Win-Win Negotions in Union Cooperatives

Ariana Levinson discusses her recent article on labor agreements in unionized cooperatives. 

Read the article here.

RSVP for our discussion of Union Co-ops on Oct. 26th, 2026

Transcript

Josh Davis: So, welcome back for another GEO interview. I'm here today with Arianna Levinson, who is, as far as I know, a cooperative attorney - that's how everybody talks about you, when we're talking about Arianna - and Arianna wrote recently a couple of academic articles, one of them that we've posted on our website, on union worker cooperatives. And so welcome Ariana, and thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

Ariana Levinson: Thank you so much, Josh, for having me, and for the opportunity to discuss these articles. I will say while I am a licensed attorney in Indiana and California, I live in Kentucky and I do not actually practice law. So I teach law, I'm a law professor, but I do have the pleasure of getting to interact with a lot of the cooperative attorneys from across our country.

Josh Davis: Excellent. Nothing we say here today is to be considered legal advice.

Ariana Levinson: Yes.

Josh Davis: So, why don't you start off, just maybe tell us about the two articles you wrote and why you were interested in those particular topics.

Ariana Levinson: Yeah, definitely. So the topic about union collective bargaining and that article, which I believe is the one you posted, has something that I've been interested in and studying for a long time. You know, we know some of the advantages of worker-owned cooperatives. Which give people an ownership stake, so that they're able to not be dependent on someone else for their livelihood, but then they're able to depend on themselves and their coworkers for their livelihood and then gives them also decision-making power and voice.

And then similarly, the labor movement is, like the cooperative movement, designed to really equalize power between workers and those who aren't workers, who own their companies; so the other types of owners of companies that people work for. And I've always been interested in having the protections and the benefits of both those movements, and the intersections of both in one space. And collective bargaining, of course, is something that lawyers, labor law professors study and so it felt like just reading the cases wasn't enough. And to be able to go out and talk to the people who had been involved in those negotiations was really important to get some type of deeper understanding about them.

I don't know how much you want me to talk about the other paper as well. That's something that I'm less of an expert in. So I was really beginning to explore that research and it's a literature review that's really about at the macro level how can worker-owned cooperatives contribute to helping people who have been marginalized from the economy, and to being integrated into the economy. And then how do the workplace governance structures that cooperatives adopt impact whether people feel integrated at work? So there's really not very much written on that second topic is what I discovered.

Josh Davis: Yeah, so to focus, I guess, a little more on the union worker co-ops and the labor negotiations in them. Yeah, a lot of people, when they first hear about worker cooperatives, think, "oh, this is great. This is like a unionized workplace, but even more so." And then when they hear about the fact that there are some worker co-op's who are also part of a union, the obvious question is just... "Why, what is the point of that? Are you just negotiating with yourself?" And I know some of the reasons, but just to start out with the very basics, why would people in a worker co-op think, "okay, we should become part of a union." What is the benefit for them?

Ariana Levinson: Yeah, so I think that not every cooperative is the same, so there can be different benefits. So in some worker-owned cooperatives, you really do have a lot of power as an owner, and you are plugged into the larger cooperative ecosystem and the movement. And in that case, partnering with the labor movement could bring benefits from solidarity, whether that be being part of a health plan, or we saw during the pandemic, being able to tap into different supply chains that different union companies are a part of. So it could be benefits that are shared like that, or it could be political power that you can bring to bear if you're interacting with agencies that are delivering part of your funding. So those benefits hold even for owners that really do have power in their cooperatives.

And then, unfortunately, we know that cooperatives in real life aren't some utopia. So we usually have some people who are what we would more traditionally think of as employees or even situations where there are people who would technically legally be owners. You can think of some of the taxi cab cooperatives from earlier in history, and they don't really have the power that they would like, and they're not really part of the decision making, and so they do decide to unionize for the reasons that many other people decide to unionize: to increase their bargaining power in the workplace.

