This is the third article in NPQ’s series, Solidarity Economies: Building Community Power. Coproduced with the New Economy Coalition—a coalition of over 100 organizations building the solidarity economy in the United States—this series highlights case studies of solidarity economy ecosystems that are returning wealth and building grassroots power in cities across the country.

Spanish language version, translated by María Luisa Rosal and edited by Lila Arnaud, members of the BanchaLenguas Language Justice Collective is available here. Versión en español, traducido por María Luisa Rosal y eidtado por Lila Arnaud, integrantes de la Colective de justicia de lenguaje BanchaLenguas está acesible aquí).

The summer of 2023 was Los Angeles’s “hot labor summer.” Rolling strikes by hotel and airport workers disrupted conventions and airport concessions in the city’s busy tourist season. The Hollywood writers’ strike expanded as film and television actors also left the job in July. Less noticed, at the same time, other workers in Los Angeles were organizing for worker ownership—pushing back against inequity, gentrification, and the gig economy by collectively creating their own jobs and meeting community needs. 

Those workers are concentrated in a wide range of service industries where wage theft has proven to be a reliable business model and enforcement of labor rights is rare. And often, immigrant workers and workers of color are most directly impacted. Their movement toward a solidarity economy is where L.A. Co-op Lab comes in.

Formed in 2015, L.A. Co-op Lab was created to explore and invent ways to build Los Angeles’s capacity for worker ownership as a pathway toward a more equitable and democratic economy. When we began, worker co-ops in Los Angeles were unheard of; now, they are increasingly common.

As a long-time volunteer for the L.A. Co-op Lab, our story, in short, is about a solidarity economy ecosystem in development. There are some key lessons that we have learned: 1) link with national organizations (a national loan pool has been particularly helpful); 2) create “open door” processes for workers to propose new co-op ideas; 3) provide spaces for peer learning and information sharing; and 4) join with others (in our case, immigrant worker centers) to expand scale and capacity.