Unfortunately not everybody’s experience of cooperatives is positive. For Elle, their time in co-operatives was both transformative, but also painful, marred by classism that often goes unnamed.
In this episode of Punchcard, Elle and I talk about what classism looks like in co-ops, how we can transform it and why inclusion isn’t enough.
Co-ops tend to be far more accessible to middle-class people – those with higher education, spare time, savings, and inheritance. That shapes who can access co-ops and quietly sets middle-class culture as the default.
Middle class norms then define how we communicate, behave, argue, and organise. Anything outside of that framework is subtly flagged as unprofessional, disruptive, or “not the right fit.” That’s how working class ways of being (in all their intersectional forms) get sidelined, suppressed, and erased.
💸 Inclusion Isn’t Enough
We can, and should, keep learning how our cultures marginalise others. But as Elle (and Taylor, in her episode) both emphasise, inclusion is not enough. Often it causes harm by placing the responsibility on marginalised people to adapt.
The deeper issue is power. Working-class people often lack real decision-making power, leaving them dependent on the goodwill of those who have it. Inclusion becomes assimilation.
🔧 Shifting Power
Elle is part of a network of redistribution groups that have been forming across the UK. These groups have been set up to give real power to working class members, including power to choose how to redistribute the groups financial resources.
These groups are cross class collectives, where traditional hierarchies are flipped on their heads – working class cultural norms are centred, decisions are weighted in favour of working class members, and access to resources, especially financial resources, are transferred to the group.
❤️ Support Punchcard
Elle’s work on class pushes the worker co-op movement to confront its blind spots and grow. If you want Punchcard to keep platforming voices like hers, please consider supporting the show.
We are aiming to get 50 listeners to donate £5/month. Your support helps us improve production quality and reach more people.
Abbas Shapuri’s journey into the worker co-operative movement is not a typical one. Many worker co-operators arrive from the “alternative” or activist scenes. Abbas, however, came from the heart of capitalism: corporate accountancy.
In this episode of Punchcard, Abbas and I talk about what led to him betraying his politics and values to work at big corporate firms, like KPMG & IHG, and how he eventually managed to escape.
Something I was thinking about when talking to Abbas is how many other people there must be in the same position that he was in – stuck in a corporate job that clashes with their values, unable to see an alternative, or too afraid to take the jump. How do we reach those people?
Abbas’s journey has plenty of twists and turns, but the one that seems the most impactful is his best friend Aqeel. Aqeel shared Abbas’s politics, but acted on it – joining a Radical Routes housing co-op, discovering Third Sector Accountancy and introducing Abbas to the illusive world of co-ops.
And this points to a solution, but also an issue. If Abbas hadn’t had Aqeel, a friend inside a housing co-op, he might never have found his way in. The worker co-op sector’s growth is held back by our reach, and if we want it to grow, we need to start punching above our weight.
That’s why I started Punchcard, to introduce people to co-ops at scale. To share the stories that make people stop and think “maybe I don’t have to keep working like this”. If Abbas did it, maybe I can too.
Support Punchcard for £5/month to take us to the next level – better audio, better video, greater reach!
Abbas is the second Punchcard guest to highlight the benefits of spending some time working outside of worker co-ops. While our self-taught, DIY ethos is powerful, the reality is that KPMG gave Abbas access to skills and experiences that you’d struggle to find in a worker co-op.
The same message came from our episode with Ai Van, who, while at the Leeds Bread Co-op read traditional business management books and brought us the £1 model. She has since left the Leeds Bread Co-op to see what she can learn from working in a traditional business and may return with more insights and tools that could strengthen our co-ops.
Building on the impact of Ai Van’s episode, season 2 of Punchcard is featuring more innovators and practical solutions for worker co-ops. Upcoming guests include Paul from Navigate, sharing tools & frameworks to manage conflict, and Steffi, Novara Media’s fundraiser, discussing fundraising campaigns and the power of newsletters.
According to Third Sector Accountancy they have no shortage of organisations asking for accountancy support. So why aren’t they growing to meet the need?
A common concern for Abbas, and many other cooperators, is the risk of diluting or losing the values and ethos of their co-op. So how do we build and maintain cooperative culture?
In a previous episode of Punchcard, Beau explained how Suma Wholefoods strengthens its values through a secondary set of principles, a framework that goes deeper than the standard seven international cooperative principles and the members have more ownership over.
Unicorn Grocery takes this a step further, embedding their values into the rhythm of daily life with fortnightly trainings where members can present everything from sectoral trends to how to better include neurodivergent members.
Help connect more workers like Abbas with the worker co-op movement
Worker co-operatives are still a fringe model, known by few and understood by even fewer. Punchcard exists to change that, bringing co-operative ideas and real-world stories into public consciousness.
