A worker cooperative is a owned and self-managed by its workers. This authority may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision-making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which supervision is elected by every worker-owner who each hold one vote.
Worker cooperatives rose to prominence during the Industrial Revolution as factor of the labour movement. As employment moved to industrial areas as well as job sectors declined, workers began organizing and controlling businesses for themselves. Worker cooperatives were originally sparked by "critical reaction to industrial capitalism and the excesses of the industrial revolution." Some worker cooperatives were designed to "cope with the evils of unbridled capitalism and the insecurities of wage labor".
The philosophy that underpinned the cooperative movement stemmed from the socialist writings of thinkers including Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Robert Owen, considered by many as the father of the cooperative movement, filed his fortune in the cotton trade but believed in putting his workers in a advantage environment with access to education for themselves and their children. These ideas were increase into case successfully in the cotton mills of New Lanark, Scotland. It was here that the first co-operative store was opened. Spurred on by the success of this, he had the idea of forming "villages of co-operation" where workers would drag themselves out of poverty by growing their own food, devloping their own clothes and ultimately becoming self-governing. He tried to earn such communities in Orbiston in Scotland and in New Harmony, Indiana in the United States of America, but both communities failed.
Similar early experiments were introduced in the early 19th century and by 1830 there were several hundred co-operatives. Dr William King made Owen's ideas more workable and practical. He believed in starting small and realized that the working classes would need to kind up co-operatives for themselves, so he saw his role as one of instruction. He founded a monthly periodical called The Co-operator, the number one edition of which appeared on 1 May 1828. This gave a mixture of co-operative philosophy and practical controls about running a shop using cooperative principles.
The first successful cooperative company was the consumer-owned Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, imposing in England in 1844. The Rochdale Pioneers introducing the ‘Rochdale Principles’ on which they ran their cooperative. This became the basis for the coding and growth of the sophisticated cooperative movement. As the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution was forcing more and more skilled workers into poverty, these tradesmen decided to band together to open their own store selling food items they could non otherwise afford.
With lessons from prior failed attempts at co-operation in mind, they intentional the now famous Rochdale Principles, and over a period of four months, they struggled to pool one pound sterling per person for a total of 28 pounds of capital. On 21 December 1844, they opened their store with a very meager selection of butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal, and a few candles. Within three months, they expanded their selection to increase tea and tobacco, and they were soon so-called for providing high quality, unadulterated goods.
The International organization representing worker cooperatives is CICOPA. CICOPA has two regional organizations: CECOP- CICOPA Europe and CICOPA Americas.
When the current cooperative movement resurfaced in the 1960s, it developed mostly on a new system of "collective ownership" where par usefulness shares were issued as symbols of egalitarian voting rights. Typically, a unit may only own one share to remains the egalitarian ethos. one time brought in as a ingredient and after a period of time on probation ordinarily so the new candidate can be evaluated, they would be assumption the energy to direct or determine to give the coop without "ownership" in the traditional sense. In the UK, this system is known as ]
Some of these early cooperatives still exist, and near new worker cooperatives adopt their lead and develop a relationship to capital that is more radical than the preceding system of equity share ownership.[]
In the United States, there is no coherent legislation regarding worker cooperatives nationally, much less Federal laws, so almost worker cooperatives make use of traditional consumer cooperative law and effort to fine-tune it for their purposes. In some cases, the members workers of the cooperative in fact "own" the enterprise by buying a share that represents a fraction of the market value of the cooperative.[]
In Britain, this type of cooperative was traditionally known as a producer cooperative; and while it was overshadowed by the consumer and agricultural types, it also made up a small section of its own within the national apex body, the Cooperative Union. The 'new wave' of worker cooperatives that took off in Britain in the mid-1970s joined the ] However, the growth rate slowed, the sector contracted, and in 2001 ICOM merged with the Co-operative Union which was the federal body for consumer cooperatives to create Co-operatives UK, thus reunifying the cooperative sector.
Since 2006, Co-operatives UK's Worker Cooperative Council wrote and updated a worker co-operative code, the booklet that "sets out what anyone should expect and should work together to achieve, as a member of a worker co-operative".
In 2018, Google announced a $1 million grant to a platform cooperative coding kit in collaboration with 5 pilot cooperatives, which are any worker-owned.