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Author Archives: lasairdhubh
What is democratic socialism?
Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy by Pelle Dragsted, translated by William Banks, University of Wisconsin Press, 2025. If someone asked me right now to name good book on democratic socialism, one that succinctly explained the idea, I … Continue reading
Do worker cooperatives pay a price for equality?
One of the benefits of worker-owned businesses is that they tend to pay people more equally; the lowest wages and the highest wages in a typical worker-owned business are nearer to each other than the lowest and highest wages in … Continue reading
Posted in Research
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Review: How to set up a Workers’ Co-op
This is a great book. If you are planning on setting up a workers’ coop in the UK, this is definitely the first book you should pick up. And it’s free. You can download it as a PDF from Seeds … Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
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Sortition: a better way to do democracy?
When we think of democracy, we usually think of either consensus and direct democracy on the one hand, or elections and representative democracy on the other, but in a recent article in the Journal of Management Inquiry, Simon Pek argues … Continue reading
Democracy is hard work
Why are coops so rare? If worker-owned businesses are so much better than traditional businesses, why aren’t they more common? Worker-owners face a number of external barriers that make it harder to start and run a cooperative business, a lack … Continue reading
Posted in Research
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Interview: Jeremy Neal, Tribe
Tribe is a worker-owned staffing platform for technology professionals, and in this interview, co-founder and chief technology officer, Jeremy Neal, talks us through the design of this innovative cooperative, and explains how they got started. Jeremy studied computer science at … Continue reading
Posted in Interviews
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Hiring the wrong people
Imanol Basterretxea, Iñaki Heras-Saizarbitoria and Aitziber Lertxundi from the University of the Basque Country recently published an important paper about the failure of Fagor Electrodomésticos, the flagship cooperative in the Mondragon Corporation that went bankrupt in 2013, and last March, … Continue reading
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Cooperative Cities
How US cities are beginning to take an active role in promoting worker-ownership. There are certain places in the world, like the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain for instance, or the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, where worker-ownership is much more … Continue reading
Worker-ownership and the assembly line
When Fagor Electrodomésticos, the flagship cooperative in the Mondragon Corporation, went bankrupt in 2013, cooperative economists began studying the failure hoping to learn more about why it went bankrupt, and also perhaps, to learn how other cooperatives might avoid the … Continue reading
Degeneration and Regeneration 3: Kibbutzim
Probably one of the most important research articles on worker ownership was published by Tal Simons and Paul Ingram: “Organization and Ideology: Kibbutzim and Hired Labor, 1951-1965”. It is both an important practical article and a key theoretical article. In … Continue reading
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