Saw this come thru my email: Hypha is looking to fill three positions - a front end developer, PT full stack developer, and a senior DevOps role. More info about the roles available on their website.

https://hypha.coop/people/#openings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztl0L2nI22g&t=22s

In the description is what Marx actually wrote about worker cooperatives.

Today, July 6th, is International Cooperatives Day. Just want to lift that up and say great work talking about coops, running coops, dreaming up, and acting in cooperation!

Hello!

My fiancee and I are hoping to start a workers owned cooperative in 3 years. We would like to open a print shop. Print shops bring in good revenue but are extremely expensive to open. I found the Share Capital Cooperative, which only loans out to cooperatives. Is this a good option? Has anyone else opened an expensive coop and can speak to funding?

So, the majority of people who want to see more worker coops generally want that because they either want more power and benefits in the workplace, they want other people to have more power and benefits in their workplace, or both. Having a truly competitive worker cooperative is difficult because you are giving in more to the worker’s demands and generally have less money to reinvest into the company compared to other privately owned, exploitative businesses of the same nature. Most people would agree that a major issue with privately owned businesses also is that they create immense concentrations of wealth and power that one or few people get to decide how to use and usually do not use it for the betterment of the most amount of people. Is this the same predicament we see in governments and politics? That having too few people with too much power leads to tyranny? If our wealthy business leaders end up influencing our politics anyway then why should we think of the two as separate? We can structure worker cooperatives similarly to how we have structured successful democracies and from there be able to form a larger system of cooperatives that trade with and support one another. This would be a great way to make cooperatives truly competitive with privately owned businesses while still remaining democratic. This idea is infantile, but I want to explore business and governmental structure and see how they can function similarly because they serve a similar purpose in a market, to decide who gets power and how much power everyone gets. Obviously, not everyone’s opinion is really equal and there needs to be specialization in who knows what but giving workers the power to bargain for better benefits and wages and having people that represent them and their needs within the company would be monumental. This would allow the size of the business to grow while retaining efficiency and quality of decision making. I’d love to discuss this further with people but let me know what you think.

Hi,

I plan with 2 other small farmers friends, and others people, to start a worker coop and do a part of our farming together in a land for the coop. We are already working together with these friends informally on distribution, but not on production. And I have some prior experience running a self organised farmers market with more people.

For this new project, the idea is synergy, to benefit from each other work and federate the costs (equipment, organic certification, etc).

But I am very worried about collaboration, since we had many collaboration problems with each other so far and we are not even in a formal structure, and I could say the same for the farmers market I was part of.

I would like to know how best to organise collaboration between people to avoid tensions and conflicts and friends slamming the door to leave, some people trying to take over, or others avoiding to do the work, etc.

I know there are many content documents available in text as well as videos but a book ties together different ideas differently.

Anybody read or know good books on the subject will be helpful. Not a specific topic inside worker coop in particular, just what kind of content is out there?

Round Sky (my worker coop) & Loomio (another worker coop) are hosting the 3rd annual cooperative decision-making workshop on July 14th!

Come learn about the tools we teach and use for facilitation and decision-making tools for flow and participation.

Early bird prices till international coop day (July 3rd)! Here's the link: https://www.roundskysolutions.com/coopdecisionmakingworkshop/

Does anyone know of a worker’s cooperative that sells ANSI certified hard hats or other tools for tradesmen?