Author Archives: lasairdhubh

Review: How to set up a Workers’ Co-op

Posted on May 31, 2020

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 →

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Sortition: a better way to do democracy?

Posted on December 30, 2019

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 →

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Democracy is hard work

Posted on October 17, 2019

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 | 4 Comments

Interview: Jeremy Neal, Tribe

Posted on August 19, 2019

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 →

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Hiring the wrong people

Posted on July 19, 2019

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

Posted on June 12, 2019

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 →

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Worker-ownership and the assembly line

Posted on March 11, 2019

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 →

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Degeneration and Regeneration 3: Kibbutzim

Posted on January 3, 2019

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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Interview: Kateri Gutierrez, Collective Avenue Coffee

Posted on October 18, 2018

Collective Avenue Coffee is a worker-owned coffee shop founded three years ago by Kateri Gutierrez and Jonathan Robles in Los Angeles, California. I recently spoke to Kateri by phone and discussed the history and vision of their young cooperative. Kateri … Continue reading →

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Cooperative nuts and bolts: minimum profit plow-back rules

Posted on August 15, 2018

This is a first in what I hope will be a series of practical articles about the nut and bolts of setting up a worker cooperative. In this first article, I’m going to take a look at an important but … Continue reading →

Posted in Nuts and Bolts | 8 Comments