So there can be different benefits depending on the industry, the structure of the co-op and, even the individual workers within the cooperative, is the way that I think about it. But on the largest scale, I think that. The power of the labor movement joined with the power of the cooperative movement can just make more impactful change in the world. And that's ultimately what both movements, and all of us who are in them, are striving for.

Josh Davis: Yeah, I really appreciate that aspect, because unions are generally in an antagonistic relationship with the employer, with their organizing, but it doesn't have to be that way. The goal of both the co-op and the union is to improve work life for people - different ways of coming at that - and as you point out. A lot of worker co-ops - probably most worker coops that I know of - not everybody is an owner. Which again, is something that's surprising to some people, but in reality, it can be less than 50% sometimes, in some co-ops.

Ariana Levinson: Yeah, it's really interesting that state laws differ in terms of that. Some states, like Delaware require that a majority of those in the workplace be owners, but many states do not. It's just that a majority the owners must be workers. And even in collectives, there's usually a probationary period. So even there, you usually have some people who are not owners at any given moment.

Josh Davis: Did you come across any situations where there was real antagonism that had developed between the union and the co-op, in unionized worker co-ops? Do similar tensions that happen in a traditional workplace between unions and the employers ever happen in worker co-ops, did you find, or not?

Ariana Levinson: So in my research - in my interviews - these were all established union cooperatives, so they all had a good relationship. And that was a thesis of my paper that something about the structure of the cooperative, namely that information is available to all of the owners. And then that means it's also usually available just to everyone because it's available in the workplace. The fact that there's decision making in cooperatives above the level of just pay and benefits - to managerial decisions, what to produce, where to locate - and the fact that the cooperative principles are usually implemented across the company. So those things make it much more likely that it'll be what we call win-win, or interest-based, or integrative bargaining that's occurring in a union co-op.

But certainly, you could have situations, like in some of the earlier taxi cab law cases, where it did appear that those drivers had unionized because they were not satisfied with their working conditions. My hypothesis - which obviously this is not true empirical research, this is more theoretical research - but my hypothesis is it in that situation over time - because the information would then be shared more, and all of these other reasons - that having the union and the cooperative over time, they should become less adversarial and more towards a win-win type of negotiation. But that would be great to test. I haven't had that situation. Everything I saw was much, much less adversarial. Other than the one situation with the multi-employer bargaining and even that wasn't as adversarial as you commonly think of a lot of collective bargaining.

Ariana Levinson: So yeah that's one thing I think is really interesting is just to see the interest-based bargaining versus the distributive bargaining and to think about how a cooperative is impacting that bargaining structure.

Josh Davis: You just used two words there - could I get a definition of the different types of bargaining you said?

Ariana Levinson: Oh, so what we would typically see in just like a standard company that's bargaining with the union, where they're really focused on wages, working conditions, schedule, job security - not so much on these managerial decisions - we term it in the dispute resolution literature as "distributive bargaining." So it's a type of bargaining where you're dividing the resources up between the two parties. And then the type of bargaining that I'm positing that the cooperative encourages is known as "interest-based" or "integrative" or "win-win bargaining." It was popularized by the book, Getting to Yes, that a lot of the listeners are probably familiar with.

Of course, in real life, you have both types of bargaining intertwined, but some bargaining looks more integrative and some bargaining, looks more distributive. And so what I found from the interviews and from looking at the collective bargaining agreements of these eight union cooperatives was that they had a lot more terms in the collective bargaining agreement that looked like they resulted from integrative bargaining. They were more of a win-win. Going back to your question about the employer and the union cooperating to come to creative solutions that help the workers and the company thrive, as opposed to our usual vision of the union just- you know, sometimes it's famously quoted as wanting more, more, and more, right? So that's what was the impetus for it.

