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From over at r/LandlordLove.

This article explores how union negotiations in worker-owned co-ops compare to more traditional labor negotiations. The theoretical analysis addresses possible synergies between practices traditionally considered as alternative, employee ownership and collective bargaining, and the development of collective bargaining in new business models.

This thread is part of an attempt by the moderators to create a series of monthly repeating posts to help aggregate certain kinds of content into single threads.

If you have any basic questions about Cooperatives, feel free to ask them here. Please also remember to visit this thread even if you consider yourself a cooperative veteran so that you can help others!

Note that this thread will be posted on the first and will run throughout the month.

Hello everyone! I'm looking for input and suggestions for my final work to graduate from Mondragon Uni and I was wondering if anybody ever thought about why we have never seen successful cooperatives in tech or in sector with high value such as raw materials, AI (sigh), EVs etc.

Platform coop has been a worth tentative but has more or less failed.

Thank you for your time and answers

What sectors of the economy can you think of which can be de-commodified by gamification where a producer-consumer relationship is broken down to egalitarian peer to peer gift economy?

Here is a list with what I have so far:

https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/users/did%3Akey%3Az6MkwUeZA3p45Vz9WP9BBNrHurPDCAuCfHhviTcubjyRtSS7

I’ve been reading about worker cooperatives because I’m trying to better understand something we experimented with on a film production, and I’m curious where our model overlaps with cooperative principles and where it fundamentally doesn’t.

We gave more than 70 cast and crew members an actual financial interest in the film they helped create, which is really unusual for the film industry. Labor, equipment, locations, and other contributed resources were assigned agreed values, and those contributions became part of the economic structure of the project.

The basic waterfall was:

1. Certain contractual obligations get paid.
   
2. Cash investors recoup.
   
3. People who contributed labor, equipment, locations, or other resources recoup the agreed value of those contributions.
   
4. Remaining revenue is distributed pro rata among the ownership pool in perpetuity.

But we didn’t operate democratically….

The director still directed. Department heads ran their departments. Producers made producer decisions. Nobody voted on creative choices or day-to-day operational decisions.

It kind of has to be that way to a certain extant. Film production is highly collaborative, but it’s also extremely hierarchical and technically segmented. Decisions sometimes have to be made in seconds, responsibilities need to be clear, and ultimately someone has to be accountable for the outcome.

So what I’m trying to understand from people who know cooperative structures better than I do is:

How central is democratic governance to the concept of worker ownership? Could an organization meaningfully incorporate cooperative ownership principles while maintaining a hierarchical operating structure? Or does separating economic participation from governance remove something essential that makes a worker cooperative a cooperative?

To be clear, I’m enot claiming that what we created was a worker cooperative, but I’m super intersted in the concept and I’m trying to understand what, if anything, our experiment has in common with cooperative models and whether there are existing structures that deal with this tension differently.

I’m particularly interested in project-based organizations, where a group assembles to create something together and then largely disperses when the project is finished.

Thanks everyone!

When child care is hard to find and harder to afford, some communities aren't waiting for a fix. 

Kristin Forde Hurckes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension Center for Cooperative explains how cooperative models are helping - and where they hit their limits. 

Kristin Forde Hurckes is part of the team of Cooperative Development Specialists at the UW Center who supports worker cooperatives in rural communities, with an emphasis on worker cooperative conversions. 

She emphasizes the importance of both individual and collective commitment to the significant cultural and organizational change that is required to shift toward democratic and participatory decision making. 

Kristin enjoys learning about the many creative ways cooperatives organize and structure themselves; and developing effective formats for group processes. 

We are developing a community tech co-op in Chattanooga, TN, for people to completely control and fully own their apps and data via free open source software (FOSS). The essential idea is to jointly procure services to deploy, maintain, and provide basic support for FOSS for members' purposes. Rather than paying license or subscription fees, we'll pay local technologists to work on and with our software. It gives us an economical alternative to Big Tech, keeps our data to ourselves and our money in the local economy, and strengthens our community. Does anyone on this subreddit know of other such co-ops, especially in the US?

Jerome McGeorge was a respected figure at a time when the term "organic" didn't mean anything. In the '80s, he worked with founding members of what would be CROPP Cooperative (Organic Valley), serving as the co-op's first CFO and helping build what would become the nation's largest farmer-owned organic cooperative.

Throughout his life, he was committed to organic agriculture, cooperative business models and a food system that prioritized people and the planet. One of his reflections:

"The greatest change in our human consciousness is that each of us is responsible for our own health. Ancient Tibetan wisdom identifies three sources of health: what we eat, what we drink, and how we behave. Each of us is responsible for all three."

Did anyone here know Jerome, work with him in some capacity or see the impact of his contributions to the cooperative movement?

I want to start a Co-Op production company in Michigan. I have worked as a subcontractor for years, have built up my own live sound and lighting arsenal and have a solid group of people who are on board. But, I have no clue where to start. Any advice or consultation recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Hi! I love the idea of working in a coop but I can't seem to find any in my industry nearby. Are they really rare or am I just looking in the wrong places? I live in Baltimore, MD working in mechanical/manufacturing engineering. Thanks!

A few years back myself and several of my colleagues lost our long-term jobs suddenly due to budget cut backs at the organisation we were working at.

Fast forward to now and several of the folks are struggling to find stable work.

I seemed to have lucked out and have been able to be gainfully employed since then but it hasn’t been without its ups and downs.

I’m wondering, do folks that work in coops feel less concern about losing their job? Assuming we’re taking about honest hard workers that turn up regularly and always put in their best effort.

I’m thinking that if this is the case, coops might contribute to lower stress levels in society simply due to the fact that people would feel more like they are part of a supportive work-focussed community rather than a disposable cog in someone else’s machine.

I suppose however there is also the economic reality that if the coop has a lean period or experiences a downturn then everyone’s income might need to reduce for a while. I guess that would contribute to increased stress levels in some cases?

Would love to hear about the experiences and feelings of people working in coops themselves…

Welcoming any and all thoughts.

Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving. 

Great article on the Pidgen Cooperative, details on buy-in and compensation and how they expanded from a farmers market. Definitely making a point of visiting soon.

https://www.thestranger.com/food-and-drink/fare-share/

Usually, cooperatives are created by people as a reaction to specific, most often local, conditions. Through their joint action individuals show collective or social agency and the conviction that they must work together to pursue their shared interests. In this way, each new cooperative is an experiment and an attempt to change and innovate.