until this project, no comprehensive set of national-level statistics had been compiled about U.S. cooperative businesses, their importance to the U.S.

This report will provide historical evidence and current empirical evidence that proves that the cooperative model of enterprise survives crisis, but more importantly that it is a sustainable form of enterprise able to withstand crisis, maintaining the livelihoods of the communities in which they operate. It will further suggest ways in which the ILO can strengthen its activity in the promotion of cooperatives as a means to address the current crisis and avert future crisis.

By means of qualitative analysis, this paper examines the organisational cultures underlying three worker cooperatives in the San Francisco Bay Area. 20 workers were interviewed and the transcripts were subsequently analysed along Edgar Schein's cultural framework. The findings show that overall the culture of these worker cooperatives is people-centred: the wellbeing of the workers comes first and the concern for making a profit comes only second.