Worker cooperatives – democratically run businesses that are owned and operated by their workers – are critical to building a solidarity economy based on community control and community wealth. They create quality jobs and build wealth among those who build a business’s value: the workers. Across the world, worker cooperatives have proven to be scalable, more productive than conventional companies, more resilient in times of crisis, and a key factor in generating economic opportunity and growing communities centered in equity and democracy.

NYC’s worker cooperative movement is made up of common people, neighbors, people of color and immigrants across the five boroughs. Working across industries, we represent many nationalities, cultures and gender identities. We are rooted in the international cooperative principles and grounded in shared values of equity, mutual aid, and democracy.

We stand on a deep legacy of economic resilience, cooperation, and mutual aid in BIPOC communities, and we also draw wisdom from places around in the world that have deeply rooted cooperative economies. From Tokyo to Montreal, wherever cooperatives have thrived, they have worked together across sectors to form solidarity economy eco-systems. We imagine access to deeply affordable community-owned land for housing, cooperative businesses and community institutions. We imagine a world where every worker has access to financing and education to own their own cooperative business and control the conditions of their work. We imagine a world without prisons, police, or ICE.  We envision a city with a worker cooperative on every block, where traditional institutions and businesses, from hospitals to pharmacies to art stores, are co-operatized, and constitute cooperative value chains.

We are creating the conditions for our communities to thrive through community control. We need:

• Access to capital for worker cooperatives to sustainably emerge, grow, and thrive;

• Access to democratically-controlled land for affordable and stable communities and commercial spaces; 

• To educate New Yorkers of all ages about worker-ownership and the solidarity economy, and expand technical assistance to worker cooperatives; and

• A city that purchases and invests consciously and prioritizes contracting with worker cooperatives.

In the midst of a global pandemic, deepening economic divisions, a worsening climate crisis, and ongoing social and racial injustice, NYC stands at an historic precipice. We have a chance to redefine our values-- a chance to rebuild, recreate, and reimagine a NYC for the people and controlled by the people. Our city’s champions are the people building deepening relationships among all sectors in our local economy and fighting for justice. 

We can create this world if we commit to transitioning our violently extractive economy to one based on solidarity, from a world based on competition to one based on cooperation. The time for local control is now. Our future is cooperative. This is how we do it.