By building a dedicated worker co-op podcast, we’re reaching new audiences and showing that another way of working is not only possible – it’s already happening.
We’re aiming for 50 listeners donating £5/month to take Punchcard to the next level – better audio, better video, and greater reach.
Ai Van Kok (Leeds Bread Co-op) → demystifying finances with the £1 model and overcoming financial difficulties.
Alice McLarnon (Trademark, Belfast) → on using co-ops to break down racist & sectarian division in Northern Ireland.
Taylor Le Melle (not/nowhere, London) → why inclusion isn’t enough, and how redistribution should guide co-ops.
Rebecca Kemble (US Federation of Worker Co-ops, Madison) → lessons from a movement drifting away from its grassroots.
Nacho Gómez (Black Cat Café, London) → reflections on why co-operatives close and ideas on how to save them
The podcast gives time and space to get into the complexities and nuances of the worker co-op movement – I’ve learnt so much about what folks are doing (and why!)
🎙 Better production & regular episodes I’m now working with Vilte from Media Co-op, who’s improving editing, audio quality, and creating clips & reels to reach wider audiences.
🎤 More live shows – 2 live recordings at London’s Anti-University Festival with Cooperation Town & kin.coop – 1 live recording at workers.coop’s Autumn Assembly – guest TBC
🌍 More global voices We’ve had interest & engagement from the international co-op movement and I 2 more international guests lined up, bringing perspectives from across the world. – Rupay Dahm – cofounder of a migrant led cleaning co-op in Berlin – Àlex Badia – Barret.coop, a video production studio and part of the local co-op federation in Valencia, Spain
Excellent work! Exactly the sort of thing we should be doing!
Worker cooperatives are still a relatively unknown and confusing concept to most people. The dominant narrative tells workers to either accept exploitation or climb the ladder by exploiting others, and nothing about worker cooperatives.
Punchcard is the only podcast dedicated to spotlighting and showcasing that worker cooperatives are innovating and creating the worker owned and control future we need.
But Vilte & I can’t make Punchcard alone.
If just 50 listeners contribute £5/month, we’ll be able to release episodes more regularly, improve production quality, and expand our reach with short clips and reels that will reach more people.
A massive thank you to everyone who is already supporting Punchcard – on Open Collective, and to workers.coop, and the co-ops who helped us get this far.
Alice McLarnon grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, surrounded by violence, segregation, and 60-foot peace walls. In 2006, she joined the worker cooperative Trademark and was immediately struck by how different it was from anywhere she’d worked before.
Coming from low paid work in a chip shop and other hierarchical workplaces, she was shocked that even as an administrator she was considered an equal. From being paid the same as the founders, to being invited to take part in key organisational decisions, Trademark’s radical commitment to equality reshaped her expectations of what a workplace could be.
In Northern Ireland, the workplace has long been one of the few places where Catholic and Protestant communities regularly intersect. That’s why Trademark, as the anti-racist and anti-sectarian unit of the Irish Labour Movement, focuses its work there — working with unions and supporting groups to set up worker cooperatives.
One of the most notable examples of this is the multi-award-winning Belfast Cleaning Cooperative. Formed by a cross-community group of women that the Trademark team were working with. The co-op has become a standout example of what cooperative development in working-class communities can look like.
Trademark’s work offers a powerful example of what’s possible when anti-racism, class politics, and cooperative economics come together. It’s a prime example of how to confront the rise of racism and fascism we’re seeing across the country.
Listen to Punchcard for the full conversation with Alice McLarnon.
In this episode of Punchcard, we speak with Taylor Le Melle, a founding member of not/nowhere, a BPOC worker cooperative that supports artists to navigate the structures and institutions of the UK art world, unpacking harmful myths and helping artists to recognise and use their power in the industry.
As a BPOC cooperative which is also queer-led, not/nowhere challenges other co-ops to move beyond inclusion efforts and instead adopt a more radical approach to redistribution. Inclusion, even in its most well-intentioned forms, often demands assimilation, whereas redistribution supports alternative ideas and ways of being that come from the bottom up. In this reclamation of solidarity, self-sacrifice becomes central: if you are unwilling to give something up, is it truly redistributing power, or simply another form of charity?
Taylor sees the arts as a perverse industry which also has unique opportunities for redistribution, as it is one of the only industries “where you could charge £20,000 for something that you worked on for five minutes”. By accessing capital through art, resources can be redirected toward education and movement-building. not/nowhere itself does this through its access to antique analogue film equipment and funding from the Arts Council.
