Book review on plywood coops

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

This is the late-70s ICA pamphlet that introduced people to worker cooperatives.

The Legal Structure of Worker Cooperatives

This is the first paper to analyze all the different varieties of worker-owned firms as well as conventional firms in terms of how they parse the bundle of rights in a firm.

3 Hats Paper

This is the “famous” 3-hats paper that first laid out the ICA model for a worker cooperative and that clarified how different rights would be assigned to different functional roles (“hats”) in a worker cooperative.

The Democratic Corporation

This is a law-journal treatment, coauthored with Peter Pitegoff, of the theory and practice of worker ownership in the US in the early 1980s.

The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm

My second book was the 1989 The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm. The book was revised for the Chinese translation, and that is the version that can be downloaded here. This book develops the labor theory of property and democratic theory arguments for a democratic firm, and analyzes the connection between those principles and the legal structure of the firms.

Jobs & Fairness

This the late Robert Oakeshott’s magnum opus of case studies of and reflections on employee ownership. There is nothing else like it but it is very little known.