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.
Harvard Business School Case: Mondragon
December 12, 2012 by
This is a reprint of Case No. 1-384-270. Harvard Business School 1984. It gives an overall view of the Mondragon cooperative movement of the Basque country in northern Spain as it was in the early 1980s.
Book review on plywood coops
December 9, 2012 by
This book on the plywood coops is written by an academic economist who is sympathetic to worker cooperatives, but just repeats the standard criticisms as if he were unaware of the solutions and counterarguments. Hence I wrote the review to once again point out the solutions and counterarguments.
What is a worker cooperative
December 7, 2012 by
This is the late-70s ICA pamphlet that introduced people to worker cooperatives.