Author Archives: lasairdhubh

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

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Review: The Inner Level

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, was a rigorous, evidenced-based exploration of the damage economic inequality does to society. Published in 2009, it came out at just the right moment, and along with the Occupy Movement and the Bernie … Continue reading

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Review: Shut Down the Business School

I have a new favorite book! Ever read a book that comes at just the right moment, that seems to perfectly sum up how you are thinking or feeling about something, and then points a way forward? I had that … Continue reading

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Innovation and Worker-Ownership

Yesterday I published a post about the new book, Jackson Rising, edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya, and while I was researching Nangwaya to see if I could find his homepage, I stumbled across a short article he wrote about “Labor … Continue reading

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Review: Jackson Rising

Jackson Rising is a recent collection of essays about the growing movement for economic democracy and Black self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. Edited by local activist, Kali Akuno, and the academic, Ajamu Nangwaya, Jackson Rising was published right at the end … Continue reading

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Georgian Cooperatives

Near the end of World War I, Georgia declared independence and set up one of the world’s first experiments in democratic socialism. The Georgian experiment wasn’t perfect. Mistakes were made. And it didn’t last long, just three years. In 1921, … Continue reading

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Interview: Harold de Jesus, P.O.L.I.D.O. Skateboards

P.O.L.I.D.O. (Physics and Other Laws I Don’t Obey; Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr) is a custom skateboard company in the Bronx, NY, that was recently organized into a small workers’ cooperative. I wanted to interview P.O.L.I.D.O., in part, as a window on the … Continue reading

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Worker Coops in the USA

The Democracy at Work Institute in Oakland California conducts an annual census of all the worker cooperatives in the United States, and they have just released their analysis of their data from 2015. This is a relatively new research project. … Continue reading

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Cooperatives in Times of Crisis

The 2008 global financial crisis was the greatest economic shock to the world economy since the great depression. The crisis not only tested the foundations of the capitalist economic system; it also presented a severe test for the cooperative economic … Continue reading

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Coops are huge

New figures just published show that almost 10% of jobs in the world are either in a cooperative or closely linked to a cooperative. This figure includes employees in consumer coops, worker-owners in worker coops, and self-employed workers in producer … Continue reading

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