“It’s about changing the world. It’s about changing the way that we relate to work and to money.” - Kate Khatib, Seed Commons 

by Ariel Munczek Edelman, MPA '25 for Annotations Blog

This summer, I had the opportunity to work for the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI), a “think-and-do” tank that produces data, research, training, and policy to support the growth of worker cooperatives. In a cooperative, workers are simultaneously the owners of their own firms, the recipients of any profit, and the decision-makers determining their firm’s management and business practices. Worker cooperatives differ from consumer cooperatives like Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Co-op, where communities come together to receive lower prices through bulk purchasing, or agricultural cooperatives like Land O’Lakes, through which farmers pool their products into a single brand. Worker cooperatives are the contemporary expression of a historic economic model built on the simple idea that workers and their communities should be the primary beneficiaries of their own labor.

Together with its sister organization, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC), a membership organization for worker cooperatives and other democratically managed businesses, DAWI hosted the 2024 Worker Cooperatives Conference (WCC2024) this September in Chicago. This tenth biannual edition of the gathering brought together hundreds of worker-owners, cooperative funders and business developers, lawyers, researchers, government officials, and organizers. I had the pleasure of meeting worker-owners from across the country running cooperative cafes, bookstores, home care services, news outlets, real estate companies, tech and consulting firms, and even a worker-owned party bus rental service. It was an invigorating opportunity to share resources, assess the state of the worker cooperative sector, and strategize to grow cooperative economies at local, national, and international levels.

My first WCC2024 session was a discussion group on Racial and Economic Justice. Worker cooperatives have long been a liberatory economic tool for African American communities and others experiencing economic discrimination and labor exploitation. The model was even championed by famed Sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, who asked colleagues at the 1907 “Negro Businesses and Cooperatives” conference, “should we go the way of capitalism and try to become individually rich as capitalists, or should we go the way of cooperatives and economic cooperation where we and our whole community could be rich together?” DuBois and many other important African American historical figures, including Fannie Lou Hammer, Ella Jo Baker, and John Lewis, were supporters of the cooperative path. 

In recent years, cooperative supporters have also emphasized the utility of worker cooperatives for immigrant communities, who may have a harder time than other U.S. residents finding stable incomes and asset-building opportunities. A significant portion of conference attendees were multilingual and about a third spoke Spanish as their primary language. To ensure all attendees had equal access to the conference’s many learning opportunities, organizers enshrined the principles of language justice by including many Spanish-language or bilingual Spanish and English events and providing free live interpretation services for monolingual events.

On the second day of WCC2024, I attended panels on the relationship between worker cooperatives and the movement to build a solidarity economy. The solidarity economy is a concept that comes out of economic justice movements in the global south, particularly from Latin America, contending that democratically-controlled collective ownership structures for labor, land, housing, finance, utilities, and technology would better serve the global majority than capitalism’s defining division between owners and renters. The solidarity economy movement champions already widespread models like credit unions, community land trusts, social housing, and community solar, in addition to worker cooperatives. Solidarity economy activists tie their support for these economic models to larger struggles for social justice and equity. The land, labor, housing, and finance institutions in solidarity economies work together, proponents contend, to reduce capital outflows from historically dispossessed communities and build wealth that can last generations.

Organizations like PODER Emma in Asheville, North Carolina take a solidarity economy approach to anti-displacement efforts. PODER Emma’s community development strategy simultaneously helps local low-income communities to collectively buy their homes through housing cooperatives and to access stable, well-paying jobs through worker cooperatives. Some of their worker cooperatives even run services for residents of their housing cooperatives. The community developer also uses a cooperative approach to real-estate investment to support these activities by partnering with a coalition of solidarity economy-focused funders called Seed Commons. By tying together multiple cooperative ownership models, PODER Emma demonstrates how worker cooperatives can be a part of solidarity economy development efforts that create genuine opportunity for historically exploited communities. 

The public policy and non-profit efforts to build solidarity economies are often referred to as Community Wealth Building (CWB), an approach to economic development first articulated as such by the Democracy Collaborative. CWB encourages governments at every level to stabilize and equalize regional economies through education efforts, partnerships, ecosystem growth, and direct investment in cooperatively owned and democratically managed institutions. The growing government interest in worker cooperatives and CWB was on full display at WCC2024, with representatives from city governments and state Offices for Employee Ownership in attendance and headlining speaking spots for U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Assistant Secretary Lisa Gomez and the inaugural Chief of DOL’s Division of Employee Ownership Hilary Abell.

Conversations about the intersection of worker cooperatives and public policy continued into the third day at a panel featuring Zen Trenholm and Mo Manklang, the Policy Directors at DAWI and USFWC respectively, and Aaliyah Nedd, Director of Government Relations at the National Cooperative Business Association. In this interactive event, panelists and attendees wrote a list of policy priorities for growing the local ecosystems necessary to sustain worker cooperative development. They also compared recent histories of state legislation passed in Washington, Colorado, California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, as well as legislation proposed but not passed in other states, to consider the political coalitions necessary to move cooperative policies forward.

WWC2024’s closing plenary featured DAWI Executive Directors Vanessa Bransburg and Julian McKinley in conversation with University of Illinois-Chicago Professor Stacey Sutton and Kate Khatib, a co-founder of Seed Commons, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, and Red Emma’s, a cooperative café and bookstore. Reflecting on the enormous growth of the worker cooperative movement in the last twenty years, Khatib remarked, “Workers now feel that we can ask for what we need. I never thought that our coop movement would have the kinds of resources we have now. They’re a drop in the bucket in the American economy but they’re helping us make real change.” Asked about her vision for the next decade of the movement, Khatib remarked that she hopes that the cooperative economy in the United States reaches a value of $100 Billion USD or about 0.5% of GDP. But, she asked, “How do we scale in ways that are true to what we want to do?” This goal is not just about growth for its own sake, Khatib emphasized: “It’s about changing the world. It’s about changing the way that we relate to work and to money.”

Meet the Author: Ariel Munczek Edelman 

Ariel is a born-and-raised New Yorker and a second-year MPA student focusing on urban and social policy. Their interest in public policy developed out of their undergraduate work on the political economy of drag performance. After graduating with High Honors in Sociology from Wesleyan University, Ariel provided research and technical assistance for a number of federal agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Food and Nutrition Service. Ariel then managed New York City's financial counseling programs at the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. With the Democracy at Work Institute, they helped develop a technical assistance program for city governments that want to grow local worker cooperative ecosystems. They are particularly interested in policy work that expands affordable housing, solidarity economies, and alternatives to policing and prisons. Ariel is also the co-Editor-in-Chief on JPIA's 2024-2025 Editorial Staff.