Union-Cooperative Collaborations: Toward a Global Framework of Analysis

Union-cooperative collaborations, which first emerged in the 18th century, have witnessed a resurgence in recent years. Across the world, they have created new jobs, safeguarded worker-owners facing exploitation, and reinvigorated community and labor movements. By combining cooperatives' democratizing ideals of self-reliance and social security with union ideals of empowerment and mass organization, union-cooperative collaborations hold immense potential for social transformation. It is no wonder that union-cooperative collaborations have sparked rich, new scholarly attention. But our understanding of these collaborations deserves more depth. Therefore, this review draws on the extant literature and the case of SEWA from India to build a more globally relevant framework that can deepen future analyses of the potential and contradictions undergirding union-cooperative collaborations. Our framework articulates three levels of collaboration, three mechanisms through which such collaborations yield benefits, and a key condition for successful and transformational collaboration. Underlying successful collaborations is a contradiction that needs to be addressed--namely the challenge to democracy that comes with scale.