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Worker cooperatives are a powerful tool for economic and community development. This resource describes their role in creating a more just economy. It provides an overview of the benefits of the cooperative form, with examples of existing cooperatives and quotes from worker-owners. The resource also describes current initiatives to develop cooperatives by nonprofits, as well as government initiatives to spur the growth of the sector. 

When forming, worker cooperatives have an important choice to make regarding their legal entity. Each entity type has implications on important issues including taxation, employment law, and access to capital. This resource is intended to give a brief overview of the entity types and lay out the issues worker cooperatives may want to consider when choosing which is the best fit for the business at whatever stage it is currently in.

At a time when trust in conventional capitalist governance is at a historical low, worker cooperatives demonstrate that, given a fair chance, workers can run the show by themselves and it is indeed a good moment for trade unions to challenge received ideas about worker cooperatives. This journal includes six (6) articles about the relationship between unions and worker cooperatives throughout the world.

Multi-stakeholder cooperatives (MSCs) are co-ops that are owned and controlled by more than one type of membership class such as consumers, producers, workers, volunteers, or community supporters. Stakeholders can be individuals or organizations such as non-profits, businesses, government agencies, or even other cooperatives. Instead of focusing on the needs of a single membership class, MSCs are often built around a broad mission that addresses the interests of the various stakeholder groups. The number of MSCs in the U.S. is small but growing.

Cities are built for sharing. It’s what makes cities engines of prosperity, in­novation, and cultural exchange. Well connected cities have the unique capacity to raise per capita production and innovation while using dra­matically less energy. For this reason, cities may be our best hope for achieving widespread prosperity within the earth’s natural limits. We believe that fostering the growth of the sharing economy is the single most important thing that city governments can do to boost prosperity and resilience in times of economic crisis and climate change.

The Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA) presents this report, Worker Cooperatives for New York City: A Vision for Addressing Income Inequality, as an examination of one solution for the challenges facing New York’s workers: worker cooperative businesses. Indeed, the report’s key finding is that worker cooperatives can easily fit into a broad campaign to cope with poverty, long-term joblessness, the growing isolation of low-wage workers and unprecedented levels of income inequality.

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 presentation goes over the steps of the cooperative transition process and outlines benefits, challegnes, and key questions of a business transition.

Link: here

Before a cooperative transition process can get started, the selling owner needs to make some decisions about how to structure the process, specifically she needs to clearly define who has decision-making power in the process: herself, the transition committee, the likely coop members, and the whole group. This chart outlines who decides what.  

Gant chart outlining the phases a business goes through during transition to a cooperative.