In this episode of Punchcard, we speak with Ai Van Kok, formerly a financial analyst at Leeds Bread Co-op. She joined the co-op when the co-op’s cashflow was at a critical moment—it was just months away from being unable to pay its worker’s wages. Facing an urgent crisis, Ai Van turned to traditional business management literature for solutions, finding valuable insights in books like Profit First and The E-Myth Revisited.
One of the most impactful tools Ai Van discovered was the £1 model. Financial documents make most people’s eyes glaze over, but the £1 model strips away unnecessary details and highlights only the key information. For the first time, members of Leeds Bread Co-op felt they could truly understand the co-op’s finances and were able to cut costs that saved the business.
While Ai Van had to adapt these tools to fit a cooperative framework, her approach challenges resistance to learn from traditional business practices. By translating and repurposing these methods, she has not only helped Leeds Bread Co-op but also supported other small co-ops, including Loaf Bakery, The Bike Mill, and Footprint, in strengthening their financial understanding and management.
Watch in this supplementary video where Ai Van Kok breaks down the £1 model, explaining exactly how to use it and how to apply it to your cooperative.
In this episode of Punchcard, we speak to Rebecca Kemble, an experienced cooperator from the US, who is a member of Union Cabs Worker Coop in Madison and co-founder of the Solidarity Economy Principles Project.
From 2009-2016 Rebecca was a member of the board of the US Federation of Worker Coops, and in late 2024, Rebecca penned an article pointing a finger at the Federation for having drifted away from its grassroots cooperative movement origins, by centralising power and becoming unaccountable to the cooperatives that it claims to represent.
In response to the Federations shift Rebecca and others have developed the Solidarity Economy Principles Project. The project was founded to help guide and ground organisations in cooperative practices & principles to avoid them going the same way as the US Federation.
To hear the full story, listen to episode 5 of Punchcard – A Warning From The US Federation of Worker Coops w/ Rebecca Kemble.
In this episode of Punchcard, we speak to Beau Bulman, one of the People Development Coordinators at Suma Wholefoods Worker Cooperative, about the challenges and compromises required to practice direct democracy within a cooperative of 200 worker-members, as well as sharing insights into improving member recruitment, member induction, and sustaining a cooperative culture.
In addition to the conversation with Beau, Suma has shared their seven internal cooperative principles, that they use alongside the seven International Cooperative Principles:
Suma members multi-skill. They actively seek out training and development to enable them to take on roles in both office and non-office areas (where practical and reasonable).
Suma members see the bigger picture. They have a broad knowledge of Suma and have an understanding of the wider business environment.
Suma members put in more than they take out. They work for the collective good, actively promoting cooperative values.
Suma members communicate openly and honestly. They are professional and approachable, endeavouring to understand the viewpoint of others.
Suma members actively seek out responsibility. They self-manage and involve themselves in the management and development of their business.
Suma members are flexible. They are responsive to the changing needs of their business.
Suma members are hardworking and have a can-do attitude. They monitor both the quality of their work and their productivity to ensure they meet member standard.
Listen in as we explore Beau’s work and strategies for cultivating democracy & collective responsibility.
In this episode of Punchcard, we sit down with Owen Powell, a lecturer and researcher with a focus on cooperative democracy. Owen first cut his teeth in the Young Cooperators Network, a national initiative formed by young people seeking cooperative alternatives to traditional economic models following the 2008 financial crash. Since then, he has completed a PhD that examined how larger and more established worker cooperatives maintain collectivist democracy over time.
In his PhD research, Owen identified 3 critical factors for strengthening cooperative democracy:
Member Induction, Integration, and Involvement
A Culture of Reviewing and Refreshing Established Norms
Bringing in Learning and Expertise from Outside
Owen remains deeply committed to the cooperative movement, actively contributing to workers.coop as a member of their research working group. The group has already published two significant reports on the organisation’s collectivist health, offering valuable insights into the sustainability of cooperative principles.
Join us as we explore Owen’s work and discuss how research can support and empower cooperatives to survive the winds of change.
In this episode Nacho speaks candidly about the highs & the lows of his & Carla’s 10 year journey with Black Cat Cafe. Even though from the outside Black Cat Cafe seems to be extremely successful Nacho shares about the constant challenges they faced – the difficulties paying members & staff fairly, and the set backs when trying to attract & retain worker members.
Nacho & Caleb also reflect on the lessons learnt & we celebrate what Black Cat Cafe has achieved – having become a landmark in the vegan, activist & cooperative scenes for its pioneering vegan cuisine & dedication to supporting its community & activists.
Black Cat Cafe may stop being a workers cooperative, but as Sam Nordland said in Episode 1 painting co-op business closures as failures isn’t always useful, because “we provided jobs for ourselves for a number of years & we introduced a lot of young people to working in a cooperative setting”.