And then some of my colleagues wanted me to look at whether in the collective bargaining agreements I saw any differences in what was bargained due to that. So I did kind of just look at some of the hot topics, or the big picture or the things that are really important at this moment in history. And I tried to examine, for example, were there more likely to be terms in these collective bargaining agreements that addressed environmental concerns, or global warming, than we might see in other collective bargaining agreements. And I didn't really find that that was the case. I did find from the interviews that many of the cooperatives are built on the notion of sustainability and many of them are very concerned about that in their practice, but I didn't see it becoming reflected generally in the terms of the collective bargaining agreement. So that was something interesting.

Another thing I looked at was in the U.S. what we think of as anti-discrimination. Most collective bargaining agreements do include a clause that prohibits discrimination against people for engaging in union activity, but also on the basis of gender, race, religion; some of the reasons that we traditionally prohibited it because of marginalization or inequality. And it again seems like most of the anti-discrimination clauses in the union co-op collective bargaining agreements were similar to the ones in traditional collective bargaining agreements, but there were two notable differences. The bookkeeper's bargaining agreement had some really interesting provisions in it where they prohibited asking about pay history because there's been a lot of studies that show that pay history leads to discrimination based on gender, because if women are traditionally paid a little less than men for the same work, then that just keeps on happening if you have to disclose your salary history. And they also have proactive provisions about educating customers and clients to be culturally aware.

And then in one of the other cooperatives, the name's not at the tip of my tongue, but they had their collective bargaining agreement and their bylaws integrated into one document, which I think is such an interesting and intelligent idea that I've heard cooperators talking about, because then it really aligns your labor relations and your ownership structure. And so then they would have provisions that look traditional, and provisions that for the union context don't, but for the cooperative context do. So like a two-to-one limit on the pay differential between the lowest employee and the highest employee, right? Things like that could really combat inequality in an interesting creative way. So those are two notable things that I thought others could use as models that were resulting from those types of collective bargaining. You know, co-op collective bargaining.

Josh Davis: Yeah, I like the idea of, like you say, integrating the collective bargaining agreement into the bylaws. And then it's just what you agree on is just how we do the operation. And thinking about it, when you said this, I guess the normal collective bargaining agreement is kind of like a set of bylaws for how the corporation and the union members are going to interact. It's kind of a similar idea. So, yeah, I like that. That's an interesting idea.

Ariana Levinson: Yeah, it's not something that I would have thought of as a labor scholar, but having that opportunity to talk with the people involved in the cooperatives and in the union cooperatives, and to look at their documents surfaced that. And I think, like you say, that's a really interesting example for us.

Josh Davis: Does it seem like there is any impetus in the movement to - you said some of your colleagues, and I know people in GEO would also be interested in this - do we get any more of the environmental stuff, or any kind of social things in this CBAs with union co-ops? Did you find any move towards that, or any discussion - even if it wasn't formally in there - are the people in the union co-ops talking about that kind of thing, or is that something that strictly those of us on the outside studying it are hoping for?

Ariana Levinson: No, I definitely found some of the folks inside talking about those things, even though they might not have come up in the negotiations, or if they came up in negotiations, they might not have made it as a term into the contract. But I think generally there's more and more awareness, in particular about technology. And this is even before the more advances in AI that we've seen recently that I was talking about these folks, and there already were people in the cooperatives thinking about how, within the cooperative, you have ownership of the technology. So then you have ownership of AI but even more broadly as a movement - how that will look, how that can happen - because it's important to have ownership. The more that the technology replaces human labor, then ownership of the technology becomes that much more important. And I did find people talking about that, even if not directly having it reflected in the terms of the collective bargaining agreement.

And the same with the environmental issues. A lot of the companies were really trying to be environmentally sustainable in their business practices, it just hadn't made it into, say, the health and safety provisions, or the other provisions of the collective bargaining agreement yet. So I do think there's growing interest. And clearly, like you say, my academic colleagues were very interested in that, which was the impetus for me to explore that.

