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Author Archives: lasairdhubh
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
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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
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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
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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
Posted in Research
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Interview: Kateri Gutierrez, Collective Avenue Coffee
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
Posted in Interviews
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Cooperative nuts and bolts: minimum profit plow-back rules
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
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