Media, culture, and tech workers in the United States and Canada are increasingly turning to unions and — to a lesser but still significant extent — co-operatives to confront poor working conditions and systemic inequalities in their industries. Since 2015, thousands of workers in digital media, video games, museums, and more have unionized. Likewise, during the last decade, the idea of platform cooperativism has spread and worker-owned businesses have emerged in fields from journalism to photography to tech. These workers view unions and co-ops as ways to collectively address low pay and job insecurity, weak social protections, racism, sexism, excessive hours, and a lack of voice.
Typically, researchers study unions and co-ops separately – a divide that reflects longstanding tensions between these traditions and strategies. Inspired by renewed interest in the union co‐op model, we argue for approaching unions and co-ops with an eye to kinship rather than division. Both are enduring models taken up by workers themselves to meet their livelihood needs, resist exploitation, improve working conditions, address inequality, and build democracy in the workplace.
The basics of both models are familiar. Unions organize workers in bargaining units to negotiate collective agreements, file grievances, organize strikes, run member education, and push for pro‐worker policy reform. Worker co‐ops are businesses owned and governed by the people who work in them. Advocates describe them as “avowedly employee‐centered,” grounded in the principle of “one worker, one vote regardless of how much a worker has invested,” created “to provide employment for its members,” and operating in “service to its employees and its community.”
Although our own earlier research studied unions and co-ops independently, we recently revisited some past research to consider the models through a comparative lens, including a book on union organizing in digital journalism; a survey of co‐ops in the tech and cultural sectors in Canada, the UK, and the US; and a scoping review of literature on worker-owned co-ops in the tech sector, gig economy, and creative industries.
We identified four entry points for exploring tensions and affinities between unions and worker co-ops as pathways to worker empowerment in the digital age: motivations, democracy, equity, and political horizons.
Motivations: Why do workers join unions or form co-ops?
Unionizing and forming co-ops are means of improving material conditions. As one editor told us, digital journalists unionize “for the same reasons that anybody else would”: to improve pay, benefits, and job security. Journalists seek a safety net in a precarious sector, pushing for protections like just cause and severance and mechanisms for converting long-term contractors into bargaining unit positions. Likewise, workers form co-ops to provide members with quality, meaningful employment. And freelancers in creative industries join co‐ops to access social protections routinely denied to the self‐employed, like unemployment insurance.
Workers look to both unions and co-ops to shift power in the workplace. Unionizing provides access to collective bargaining, amplifying workers’ say over their conditions and countering management’s control. Co‐ops potentially go further. As one worker-owner put it, “we are in charge of our own decisions.” Democratic member control in co-ops can entail more than annual general meetings, director elections, and by‐laws, extending into a day-to-day ethos of workplace democracy or worker control.
Workers also turn to unions and co‐ops to tackle unfairness. Digital media workers unionize to respond to class inequality and demand pay equity, salary minimums, and transparent pay scales. Co-op members, by contrast, often tie workplace injustice to dominant ownership paradigms more broadly and the worker/owner division under capitalism.
Crucially, the motivations to start a union drive or a co‐op often go beyond improving personal working conditions. Media workers want to protect journalistic integrity, for example, while many co‐operators seek to advance alternatives to exploitative and extractive capitalist structures, like reclaiming digital platforms as community‐owned resources.
Despite baseline commonalities between these two models, their accessibility varies. For example, not all workers have the legal right to join a union. The digital journalists we have researched are typically in a standard employment relationship and so unionization is an option. Print journalism has a history of unionization, and parent unions, such as the NewsGuild, support organizing drives. Freelancers or gig workers, on the other hand, are classified — or misclassified — as independent contractors and so may turn to co‐ops as one of the few viable organizing options available.
Enacting Democracy
Both unions and co-ops bring democratic practices to spaces usually hostile to worker participation. They give workers formal entry points into decision‐making, albeit through different mechanisms.
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Co-op principles are rooted in democratic values that unsettle top‐down control of capitalist workplaces. For co‐op members, this can mean a workplace with “no bosses.” In tech co-ops, for example, members might collectively refuse to work on projects they find politically or ethically objectionable, instead choosing to work with clients aligned with their values. Many co-ops use consensus‐based decision‐making and hold regular meetings to foster communication and transparency, challenging power’s concentration among management.
If co‐ops aim to gain democratic control over the workplace, unions engage in processes of democratizing workplaces, but stop short of outright control, which management retains. A union is often the only way to achieve any semblance of democracy in a workplace, where legally, workers have no say over the organization of labor processes and general conditions. Unlike co‐ops, unions have no role in ownership and business strategy. While unions can shape working conditions by negotiating collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), contracts typically include clauses affirming management’s “discretion and authority to make decisions about the operation of the enterprise.”
While constrained, the power shift enacted via collective bargaining is significant. A journalist who unionized their newsroom told us: “(O)nce I’ve got my union hat on, I feel like I’m speaking to them as an equal, and that [workers] collectively have the same amount of power as them … they don’t get to make every decision anymore, when it comes to work environment, pay, fairness, equality, that kind of thing. … they don’t get to dictate everything else about how the office works.”
Despite differences in degrees, both unions and co‐ops enable workers to collectively influence decisions in deeper ways than what’s typical in private workplaces in media, cultural, and tech industries. But democratic participation isn’t guaranteed: it’s something that union members and worker-owners must continually sustain.
Striving for Equity
Media, cultural, and tech industries are notoriously inequitable. They remain overwhelmingly white, with men dominating leadership roles. Research shows that women and racialized workers earn less, are more likely to be in precarious work, and face harassment, stymied advancement, and difficulty entering industries where jobs are secured based on connections.
