Melissa Hoover

Melissa Hoover is dedicated to making worker-ownership a viable option for everyone. She is the founding Executive Director of the Democracy at Work Institute, the think-and-do-tank that expands worker cooperatives as a strategy to address economic inequality. She helped launch the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and has worked as a cooperative developer with the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives in the Bay Area, supporting all the startup financial aspects of worker-owned bakeries. She currently sits on the Board of Directors of The Working World and The ICA Group/LEAF.

Cooperative shifts
A worker cooperatives is an economic form that meets people’s needs for work, so as the economy and the nature of work shift, the cooperatives people create to access good jobs are also shifting. And they are shifting in ways that dovetail with the rise of platforms—to create more stable work for contractors and contingent workers and to access markets for service workers. We will explore the various platform cooperative models people are using to build shared ownership of productive assets for people who are otherwise locked out of jobs and ownership opportunities. The Democracy at Work Institute foregrounds cooperatives in the real sharing economy: shared ownership of capital, of the means of production, and the means of market access, combined with principles that articulate a commitment to member and community benefit. We will support participants to think expansively enough to identify worker cooperative opportunities opened by technology and yet specifically enough to say what is actually a worker cooperative in principle and practice—and what isn’t, and where the edges might be.