Worker Cooperatives in America

Worker Cooperatives in America maps the past, present, and possible futures of democratic enterprise in the United States, arguing-against the grain of corporate inevitability-that firms owned and governed by workers can address stubborn problems of unemployment, productivity, and workplace alienation. Edited by Robert Jackall and Henry M. Levin, the volume moves from vivid historical arcs-co-ops formed by striking nineteenth-century artisans, New Deal-era self-help ventures-to contemporary case studies of plywood mills, reforestation crews, and urban collectives. Across these sites, contributors probe the hard mechanics of democratic firms: capitalizing without ceding control, balancing egalitarian norms with market exigencies, rotating jobs to build skill and solidarity, and designing governance that is both participatory and effective. Empirical chapters engage Mondragon as a global benchmark, report comparative productivity advantages, and show how cooperatives preserve jobs when conventional owners shutter plants. The result is a rigorous, data-grounded challenge to managerial common sense.

Equally attentive to limits, the book confronts the structural headwinds co-ops face in a legal and financial ecosystem optimized for hierarchical corporations. Essays on Employee Stock Ownership Plans, membership rights, and cooperative law demystify vehicles that can either enable or erode self-management. Analyses of culture, training, and decision rules illuminate why some democracies falter while others endure. Throughout, the editors press a central question: how can enterprises reconcile internal commitments to voice and equity with external demands of competitive markets? With clear-eyed assessments and practical design lessons-revolving credit funds, representative/assembly hybrids, counter-cyclical work-sharing-this collection offers scholars, organizers, and policy makers a usable blueprint. Worker cooperatives, the contributors show, are not a panacea; they are a durable, American repertoire for linking productivity to dignity, enterprise to citizenship, and work to democracy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.