This week, the Punchcard Podcast talks Elle Glenny about her experiences in housing co-ops and worker co-ops, and how both can often have blindspots around class and culture that keep low income, "working class" people away.
Then, composer and multi-instrumentalist Louis-Louise Kay talks about how and why the Mirlo cooperative is building an alternative to Bandcamp and other music distribution services, and dives deep into the details of what the open-source project has managed to achieve so far.Â
Classism in Cooperatives
An Interview with Elle Glenny
by PUNCHCARD
Unfortunately not everybody's experience of cooperatives is positive. For Elle, their time in co-operatives was both transformative, but also painful, marred by classism that often goes unnamed. In this episode of Punchcard, Elle and I talk about what classism looks like in co-ops, how we can transform it and why inclusion isn’t enough.
Mirlo is Building Cooperative Tools for Music Distribution
by Mittens XVX
"So two years after launch, this is where we are now: we’ve got a free and open-source service run by a workers coop that emulates Bandcamp. People can choose the fee they want to give us, or keep all the money from their sales, it’s setup at 10% by default but they can manually set it to 0 and even decide variable fees for each of their releases if they want. The entire code the platform itself runs on being free and open-source means people could potentially even use it to build their own platform with it."
The Employee-Ownership Mirage: Private Equity’s Latest PR Strategy
OnLabor — Without situating private equity’s employee-ownership initiatives within the broader empirical record of how private equity operates, and how its practices have historically reduced worker bargaining power, any positive account is incomplete at best. Omitting this context obscures the structural tension between private equity’s financial incentives and meaningful worker ownership...
Co-op Values in Action: Abundance Staff Win Union Vote
Food Tank — Over 70 percent of the employees signed union authorization cards early in the process. With the guidance of seasoned organizers at Workers United, the nearly 40 workers moved quickly from there. The election was held two weeks after workers first announced their intention to organize. “[It’s] the fastest [organizing] I’ve ever encountered,” Will Westlake, an organizer with Workers United, tells Food Tank...
Why Co-ops Are the Solution to Our Housing Crisis
The Walrus — In 2024, rent for a three-bedroom apartment in the co-op was $828 a month, a very affordable price compared to the $1,687 for a much smaller one-bedroom apartment listed on kijiji.ca in the same city. Twenty of the townhouses in the complex have even more budget-friendly rates thanks to governmental subsidies for “geared to income” housing...
Rep. Khanna Introduces Bill to Support Worker Co-op Businesses
Rep. Khanna's website — The legislation will launch a coordinated federal effort to provide funding, technical assistance, education, and an improved regulatory environment for worker co-ops as well as establish a United States Council on Worker Cooperatives, led by the Department of Labor. The council will report to Congress with a federal worker cooperative strategy, designed through identifying regulatory barriers, proposing solutions, and coordinating research and educational initiatives...
1970 (and 2026) Anarchist Calendar
GEO — Tor Faegre, a peace and civil rights activist and carpenter, designed a series of six Anarchist Calendars beginning with 1968. These calendars were originally published by Solidarity Bookshop, which he co-founded, and printed at the J.S. Jordan Memorial Print Cooperative, both in Chicago. The original was printed on a variety of weights and color sheets. This digital file of the 1970 calendar has been color corrected for optimal reproduction. May is the only month originally printed in two colors. The 1970 calendar is identical with the dates of 2026.Â
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Cooperative Enterprise and Market Economy: Chapter 7 [audio version]
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