Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving.
Usually, cooperatives are created by people as a reaction to specific, most often local, conditions. Through their joint action individuals show collective or social agency and the conviction that they must work together to pursue their shared interests. In this way, each new cooperative is an experiment and an attempt to change and innovate.
This week, workers and community supporters launched the Pittsburgh Progress, “a cooperative news organization, owned and democratically run by its workers and members… dedicated to looking out for, and telling the stories of, the working-class people who form the heart and soul of our diverse communities.”
Workers’ self-management is on the rise, as a response to recurring neoliberal crises: this is the central argument in a new book co-authored by Professor Dario Azzellini, senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology, University of Duisburg-Essen...
Unions and co-ops go together. This session outlines the practice of labor neutrality — when an employer commits to taking no position for or against their workers organizing and to voluntary recognize a labor union without requiring an election facilitated by a third party (commonly through a "card check" process) — and how workers in cooperatives can benefit from their employer proactively supporting their rights.
The Dorchester Food Co-op is a community & worker-owned grocery store that aims to make healthy food accessible and advance economic opportunity and neighborhood engagement. General manager John Santos joins CommonWealth's Jennifer Smith to discuss the co-op's origins and business model.
If you want to buy from worker-owned companies, you have to search individual websites, if you even know where to look...I built workerowned.info to help change that: a free, searchable marketplace that indexes products from worker-owned businesses and puts them in one place.
Formal cooperatives must recognize and protect informal membership institutions like ROSCAs as part of the core of the social economy, or risk compromising the entire solidarity economy movement.
Clerkenwell and the East End were once full of print shops. Most are long gone. Calverts is still standing — and it's a worker co-operative, founded in 1977, with no managers and complete pay parity: everyone earns the same, no matter the job.
"Hi, we are Green Halcones, a social cooperative owned by formerly incarcerated individuals based in Los Angeles, California. We are working to make neighborhoods beautiful, grow healthy food, and protect the environment for future generations. Please follow us at Collective REMAKE (https://www.instagram.com/collectiveremake.la/), a cooperative development organization supporting our operation."
"On March 2^(nd), 2026, cooperative educator and “recovering farmer” Emi Do and I visited Heather Pritchard at her home on Fraser Common Cooperative Farm, near Aldergrove, British Columbia. After a brief tour of the farm, twenty acres on the foothills above the Fraser River Valley, and a conversation with fellow farm co-op member David Catzell, we sat down for lunch at Heather’s kitchen table and spoke for over an hour. The following is a lightly edited version of her reflections.
"Over the course of the conversation, Heather mentioned many cooperative organizations and key figures in the cooperative movement in British Columbia."
"In 1973, Teruko Mizushima started the Volunteer Labor Bank. Volunteer Labour Bank had a very simple system: 1 hour of labour = 1 point. Points can be exchanged for 1 hour of labour provided by other members. Because new members don’t have points to exchange, there was an option to pay with cash only in the beginning. Then, the person would get the cash back by earning enough points, from which point the exchange would solely be based on points..."
https://geo.coop/articles/how-uruguays-co-op-federation-tackles-countrys-housing-shortage
Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM), founded in May 1970, embodies the spirit of community and support. Serving 35,000 families through 760 cooperatives in a nation of approximately 3.5 million inhabitants, they are a beacon of collaboration. With a cooperative school for children and numerous consumer, distribution, and worker cooperatives linked to their vision, they are shaping a brighter future. Enrique Cal, the president, moved to the cooperative with his parents at age 13 and thrived in its school, exemplifying the transformative power of cooperation.
The unique communities described in great detail in the recently published Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy, authored by two South African academics, are utopian...in vision, but thoroughly practical in their everyday functioning.
Riverwest Co-op and Outpost serve as examples of how food co-ops are faring today.
The purpose of this article is to share the concept of a Solidarity Economic Circuit as presented in Euclides Andre Mance’s 2022 curriculum Solidarity Economic Circuits and Economic Liberation – moving from capitalist economy to liberation economy (Solidarius, Curitiba 2022) and consider how it might be applied in practice in a North American context.