Stacy Kranitz

In a worker-owned cooperative, employees both help run a business and share in its ownership. While co-ops make up a small portion of US businesses, the pandemic and its aftermath have helped lead to an uptick in interest in this model. There are now 465 verified worker-owned co-ops in the country, according to Mo Manklang, policy director of the nonprofit US Federation of Worker Cooperatives—up 36 percent since 2013. People turn to worker cooperatives, Manklang says, “when their government is unable to meet the moment.”

Given today’s epic income inequality and corporate consolidation—with the work that is available increasingly unstable and episodic—it’s no wonder workers are drawn to jobs that give them back some power. These co-ops mark a return to what Emily Kawano, the co-director of the co-op development organization Wellspring Cooperative Corporation, calls making a “livelihood” rather than just earning a paycheck.

Co-ops expanded in the United States in another transitional period in the country’s history, the 1880s, many of them founded by Black people after the Civil War. “When we were freed after slavery, and went to work, we got the worst jobs and the worst pay and the least disposable income,” explains Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. “Cooperatives were the way to get around,” the exclusion from traditional businesses and banks.

In the 20th century, the New Deal era encouraged this cooperative work ethos, and co-ops had another renaissance in the 1960s and ’70s. As the 2020 pandemic took hold, the worker co-op paradigm appealed with its labor-centered approach to business. “Things are going to happen, like natural disasters,” says Camille Kerr, a community organizer who co-founded ChiFresh, a worker-cooperative food service business in Chicago. “The pandemic lifted up the need for us to focus on meeting each other’s needs. What better way to do so than collective ownership?”

To give a sense of what these imaginative businesses are up to, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Mother Jones sent six photographers to document co-ops in six regions of the country. The question underlying the assignment was both practical and utopian: What does it look like when ordinary people are their own bosses? —Alissa Quart

About The Artists

Boss Workers

Featuring: Various Artists

Curated by: Alissa Quart Mark Murrmann

Locations

• #Collaboration
• #Community
• #Employment
• #Portraiture
• #Social Change
• #Society

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