United States

This guide provides a catalog of efforts made by local government institutions to support cooperative development in their regions

This brief article disccuses the role of cooperatives in fueling economic recovery and the importance of public policy in cultivating factors of success.

This white paper addresses the issue of fairness in funding for cooperative development in the United States and advocates for federally funded cooperative development assistance that is on par with that ofered for non-cooperative business development. It also emphasizes the disparity between rural and urban cooperative access to funding and proposes an increase in availabiity of funding for urban cooperatives without hindering rural cooperative development.

This proposal examines the problem of economic disparity facing the United States, and presents an option for reform based on employee ownership and incentive-based compensation. It also proposes a change in tax policy accordingly and examines the impact of the proposal on a few Fortune 500 firms.

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:

EE embarked on its pioneering efforts to sell Fair Trade products in the United States with coffee from Nicaragua. From the beginning, EE paid the producers an above market price for their products out of a desire to help provide a better, more stable income and to more equitably distribute the proceeds of the final sales. The producers are typically small farmers indigenous to their region. On each product the company slogan -- “Small Farmers, Big Change” -- is prominently displayed.

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.