Up until now, unions and worker cooperatives would not seem to go well together.
Many people in worker cooperatives naively think they don’t need a union because they have work-place democracy. At the same time, unions are suspicious of coops because coops draw much of their support from the middle and upper-middle classes.
But things are changing. In the Northeast, lobster workers first joined with machinists to create an affiliate local union. Then they created a marketing coop where they could sell their catches collectively. This may be a wave of the future given the presence of an organization with the title “A Union Toolkit for Cooperative Solutions”.
Read in Labor Notes