And one thing I will say that I'm personally quite interested in, and that I explored is there's a literature a lot of your listeners probably are aware of, about how participation in unions and in economic democracy can have what I would term a spillover effect into civic society, and being more active in civic society, and being more active in politics. And then one inference that we might draw from that is that when we see the rise of more authoritarian movements, regimes, political parties, that if people have been better educated to critical thinking, and have more skills with economic democracy, they might be better equipped to address that type of thing in a democratic way as well. So again, that's theoretical. I can't say that I have proof that this was true, but I definitely would have a hypothesis that just being involved in a union can have a spillover effect, because you're educated, you have solidarity with your colleagues, you're more active in economic democracy. That cooperatives could have a similar effect to the extent that owners are sharing information, becoming financially literate; and then when you combine those two, and you specifically look at how much more involved these owners and employees tend to be in the negotiation process than in a traditional company, where there's more fear on the part of the workers about entering the negotiation process and being active, and debating, and getting financial literacy. So I would say you could infer from that, that that too would increase that spillover effect, and that's something that I've been personally interested in exploring.

Josh Davis: Yeah, I think there is, definitely. Personally, I think there's spillover effect. I think once people get involved in something that is engaging - and that I got it first in Occupy when I just showed up and all of it was just some people hanging out in front of the courthouse lawn in Missoula initially, and then pretty quickly we had organized porta-potties and a big tent, and just from talking and coordinating and you kind of get like, "ooh, this is exciting and this is fun and we can do" and so, yeah, I got much more involved in other parts of the community, although I was not uninvolved before. I think there are some spillovers. I wonder how effective it can be in our political sphere when we only seem to have two options. Personally, I would hope that the experience of having true democracy that actually affects your life directly would encourage people to be more involved in not just going out and voting once every couple of years or whatever, but actually getting involved and building other kinds of democratic systems in their local communities. I think that's where a lot of action is that we need, a lot of local stuff.

Ariana Levinson: Yes, I definitely agree. And I think that that's what the literature suggests is that civic society, even more broadly, than the political system, benefits, along the lines of something like the book Bowling Alone, or Cynthia Estlund, an academic law professor who's written a lot about how democracy in the workplace could impact involvement in your community, or in civic society. And in the paper I draw too, again, on the cooperative principles which emphasize community, and we do see that reflected. That is something we do see unlike the environmental global warming, or something like that, we do see emphasis on community, emphasis on solidarity in the terms of the actual collective bargaining agreements.

Josh Davis: Where do you think the space for, if you had to say - I'm not trying to ask you to stand in judgment over other people's agreements - but where do you see space for growth or improvement in these kind of agreements? Or do you that they're good as they are, or are there additional things that you would like to see in there?

Ariana Levinson: Well, I think always these agreements we've got to say are very good as they are, because in the United States, most people are employed at will, so that means they don't have job security. So just the fact that in any context, if you have a union that's able to bargain a collective bargaining agreement, what that means for the workers is they now have job security, meaning that you shouldn't be terminated for no reason. You shouldn't be terminated because the boss doesn't like your laugh. And you might think that's outlandish, but there's an actual case where that happens. And so you should be disciplined for what you do wrong, held accountable, need to improve, and if you do something really egregious, then you would be termination; but not just for no reasons at all. And that really is one of the important things that a collective bargaining will give anyone in the US that they might not otherwise have.

But in terms of these particular collective bargaining agreements for the union co-ops, there is another movement you might be familiar with: bargaining for the common good. And the bargaining for the common good, what they do is they explicitly bring community members in to see what their concerns are. And I think there's room for growth in the union co-op sector, they could really probably be a leader in that because they are so active in their communities, and they could have people who say, you know, this is a concern for me. Is there any way that could also be integrated? And now that's a little pie in the sky, to the extent that a collective bargaining agreement is supposed to be about the workplace relations, but to the extent that cooperatives are about having impact in the community as well as workplace relations. I think they could really be leaders in that avenue.

