Articles

Caisse d'économie solidaire Desjardins: A Unique Financial Institution

Ethan — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:52:43 -0400

By Yvon Poirier

Taking Back the South Bronx: Opening Day at a Green Worker Co-op

Ethan — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:39:52 -0400

By Lauren Kozol

Co-ops Unite to Support Worker-Ownership in Home Care

Ethan — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:17:11 -0400

by Jim Johnson, GEO Collective

Past issues of GEO have reported on the emergence of a particular type of worker cooperative, the home care cooperative. In the 1980s, the federal government followed the lead of state governments like Wisconsin and acknowledged that elderly and disabled people who need help in day-to-day living are best served by in-home assistance. Medicare and Medicaid funding that would have otherwise been used only for nursing homes would now be applicable to home care services. With "the gray tsunami" of aging baby boomers looming, demand is only going to increase for the next few decades.

Money Talks: How Participatory Budgeting Can Transform Politics

Ethan — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:42:09 -0400

By Josh Lerner
Originally published by the Movement Vision Lab.

Cascadia Hour Exchange Goes Public

jpoling — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:33:58 -0400

Better Than Barter

The People's Grocery: Developing a Worker-Owned Community Grocery Store

Ethan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:58:16 -0500

People's Grocery is making speedy progress from a mobile organic food service cooperative towards developing a worker-owned cooperative grocery store in West Oakland in which local food and sustainable agriculture will be prioritized in a community health model centered on nutrition education for low-income residents of the community. At the same time, the cooperative is taking their business development goal beyond the single cooperative grocery store to a broader community development initiative focused on establishing a commercial and health service complex.

Searching For the Next Cooperative Principle

Ethan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:52:31 -0500

By Len Krimerman

In 1995, the International Cooperative Alliance adopted seven cooperative principles to define and guide cooperatives throughout the world. Briefly stated, the "traditional seven" include: voluntary and open membership; democratic member control; member economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training and information; cooperation among cooperatives; and concern for community.

A Strategy for Unions and Coops: Toward Building A Labor-Ownership Economy

Ethan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:15:54 -0500

By Lisa Stolarski

Both Hands in the Soil

There is an ethical imperative to shift the balance of economic power away from corporate Capitalism and toward economies that benefit us all. Beginning with this assumption, I will explain how it is possible for unions and worker cooperatives to collaborate strategically to take market share away from absentee-owned and wage labor capitalist enterprises and place control of resources and production in the hands of communities of working people.

Unions & Cooperatives: Allies in the Struggle to Build Democratic Workplaces

Ethan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:13:16 -0500

As labor organizers, we struggle in the field every day to improve the lives of workers; we are in search of tools and alternatives for working people that will meet the needs of today's casualized and insecure workforce, with shrinking or negligible benefits. It is in the spirit of innovative leadership that we propose that the labor movement use worker cooperatives, an alternative organizing strategy added to more traditional labor organizing methods, as a means of returning control of their lives to the American working people.

Our Eyes On the Prize: From a "Worker Co-op Movement" to a Transformative Social Movement

Ethan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:56:02 -0500

While empathizing with those who feel a sense of "inevitability" in the face of today's powerful capitalist economy (and disagreeing with those who see it as generally acceptable), I hold firmly to the perspective that a more just and democratic economy is both necessary and possible. And I believe that the greatest chance of increasing and assuring viability for the workplace democracy movement may rest in our ability to keep our "eyes on the prize"; that is, on the long term replacement of capitalism―an economy which socializes costs and privatizes benefits―with an economy of democratic cooperation―in which costs and benefits are democratically and equitably shared throughout society.