When is a “Coop” not really a cooperative? The short answer is whenever the actual activity of the “cooperative” is not carried out by the members but by employees. The problem is, of course, not in cooperation per se but in the hiring, employing, renting, or leasing of people to carry out the supposedly “cooperative” activities of the “cooperative.”
Democratic Ownership: Scale Through Leveraged Conversions
November 28, 2024 by
One of the problems that cooperatives face is that they do not have a standard gradual conversion mechanism but are generally established as new business startups or by an all-at-once conversion of a conventional company to a cooperative. This paper describes such a conversion mechanism.
Critical Analysis of Different Forms of Employee Ownership
November 28, 2024 by
From the 1970’s, there has been almost a half-century of development of employee-owned firms. There has been a wide variety of legal/capital structures that have been tried but too little analysis of which legal forms work or don’t work over the longer term, e.g., the transition from one generation to the next generation of employee-owners. This paper provides a critical analysis of the major forms. The emphasis is the lack of learning between the different forms. The same problems keep recurring even though solutions are known.
Talk Slides about European ESOP
April 4, 2024 by
These are slides from a talk about the European ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) developed by the Institute for Economic Democracy in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Worker Cooperatives and other so-called “Cooperatives”
March 30, 2024 by
Most cooperative organizations today do not exemplify any cooperative activity; non-worker cooperatives do not represent any cooperative activity of the members since the only joint activity of the organization is carried out by employees. The idea that cooperatives are democratically governed does not apply to non-worker cooperatives (based on the employment relation) since the members are not choosing the managers or governors of their own activity but of the activity of the people working in the cooperative.
Worker Cooperative as an Employee Ownership Fund
September 19, 2018 by
This paper shows how a worker cooperative can serve as an ESOP-like employee-ownership vehicle to make a partial or total buyout of a conventional company.
Review of Erik O. Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias
January 9, 2017 by
I rarely review books and almost never books by Marxists. However, in order to comment on a presentation at a conference, I decided to write up my extensive comments in the form of a book review of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias.
Review of Dahl’s Preface to Economic Democracy
January 9, 2017 by
This is my review in Commonweal of Robert A. Dahl’s 1985 book Preface to Economic Democracy shortly after it was published.
Labor theory of property and Marginal productivity theory
April 17, 2016 by
This is a reprint from the journal Economic Thought of a paper on the labor theory of property and the neoclassial theory of marginal productivity.
Three Themes about the Mondragon cooperatives
January 1, 2014 by
This is a preprint of a paper developing three themes, capital structure, active learning, and spinoffs, with special attention to the Mondragon cooperatives.