CUNY’s Jessica Gordon-Nembhard Shares Her Big Idea for Employee Ownership

In this clip, CUNY’s Jessica Gordon-Nembhard speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum. For additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/videos/jessica-gordon-nembhard-discusses-her-big-idea-for-employee-ownership/ 

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For other session videos, visit the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aspeneop

The 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum took place on April 9-10, 2025, virtually and in Washington DC. The Forum is proudly co-hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University.

This year’s theme, “From Workers to Owners,” highlights how the experience of ownership changes the reality of work for workers. The forum highlights companies in a range of business sectors and explores how employee ownership fits their business strategy and approach to business leadership. We also discuss the particular role employee ownership can play in supporting business success, and we consider the role institutional investors can play in improving capital access for employee ownership conversions and expansions.

For more information about the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, including our speakers, agenda, and additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2025/

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
Good morning everyone. You can hear me OK, right?
Yeah, sorry. I wear this mask for my 103 year
old dad. I just have 5 or 7 minutes, so
I'm going to get right to it. Human beings in every era of
history on every continent practice solidarity, economics,

(00:24):
mutual aid, and Economic Cooperation.
These are strategies and practices older than capitalism
that enable people to work together to survive and thrive.
Human beings first economic system was cooperative.
For Black and brown people in the US, cooperative economics
organization has been a means for collectively surviving and

(00:46):
asserting and affirming one's humanity, especially in
economics. Black Americans, for example,
established cooperative enterprises in order to sustain
their communities, feed their families, control their work
lives, and share what they created in the face of economic
exploitation and exclusion. In my book, Collective Courage,
a History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and

(01:08):
Practice, I delve deeply into this history and document dozens
of examples of Black coops. In particular, I found three
prolific periods of cooperative business practices in the 1880s,
nineteen 30s and 40s and the 60sand 70s, and I believe the
twenty 20s are coming up too. But I the book was published

(01:30):
already as well as a continuous history of mutual aid and
cooperative ownership. I want to focus today on 2
important benefits of worker cooperatives, which is an
underutilized economic structureand practice.
Worker cooperatives if you don'tknow, are cooperative business
enterprises owned and run by theemployees where worker owners

(01:52):
are 100% of the owners. Worker owners operate under the
same Co-op principles, joint ownership, democratic
governance, economic participation, return based on
use, continuous education, concern for community, profit
sharing, autonomy, etcetera. The first benefit to discuss is

(02:14):
that worker co-ops achieve and transcend economic goals and
thus have the potential to transform agricultural
manufacturing, unionized industries as well as service
industries. And 2nd, I'll talk about how
worker co-ops transform work by practicing self management and
economic democracy so that at the same time that they deliver

(02:36):
economically, worker co-ops develop their members social
capital, leadership capacity andachieve psychosocial humanist
development. And I'll explain that in a
minute. Case studies and surveys show
that worker co-ops have many benefits.

(02:59):
Sorry about that. Increased productivity, better
working conditions, control overwork and work rules, benefits
such as healthcare, retirement, etcetera.
Job ladder mobility, often better wages, less employment
turnover and asset building. Worker co-ops.
Increase social capital and civic engagement.

(03:19):
Develop multiple types of leadership, stabilize
communities and recirculate resources multiple times in the
same local community. There's less coercion, more self
management, communication, teamwork, which results in
productivity improvements. Studies also find higher levels
of training in worker cooperatives and worker

(03:42):
cooperatives are often started to meet community needs, for
example, elder care, child care,healthy food, green industries
and or to protect jobs. Cooperatives therefore create
more engaged citizens and leaders with experience in
advocating for themselves and their communities and with
experience operating democratically.

(04:06):
These broad ranging benefits canbe seen most vividly when
studying incarcerated worker co-ops.
I first truly understood solidarity economies and
cooperative economics as a humanist economics project when
interviewing formerly incarcerated men about their
experiences as Co-op owners while in prison operating

(04:30):
incarcerated worker co-ops in Puerto Rico.
Incarcerated worker co-ops are businesses owned solely by
incarcerated people who are bothmembers and board members and
who self manage the Co-op. Mckelly Prison in Northern
Ethiopia and several prisons in Puerto Rico provide the best
examples. In Mckelly, the inmates are

(04:53):
allowed to organize licensed producer cooperatives to access
market outside markets and to borrow working capital.
Incarcerated people established at least 31 cooperatives with
over 900 incarcerated member owners running successful Co-op
businesses in dairy, vegetable farming, cobblestone cutting and

(05:15):
paving, metalworks, carpentry, plumbing, electric work, bakery,
weaving and sewing. All Co-op members receive
vocational training, financial education, and access to micro
loans and micro insurance. Some receive advanced training.
Members save about a third of their Co-op income.

(05:37):
They provide remittances to their family and spend the rest
on necessities. Formerly incarcerated members
are actually allowed to continuethe membership in the Co-op with
a reverse commute in Puerto Rico.
Before the COVID pandemic, therewere five incarcerated worker
co-ops in various prisons. Incarcerated people themselves

(06:00):
demanded Co-op, business education and the right to own
their own co-ops. They petitioned for a change in
the law so they could do that and then founded the first
incarcerated worker Co-op, Cooperativa de Servicio Aragos,
which is an artist worker Co-op started in 2003 in Guayama
Penitentiary. Soon followed a solar panel

(06:24):
Co-op, a technology Co-op, a cafe Co-op right outside the
doors of the prison, and a sewing Co-op in the women's
prison with hundreds of worker owners combined.
From researching incarcerated worker co-ops in other countries
and interviewing the former members in Puerto Rico, I
learned that engaging in Co-op, business ownership and

(06:46):
production is personally and socially transformative for
incarcerated people. They gain skills, earn real
money that they share with theirfamilies and use to pay debts.
They grow in a numeral ways thatenable them to reduce their
sentences and return to society.Many of the members I

(07:06):
interviewed had 99 plus sentences and after joining the
coop were out within 10 years. When interviewed, formerly
incarcerated Co-op members mostly commented on how
transformative the experience was psychologically, socially,
and spiritually. Because they worked
cooperatively of members of a collective.

(07:28):
They took responsibility for their actions.
Their businesses were accountable.
They participated democratically.
They made decisions with other members.
They repeatedly remarked to me that when they were a member of
the Co-op, they felt like a human being and became what the
Co-op law said they were, Co-op members, Co owners, decision

(07:49):
makers and leaders, not thieves or degenerates, so it really
changed their lives. Owning and working their own
co-ops is a humanizing experience that rewards their
economic agency and gives them dignity and self respect,
counteracting the dehumanizing, disrespectful treatment they

(08:09):
receive in prison. Given the various benefits and
impacts, one can see why one study in Italy found that the
cities with the most worker co-ops had the highest measures
of economic well-being, health, general satisfaction and
political efficacy. Thank you.