Articles in Society

Fair Trade Princeton declared in the end of December as the 26th Fair Trade Town in the U.S. and 5th in New Jersey. That makes New Jersey back on top with the most declared towns of any state. Camila Tellez, then only 14, of Princeton Township...

Joel Schoening has a thorough retrospective on the demutualized business in the Oregon Historical Quarterly's Fall 2010 edition.  "Over the next twenty years, the cooperative they created faced its share of organizational and financial...

From the iVLG blog: Today’s post is going to digress from discussing the standard business model and introduce you to a different form of running a business: the worker cooperative. These organizations come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Below...

Oblique Solutions NWQ offers collaborative approaches to problem solving from Bob Davis in the great Northwest.  Consulting for Co-op Development, Governance, Consensus Decision-Making & Facilitation. Hands on experience working in co-...

Equal Exchange, the largest worker-owned coffee roasting facility in the United States, is looking for a Production Assistant to join our production team.  The successful applicant will become a part of our production team which seeks to be a...

Professor John Lawrence, a member of the Grassroots Economic Organizing collective, writes in Baltimore's Indypendent Reader in 2007.  During the industrial revolution in the United States, labor organizations such as the National Trades'...

A 2010 thesis paper by Christopher Wright at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Worker cooperatives have a long and tortured history, but recently they have been advancing globally on a more stable foundation than before. In this essay I...

The statue of former chairman of IFFCO Surender Jakhar was unveiled by  Shri N.P Patel at Surender Jakhar Bhawan in Gurgaon on Tuesday on the eve of his first death anniversary. The occasion was graced by cooperators in large number. Shri Balram...

When the Ecological Farmers of the Sierra Madres of Chiapas (CESMACH) found an important buyer to purchase their coffee, they were elated. “It was a dream come true,” Sixto Bonilla, export manager, says. “For a small-scale farmer organization to...

Fair Trade Resource Network (FTRN) & Survivors Connect (SC) announce the launch of iSpotFairTrade, a web-based map that allows anyone to identify where Fair Trade goods are bought and sold throughout the United States and Canada! iSpotFairTrade...

"In the age of unemployment, downsizing, and outsourcing, where can a poor soul find a job? Well, maybe it’s time we create our own. Self-employment is an option and can seem freeing, but it’s hard to do everything yourself and find time for a non-...

On December 7th, Francisco VanDerhoffBoersma, co-founder of the first fair trade certifying body, Max Havelaar, and the renowned small farmer co-operative in Mexico, UCIRI (Union of Indigenous Communities of the Region of Isthmus)  submitted the...