In 2015 C.E., the city of Oakland, California took a quiet but meaningful step toward reshaping how businesses could be organized and owned. The Oakland City Council passed a resolution formally supporting worker cooperatives — businesses owned and democratically governed by the people who work in them. It wasn’t a law that created new programs overnight, but it was a public declaration that a different kind of economy was possible, and that city government was willing to say so out loud.
Key findings
- Worker cooperative resolution: The Oakland City Council passed a resolution in 2015 C.E. expressing official support for worker-owned cooperative businesses as a vehicle for equitable local economic development.
- Democratic workplace ownership: Worker cooperatives give employees an ownership stake and an equal vote in major business decisions, distributing both profits and power more broadly than conventional corporate structures.
- Cooperative economy advocacy: The resolution was supported by the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a Bay Area nonprofit that provides legal resources and policy advocacy for cooperative and community-controlled economic models.
What Oakland actually did
The resolution was non-binding — it carried moral and political weight rather than legal mandate. But that framing understates what it meant in practice.
By formally endorsing worker cooperatives, Oakland’s city government signaled that it saw cooperative ownership as a legitimate tool for addressing economic inequality, not a fringe experiment. The resolution opened the door to future policy conversations: about procurement preferences for cooperatives, about city support for cooperative development, about zoning and financing that could make worker ownership more accessible.
Oakland has long had a significant cooperative ecosystem. Businesses like A Screw & More and the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives — a network of worker-owned bakeries — had already demonstrated that cooperative models could survive and thrive in competitive urban markets. The city’s resolution gave that ecosystem something it hadn’t had before: formal recognition from the government that serves it.
Why cooperative ownership matters for equity
Worker cooperatives don’t just change who signs the paychecks. They change who makes decisions about wages, working conditions, schedules, and how profits are used.
In a cooperative, the workers are the owners. Profits flow back to members rather than to outside shareholders. Research consistently shows that worker-owned firms tend to offer higher wages, more stable employment during downturns, and greater workplace satisfaction than comparable conventional businesses. For low-income communities — and for communities of color, which make up a significant portion of Oakland’s population — cooperative ownership can be a pathway to building genuine wealth, not just earning income.
The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives has documented how cooperatives help close racial and gender wealth gaps by making ownership available to workers who might never accumulate enough capital to start a conventional business. Oakland’s resolution, modest as it was, pointed directly at that potential.
A longer tradition than it might seem
Worker cooperatives are not a new invention. The Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, founded in 1956 C.E., grew into one of the largest cooperative networks in the world, employing tens of thousands of worker-owners across manufacturing, retail, and finance. In Latin America, Brazil’s Solidarity Economy movement built thousands of cooperatives during the 1990s and 2000s C.E. as a response to unemployment and economic crisis.
Closer to Oakland, the Rochdale Principles — developed by a group of English weavers in 1844 C.E. — laid out the cooperative values of democratic governance, equal membership, and community benefit that still guide cooperatives globally today. Oakland’s resolution was a local moment in a very long story.
Lasting impact
Oakland’s 2015 C.E. resolution was part of a broader municipal wave. Cities including New York, Madison, and Cleveland had already begun investing in cooperative development, and Oakland’s action added momentum to that trend. New York City, notably, would go on to fund a Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative allocating millions of dollars annually to support cooperative startups — one of the largest such municipal commitments in U.S. history.
The ripple effects of resolutions like Oakland’s are hard to quantify but real. They shape what city staff prioritize, what conversations happen in chambers of commerce and community development organizations, and what entrepreneurs believe is politically possible when they consider building a cooperative instead of a conventional firm.
Blindspots and limits
A resolution without funding or enforcement mechanisms can remain symbolic for a long time, and Oakland’s record on translating cooperative-friendly rhetoric into concrete policy support has been uneven. Worker cooperatives also face persistent structural disadvantages — including difficulty accessing startup capital, navigating legal structures designed for conventional corporations, and competing against businesses that externalize costs onto workers — that no resolution alone can fix.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Sustainable Economies Law Center — Oakland passes worker cooperative resolution
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights recognized for 160 million hectares at COP30
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on economic justice
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