When your co-op establishes policies and procedures for your workplace around wages, hours, safety, and working conditions, you can guarantee these as legally protected rights for the individual workers through a union contract. A union steward (whether from inside the co-op or an external staff representative) can help you enforce these rights and help mediate conflicts that may arise.

With a union contract or collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in place, you may enroll in the health and retirement benefits of the union you decide to affiliate with, which tends to be more affordable than market-rate options. 

Depending on your industry, your union may be involved in policy and advocacy campaigns to improve the wages and working conditions for workers across your sector. For example, Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) is a large worker cooperative unionized with 1199SEIU. Home care is reimbursed by the state government through Medicaid, so they are active with the union’s statewide “Fair Pay” lobbying campaigns to increase the reimbursement rates to the home care agencies and therefore the wages for their workers. 

Some unions offer workforce development and training programs to members for their industries that can help your co-op build its skills, licenses, and credentials to grow your business. 

In general, by being part of a labor union, your co-op is showing solidarity with workers across your industry — a way of putting the cooperative principles of Education and Training, Cooperation Among Cooperatives, and Concern For Community into practice. Your solidarity can inspire workers to start their own co-ops and organize the union to invest new organizing resources in more co-ops. 

To join a union, there needs to be an “employment” type of relationship, meaning that you are getting paid for the work you are doing. In the US, whether that’s as a W-2 employee, a 1099 contractor, a K-1 owner, or something else, the point is that you are being paid for your work. 

In the US, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) provides the minimum requirements that most employers have to follow. Similar to the federal minimum wage that is still set at $7.25 per hour, there is space to do more than the minimum requirements — a difference between what is mandatory and what is permissive​​. For worker-owners who are W-2 employees, this means that the NLRA covers the minimum collective bargaining rights for most non-management employees, but the “employer” can voluntarily recognize other “employees” as part of the union’s bargaining unit. For most worker co-ops, the preference seems to be that everyone is included in the bargaining unit (often with a rotating role of “management” if needed), which works so long as no one files an NLRB complaint.

However, if an NLRA-protected employee does file an objection to the inclusion of non-protected employees (i.e. management) into their bargaining unit, the employer would need to comply and any “management” would need to be excluded. One approach to include both sets of workers in the union would be to have two different bargaining units (one unit that fits within the NLRA requirements and another that does not). Another approach is simply excluding 1 person from the bargaining unit as a manager, then using the co-op’s bylaws/operational agreement to extend the benefits of the union contract to anyone outside of the bargaining unit.  

In addition, 1099 contractors and K-1 owners are most likely going to be outside of the NLRA minimum protections. (Traditional employers often exploit this loophole, such as FedEx classifying a driver as an “independent contractor” even though they wear a FedEx uniform, drive a FedEx truck and deliver FedEx packages.) Even though an employer isn’t legally required to collectively bargain with 1099 contractors and K-1 owners, it’s not prohibited if the employer voluntarily recognizes a bargaining unit.

Once you define who is in the union’s bargaining unit, you can sign union authorization cards, then your "manager" (however defined) will voluntarily recognize the union as the legal bargaining representative of the unit.

Then you can negotiate a collective bargaining agreement (union contract), which can be as simple or complex as you'd like to define the working conditions and rights of workers at your co-op.