Worker cooperative

From Freepedia

A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and operated by its "worker-owners". There are no outside, or consumer owners, in a worker's cooperative - only the workers own shares of the business. One share and one vote for all members.

Since there is no coherent legislation across the United States, much less Federal laws, most worker cooperatives make use of traditional consumer cooperative law and try to fine-tune it for their purposes. In some cases the members (workers) of the cooperative in fact "own" the enterprise by buying a share that represents a fraction of the market value of the cooperative. But this is seldom the case in most modern day worker cooperatives. This system of "buying-in" has proven unworkable because as the value of the cooperative increases,new members cannot afford to buy a share and are reduced to either purchasing over a long-term, which means going into debt to the cooperative, maybe for years. Worker cooperatives organized this way mostly became traditional busineses with the orginal coop members hiring employees.

When the current cooperative movement resurfaced in the 1960s it developed mostly on a new system of "collective ownership" where par value shares were issued as symbolic of egalitarian voting rights. Once brought in as a member, after a period of time on probation usually so the new candidate can be evaluated, he or she was given power to manage the coop, without "ownership" in the traditional sense. In the UK this system is known as common ownership.

Some of these early cooperatives still exist and most new worker cooperatives follow their lead and develop a relationship to capital that is more radical than the previous system of equity share ownership.

To learn more about current cooperatives please visit the website of Bay Area Network of Worker Cooperatives (NOBAWC, pronounced No Boss!) <http://www.nobawc.org>

Some cooperatives join Trade Unions to express their support for the values and social advances of the Labor Movement. While an unusual situation, there is no contradiction in doing so. The labor contract negoitiated becomes the baseline of benefits due to the membership and guarantees to the community that the working conditions are not those of a "sweatshop". Union membership also guarantees that the worker cooperative will not operate on the basis of typical small business sacrifice, where the owner (s) sometimes work day and night to keep their business afloat and expect similar sacrifices of their workers. Union membership for worker cooperatives gives the enterpise a legitimate standard of operations.

Worker coops in the U.S.

The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives is the only organization in the U.S. representing worker cooperative interests nationally. There are local networks and federations throughout the U.S. in the San Francisco Bay area, the Twin Cities, Portland, Oregon, and Boston, Massachusetts, and Asheville, North Carolina.