Cooperatives in the Twenty-First Century

A blueprint for an economy that delivers true shared prosperity and inclusive growth. How can we address economic inequality? Most proposed solutions ask the rich to pay higher taxes to benefit the poor. But the rich have the political power to control whether redistribution happens and are unlikely to tolerate such arrangements. Therefore, Francesco Caselli argues, what’s needed is a system that generates wealth equitably at the source: an economy that retains free markets but replaces traditional corporations with worker-managed cooperatives, where every employee has an equal say in company governance. Cooperatives in the Twenty-First Century shows that properly designed worker coops can match the productivity of conventional firms while sharing the resulting prosperity more evenly. Hardly a radical, Caselli mobilizes decades of orthodox economics research to distill the principles required for cooperatives to succeed: He explains how to implement worker democracy, structure management, address worker discipline, and protect the rights of those who leave the coop, among other matters. If a coop follows these principles, it will be “incentive compatible”—that is, each member will work hard because it will be in their interest to do so. Crucially, this coop system does not assume worker altruism. A well-designed cooperative will succeed even if every worker is a purely selfish Homo economicus. Effective worker coops are not the stuff of utopian fantasy: Spain’s Mondragon federation, for example, has been around for seventy years and employs over 70,000 workers. But coops are still rarer than they should be. Caselli’s meticulous, accessible recommendations offer a vision of a more equal economic future and detail how we can get from here to there.