Providing agency to workers – particularly those from marginalized backgrounds – is a central tenet for financial vehicles and enterprises seeking to promote economic and racial justice. As such, we’ve explored several models of employee and multi-stakeholder owned businesses.
But limitations of the available models often hamper the goals of founders. For example, a traditional worker cooperative structure does not allow multiple businesses to join together to leverage scale like purchasing cooperatives are able to achieve. To challenge these issues directly, The Staffing Cooperative was created as a cooperatively managed holding company in which the workers of subsidiary companies own the majority of the holding company's shares, allowing control of major decisions at both the fund and subsidiary level as well as the ability to acquire or convert businesses underneath the model.
In this webinar, Joseph Cureton of the Staffing Cooperative details their model and describes how it provides voice and agency to its workers throughout the holding company, which currently includes a subsidiary portfolio of two firms; one focussed on returning citizen laborers and another focussed on technology professionals.