Josh Davis: Yeah, that's great. That's exactly kind of what I was looking for, something like that. And I mean, I would say, as somebody who has worked a lot of manual labor jobs in my life and a lot low wage jobs - because that's what you do when you get a degree in economics, by the way, just for anybody considering one of those - if you want to paint houses, get a Degree in Economics. Your labor relation to your working life affects the rest of the community. If the big employer in your town treats their people bad, that's gonna have effects outside with people who do not work at that business, right? Family traumas and stuff like that is gonna happen as a direct result. So I think we should understand everything is connected to everything else, especially for large employers, but every employer is having effects beyond just the business.

And so I think that's setting a good example, if union co-ops could say, "hey, we understand that we're an embedded part of this community that we are in, and we want to make sure that we not just doing right by those of us who are here making money off of this enterprise, but also those people otherwise affected," and bringing in people and then trying to make that the - I don't know how effective trying to guilt trip corporations into you know good business behavior is - but I mean that would be nice to make the gold standard is that you're you're thinking beyond just the firm walls, there.

Ariana Levinson: And I really do see that reflected more in these union co-op agreements than in traditional collective bargaining agreements. Like I said, they do mention the importance of community. And I also think whether I was interviewing people technically who are management/owner/employer side, or who are technically the union rep from the outside union, they were all really in agreement about recognizing that they have impact well beyond just their workplace, whether it be with their clients, with the community, with the environment. So I do think there's a lot of promise there.

Josh Davis: Yeah, yeah.

Ariana Levinson: Earlier, you had asked or mentioned something when we very first started talking about like, why would you need a union? And we talked about that but also sometimes, and this isn't really addressed in these papers, but sometimes people are like, "well, isn't it just a conflict of interest? Isn't it just that they're bargaining well together?" Because they're co-opted, or not in the sense of co-operatives, but like in the sense of they're just a bought out union, they're just pro-employer union. Or the reverse, that the employer is just really run by the union. And so I do really feel that that is not the case, that what I saw in these selective bargaining settings was the people who were representing the employer were really bringing what they felt was needed to keep the longevity of the company going, still treating the workers fairly. And the people representing the union were really pushing for the workers and them being able to get the maximum of benefits that could be afforded. But it was just that.

It was a more open cooperative process, so that they would come more easily to the realization, for instance, that, "oh, the company, they open the books, we see all the financial information, they really can't afford that health plan. So what can we do instead? Can we get a stipend to go out to the market?" Or on the employer's side, like, "oh, you really think that we need this for the longevity of the company, and because we're competing against these other businesses, but we see we have to have a little more with inflation. So how can we go to these other businesses together and lobby to get the government to put in some supplement here?" So I found that it really was more interest-based, and more win-win in that way, and not that it as just one side or the other caving. And so I know you may not like the political system for valid reasons, but the same thing, we're the same people in the political electorate, who elect the president and our congresspeople, but they serve different functions. And so I think the fact that the owners are the same people who elected this management, and who decided to join this union and have this representative doesn't mean that they're all one in the same. Those people know what interests they're representing, and it's a different, more amicable, cooperative, pie-increasing, win-win type of negotiation.

Josh Davis: Did you find any major differences in how the different unions and the different co-ops approach the CBAs? Because you said you looked at eight different co-ops, and there were several different unions represented there. I think UE and maybe the Steel Workers and somebody else, right?

Ariana Levinson: Yeah, for sure.

Josh Davis: Did they operate about the same, or was there big differences between UE, say, and the Steel Workers?

Ariana Levinson: Well, I think it's both/and, because obviously all unions have their workers' interests at heart, and most of them are plugged in some way into the larger labor movement and wanting to advocate, politically and non-politically, just for improvements for workers. But, yes, definitely I believe - and I hope I'm not mis-speaking - that UE was one of the unions in one of the situations where the bylaws were the collective bargaining agreement. So that is less of a, "we explicitly negotiate on a set timeline" kind of approach, and more of a- I think both ultimately are continuous bargaining, that's part of why it works is it carries over into the actual operations of the co-op as well, that people are negotiating those different interests and being able to resolve them. Because there has to be conflict, it's just they have a way to resolve it.

