I remember Wisconsin carpenter Tom Crofton trying years ago to convince his local officers to create a worker cooperative to build affordable housing. Housing was an urgent need, he argued—and the union had the skills, the labor power, the organization, and the financial resources to do it. But the officers wouldn’t even consider the idea.
“Works for All,” the latest film by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, shows what can happen when workers and unions take worker coops seriously.
Their previous films, “Shift Change” and “WEconomics,” focused on worker cooperatives in Spain and Italy, showed how work and society can be different when the workers are in charge. In the new film, workers in a variety of industries in Cincinnati—childcare, solar installation, apparel manufacturing, home care, farming—share stories of how their worker coops were built, with union support, and the impacts on their lives.
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