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Co‐ops and unions offer paths to challenge these inequities in different ways and at different scales. Since a wave of unionization in media kicked off in 2015, union drives have foregrounded commitments to racial diversity and racial and gender equity. These new unions have negotiated CBAs that introduce policies that materially shift working conditions in a more equitable direction: securing higher salary minimums, which disproportionately benefit the most underpaid workers, usually women and people of color, and enact transparent pay scales that improve pay parity. CBAs have also delivered benefits around parental leave, protections from harassment, equitable paths to promotion, protections for trans workers, banning nondisclosure agreements in harassment cases, and establishing worker‐led diversity committees.
Co‐ops can also advance equity by, for example, implementing flat payment structures, offering parental leave, and inclusive recruitment policies. Still, in our survey of co-ops in the tech and cultural sectors, “18.9% of co‐ops reported low gender diversity; 29.5% reported low age diversity; and a majority reported low racial diversity, with 52.6% of co‐ops describing themselves as ‘slightly’ racially diverse, and 18% selecting ‘not at all’ racially diverse.” As Juliet Schor writes, if the new generation of platform co‐ops “are to succeed without reproducing their own more privileged class, race, and gender homogeneousness,” they must be established by “a diverse group of founders and early participants” from the start.
Worker‐led models can be more effective than top‐down corporate diversity and equity initiatives. But the challenge of engaging in this work while managing the day‐to‐day work of running a co‐op business, or the challenge of enforcing a union contract, demonstrates the limitations these models encounter. Still, the digital media union movement shows the potential, and the system of smaller union locals tied to larger parent unions that helps advance systematic critique of industry-wide inequities could also be valuable to co-ops struggling for equity in similar sectors.
Political Horizons
A key marker of differences between unions and co‐ops is their political horizons: their visions of social and economic transformation beyond individual workplaces.
Practices of solidarity begin to express these horizons. Digital journalists engage in cross‐shop solidarity supporting union drives across the sector. Co‐operators likewise enact solidarity beyond their own workplace. The co‐op principle of “cooperation among co‐operatives” promotes mutual support to grow the co‐op sector. Tech co-op networks encourage skills‐sharing and co‐bidding on contracts. Solidarity scales up, too, when workers see themselves as part of a larger “movement,” which is how many digital media workers describe their union push. Co‐ops can position themselves within a wider “co‐operative movement,” too.
What workers aim to transform also signals their political horizons. Many media union drives seek to raise labor standards across the industry. Co‐ops similarly look beyond the individual workplace. Freelancer co‐ops want to make self‐employment sustainable, while tech co‐ops advance “alternative visions of tech work.” Both models also potentially alter the products of labor. Journalists unionize to protect editorial integrity and local news. Many co‐ops design tools that improve working conditions, from consensus‐based decision‐making software to gig platforms without stress-inducing rating systems.
Union and co‐op formation also transforms how workers see themselves. For journalists, unionizing challenges ideologies of objective professionalism and entrepreneurialism, enabling them to identify as workers. Co‐operators, in contrast, often adopt a different identity, that of the “worker‐owner,” and embrace a culture of worker control focused on remaking production relations and redistributing wealth.
Ownership is a big dividing line. Both models seek to return a greater share of value to those who produce it. But unionization leaves capitalist ownership intact, while co‐op advocates believe changing ownership paradigms is necessary to confront wealth inequality under capitalism. Journalists unionize to reform their industry. Co‐operators often envision systemic change, seeing their co‐ops as contributing to a wider “solidarity economy.”
Finally, both models engage wider communities. Media unions can politicize the cultural discourse about work through reporting informed by journalists’ experience organizing. The multistakeholder co‐op framework, used by several co‐operative platforms, includes not only workers but also users or other groups affected by the business, echoing “Exit to Community” ideas around broad-based ownership and accountability.
Complementary Pathways
Unions and co‐ops are neither monolithic, nor a panacea.
Unions resist capitalist imperatives but remain constrained by them. Media unions face real challenges, like sustaining engagement, and they don’t fully resolve precarity: media outlets close and post-pandemic job loss in journalism has been steep.
Worker co‐ops also face pressures. They don’t operate outside of capitalism: cash flow was a top challenge in our survey; state support is weak; and co‐ops can be focused on keeping their business afloat rather than participating in the wider co‐op movement. As market actors, worker co‐ops are both antagonistic and accommodating to capital. And as the former International Labour Organization official Jürgen Schwettmann reminds us, co‐ops “are not ‘better’ just because of their name or statute; they must prove their merits through tangible action.”
Still, both models can empower workers to improve their conditions, make their industries more diverse and equitable, and increase workers’ voice. And affinities between unions and co-ops suggest potential for convergence.
The “union co‐op” model, developed in a partnership between Spain’s Mondragon Corporation and the United Steelworkers, blends elements of both traditions. Proponents emphasize shared qualities – both unions and worker co-ops are, in theory, democratic, member‐controlled, and share commitments like “joint decision‐making” and “fair distribution of rewards.” By unionizing, worker co‐ops strengthen their ties to the labor movement, enrich worker‐led governance through collective bargaining, and can potentially access the support of parent unions.
While union co-ops are rare in media, tech, and the cultural sectors, they do exist. Design Action Collective in California, for example, is a worker co‐op affiliated with the Pacific Media Guild/Communication Workers of America. Vancouver’s Union Cooperative Initiative supports the development of union co-ops, including in the arts, communication, and services. And if the emergence of worker-owned digital media outlets is any indication, experience with unionizing can help to prepare workers to start labor-managed firms. Some journalist-owned outlets have begun to negotiate contracts with their freelance writers, another way for co-ops and unions to act as allies.
Rather than view unions and co-ops as rivals or binary options, they can be, and sometimes already are, complementary paths to worker power.