So I think that. Yes, I think that UE was one of those, and so that to me is more of an image of "we get it set up and then it's continuous bargaining and they just call upon us, the union, when they really hit a hard spot in the road," right? And then, they need someone to resolve a grievance at the termination level, or something that you're hoping wouldn't happen. And then some of the other unions, it's more traditional in the approach of every four years, or every three years we are going to sit down and negotiate this collective bargaining agreement. But I still feel like there is some continuous bargaining going on there as well. So I feel like, yes, it was on a spectrum of what I saw with the different approaches of which union the workers had decided to affiliate with. And I think there's different fits for different industries. And it seemed like they all had a good fit for the industry they were in. So that was it.

Josh Davis: Yeah, did you find out anything about how the worker cooperatives decided on one union or another to join? Because it doesn't always line up, right? It's not super obvious that this co-op would be a member of the Steel Workers or something like that. Did you talk to anybody about that decision-making process?

Ariana Levinson: So these articles, they're focused on that actual negotiation process and the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, which as a lawyer meant I could read the collective bargaining agreements and verify what was there. So that is not something I directly talked about them with, but I do think it's a great topic and maybe someone has written or will write about it. Because yes, sometimes maybe workers go to what they think would be their first choice of union because it sounds like it fits their industry, but then it turns out that union's not really interested in that small of a shop. So you might end up going to another union that has more cooperatives, and they're more familiar with how to represent cooperatives already. So that can definitely play a bigger role than you might first think, and just like with any company, whether it's a cooperative or not, sometimes it's regional: workers are just in a location where some particular unions are stronger than others, and so even though they're not quite with their industry that's going to tap them more into the labor movement in their region. So I think you could map out the different types of considerations that go into that, and that could be a really helpful tool for cooperatives and cooperators who are thinking of approaching a union.

Josh Davis: Yeah, because as somebody who kind of follows the union stuff a little bit from afar, I know that there are differences, cultural differences between unions and, you know, the SEIU, and the Teamsters, and UE can all be very different. And so it's always interesting to me how a business, a particular group of workers, ended up at that particular union and not some other one.

Ariana Levinson: And a lot of it goes back to how just social movements happen, which is a lot of who you're connected with, and who the people are that maybe you're not directly connected to, but there's an intermediary who's connected to the cooperative and connected to a particular union local, right? And when you think of how people come together into movements, there's a really human aspect to it that I think plays into that as well.

Josh Davis: Yeah, yeah. Okay Well, I kind of reached the end of the questions I can think about. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you'd like to put out there before we wrap it up here?

Ariana Levinson: Yeah, well I want to thank you for having me and I do want to thank all the people that I interviewed, and all the people that gave me copies of their collective bargaining agreements. There's no way I could have written these papers without the folks who are in the union co-op movement, and I have really the greatest admiration for them. I think the papers demonstrate the big impact they're having, even though they might be considered by some small in number. We do know that in other countries there are more union cooperatives, such as in Italy, and that this is hopefully - like you and I, Josh, were talking about - something that grows, and is a role model for more and more workers, and more and people.

Josh Davis: Right. All right. Well for anybody who is interested in this particular topic of Union Worker Cooperatives, GEO has started again publishing a print journal and our last issue was on union worker cooperatives, and we're having an online event on October 26th at 8 p.m Eastern time, and we are just getting together online with people who are interested to talk about the issue, and some of the articles in it, and just union worker co-ops in general. So, Arianna, I hope you can join, and anybody who's watching, a link will be in the description of the video. And, yeah, thank you so much for taking the time, Ariana. It's been very informative. We'll talk again sometime.

Ariana Levinson: Fantastic. I hope I'll see you on the 26th.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.