Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores

In the first session, we wish to give an overview of the different worker cooperatives, those from Brooklyn, from Denver, from Washington state, Boston, and New Jersey, including experiences of both experienced and fledgling cooperatives. Each group will talk about its birth, its governance structure, and its financial structure. We see the session as useful not only for explaining these different possibilities for how to generate and sustain immigrant worker cooperatives to a variety of practitioners, activists, and those interested in forming a cooperative, but also useful for building links for the first time between all of the different immigrant worker cooperatives that are dispersed all over the country. The second session will address the challenges that each group or cooperative faces, as well as ways forward. Each cooperative faces different kinds of constraints, ranging from expertise, to capital. What kinds of advice can the practitioners give to each other? And, how can we work on creating a repository of specific tools for immigrant worker cooperatives, as opposed to worker cooperatives that generally do not deal with undocumented workers?

In the first session, we wish to give an overview of the different worker cooperatives, those from Brooklyn, from Denver, from Washington state, Boston, and New Jersey, including experiences of both experienced and fledgling cooperatives. Each group will talk about its birth, its governance structure, and its financial structure. We see the session as useful not only for explaining these different possibilities for how to generate and sustain immigrant worker cooperatives to a variety of practitioners, activists, and those interested in forming a cooperative, but also useful for building links for the first time between all of the different immigrant worker cooperatives that are dispersed all over the country. The second session will address the challenges that each group or cooperative faces, as well as ways forward. Each cooperative faces different kinds of constraints, ranging from expertise, to capital. What kinds of advice can the practitioners give to each other? And, how can we work on creating a repository of specific tools for immigrant worker cooperatives, as opposed to worker cooperatives that generally do not deal with undocumented workers?