New York is now the first city in the United States with a line item in its budget specifically for the development and cultivation of worker cooperatives.
Designed to be a tool of economic democracy, the worker co-op model allows employee-members of a business to elect its board of directors on the basis of one employee, one vote. In most instances, the businesses opt to distribute profits equitably among the employee-members. The worker cooperative model is relatively rare in the U.S. The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives estimates there are around 350 in the nation, with many concentrated in the Bay Area, the New York metropolitan region and New England. In some Latin American and European nations, worker cooperatives are more common, the most famous example being the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain’s Basque region.
Read the full article at Next City
Go to the GEO front page
Add new comment