When a group of people forms a cooperative to work together, they have to decide whether to treat themselves as employees of the co-op or as producers that contract with the co-op to provide products or services through the co-op.
A prototypical producer co-op is made up of farmers that each work independently on their own [...]

I’ve been telling people that as long as a co-op’s members are all in the state where the co-op is located, does most of its business, and is incorporated, there is no need to worry about federal securities law which does not contain an exemption for non-agricultural co-ops.  If you offer memberships in more than [...]

Last year, Washington state adopted the community solar project investment cost recovery incentive to encourage communities to develop solar projects.  Unfortunately, the way the legislation was originally written, there could be only one incentive per investor so a group of investors could not pool their resources to build solar projects and each receive the incentive [...]

Equal Exchange is a worker-owned cooperative business based in Massachusetts that has created an amazing model for fulfilling its mission while simultaneously making money for its investors.
Equal Exchange purchases coffee and cacao from farmer cooperatives throughout the world and processes it into products that it sells to retailers.  All products meet rigorous standards for fairness [...]

On October 29, the House passed H.R. 3854 which would

specifically allow cooperatives to receive Small Business Administration loans
raise caps on SBA loans
create the Small Business Early Stage Investment (SBESI) program, which would provide matching grant funding for venture capital investments in early-stage small businesses in targeted industries including agricultural technology, energy technology, environmental technology, life [...]

The following is an edited version of two articles written by Bernard Marszalek, one of the organizers of the Just Alternative Sustainable Economics Festival.  For more information, see the JASecon web site.
A recent weeklong conference in Sonoma, California – The Economics of Peace – featured a day devoted to lectures and workshops on the cooperatives [...]

The lack of clarity in the laws governing medical marijuana in California has led to the inevitable: litigation.  The LA County District Attorney has declared that “about 100%” of medical marijuana dispensaries are illegal because the Attorney General’s Guidelines do not explicitly permit sales.  They only permit patients and their caregivers to grow marijuana cooperatively [...]

A “security” is, broadly speaking, an investment in a venture by a person who has a reasonable expectation of profits from the investment with such profits resulting from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others.
Why is it important to know what a security is?  Because if something is a security, it is subject to a [...]

Guest post by Gregory Wilson, Esq.
Over the past few years, IRS Examination (audit function) undertook correspondence “audits” of several members of worker cooperatives asserting the position that the member’s patronage dividends are subject to self-employment (SE) tax. Attorney Greg Wilson fought these cases asserting that patronage dividends were not subject to SE tax for [...]

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which exempts from criminal prosecution for possession and cultivation of marijuana “a patient, or . . . a patient’s primary caregiver, who possesses or cultivates marijuana for the personal medical purposes of the patient upon the written or oral recommendation or approval [...]