Putting Democracy to Work: A Practical Guide for Starting and Managing Worker-Owned Businesses

by Frank T. Adams, Gary B. Hansen, Gene Taback (Foreword)

Adams and Hansen discuss legal requirements, methods of financing worker buyouts, management patterns, and the efforts necessary to educate all those who will be participating. They provide examples of a model business plan, feasibility study, model by-laws, and much more.

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Governance is a political function; management is an economic function." For a book labeled "business" on the back, this one's pretty thrilling and packed with an excellent balance of radical social labor history and practical how-to-do-it info, all written in language that's easy to understand. Though the authors draw on a vast body of research, this book's falls short in its focus on cooperativism's European roots, feeding the myth practiced in this country that co-ops are "a white thing." A book like this needs to demonstrate that mutual aid wasn't a thing invented and handed down to us by Proudon and Owen and the Knights of Labor in the 1800s, but that it existed centuries before in Africa and Asia and all over the Americas. But aas it stands, that book packs a succinct punch in its covering the co-op movement from Rochdale to Mondragon and is an essential resource to anyone wanting to understand or practice a truly democratic means of production put into the hands of its producers.