Cooperatives at Work

Worker cooperatives have held great promise since they first appeared on the economic scene almost two centuries ago. Interestingly, they have roots with both organized labor and social reformers at the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. Worker co-ops also stem from efforts by groups of people to control their own economic and social destinies in line with humanitarian, democratic, egalitarian, and sometimes revolutionary values. This vision has been made concrete in countless cases of people taking their work and social futures into their own hands, working against many obstacles and fashioning possibilities that many politicians and business leaders said were unrealistic or even impossible.