Stewart Perry and Raymond Russell's classic Collecting Garbage about the worker cooperative Sunset Scavenger is previewable online and available inexpensively used (especially previous editions titled San Francisco's Scavengers).   Sunset Scavenger held a monopoly on the San Francisco's refuse collection for over 50 years before selling to a larger corporation in the 1970s as the industry changed from personal to automated relationships with clients.

Joel Schoening has a thorough retrospective on the demutualized business in the Oregon Historical Quarterly's Fall 2010 edition. 

"Over the next twenty years, the cooperative they created faced its share of organizational and financial struggles, and they made some modifications, both to Burley's original product line and to its organizational structure. Through it all, the cooperative's worker-owners made every attempt to remain true to its fundamentals — making bicycling products under conditions of equal pay, equal ownership, equal distribution of profits, and equal voice in management, while retaining a social and environmental conscience. Grounded in these fundamentals, Burley grew to become a model of successful workplace democracy and one of the United States' largest manufacturing cooperatives, with one hundred full, voting members and nearly $10 million in annual sales.

"Such prominence, however, was not Burley's goal, and it arrived surprisingly quickly. In fact, it came as such a surprise that the cooperative struggled to accommodate the growth. In that struggle, Burley failed to anticipate and understand the end of its growth spurt or the fundamental changes occurring in the surrounding economy. In 2006, after nearly thirty years of cooperative manufacturing, Burley was on the brink of collapse as its competitors moved manufacturing to unregulated and lower-cost markets overseas."

via tandemgeek

A 2010 thesis paper by Christopher Wright at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Worker cooperatives have a long and tortured history, but recently they have been advancing globally on a more stable foundation than before. In this essay I provide a theoretical context for the current growth of cooperatives, drawing on Marxist theory to illuminate their potential. I also consider the sociology and economics of worker cooperatives, in addition to expounding and evaluating their history in the United States. A case-study of a cooperative printing press in Jamaica Plain gives a more intimate portrayal of worker co-ops, and hopefully provides lessons for future cooperators. I interpret society as on the cusp of a triumphant advance of cooperativism; the main purpose of this essay is to explain how and why this advance will occur.

As a tangental nod to the emergence of the Occupy protests and their spontaneous democratic structures, here's Peter Watkins' epic (5 hour) docudrama, popular education ensemble theater, and anachronistic media critique, La Commune, Paris 1871.   The worker cooperatives begin to organize late in hour 3, though of course the excerpt is more meaningful if you've been following the tale for a while.    

Here 's a taste, where "CommuneTV" interviews Parisians behind the barricades to find out what their demands are.

"La Commune is the name given to the French revolutionary government established by the people of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). On March 17 and 18, Parisians led an uprising against the national government, which fled the capital and re-established itself in Versailles. The radicals established a proletarian government in Paris, called the Central Committee of the National Guard, and set March 26 as the date for the election of a municipal council. This council became known as the Commune of 1871, and its members as Communards. Most Communards were followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, a revolutionary held prisoner in Versailles by the head of the National Assembly, Adolphe Thiers. Other Communards supported the school of socialism expounded by the French philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon and members of the International Workingmen's Association, of which Karl Marx was then a corresponding secretary.

For the film LA COMMUNE we travel back in time to 1871. A journalist for Versailles Television broadcasts a soothing and official view of events while a Commune television is set up to provide the perspectives of the Paris rebels. On a stage-like set, more than 200 actors interpret characters of the Commune, especially the Popincourt neighborhood in the XIth arrondissement. They voice their own thoughts and feelings concerning the social and political reforms. The telling of this story rests primarily on depicting the people of the Commune, and those who suppressed them.

Deliberately, this film is an attempt to challenge existing notions of documentary film, as well as the notions of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity' so beloved by the mass media today. The film is not intended as an apologia on behalf of the Paris Commune. But at the same time, it attempts to show that the Paris Commune, for all its human frailty, its internal conflicts and its blundering, was an event of major importance, not least because of the way in which its leading reformers tried to work with social process, by a direct involvement with the community and its needs."

Roscoe Caron, former member of the Hoedads, reflects in Eugene's  Register-Guard. 

"At this moment of high unemployment, it may be instructive to look back on an earlier hard time in Oregon. In the early to mid-1970s, Oregon’s unemployment rate ranged from more than 6 percent to close to 9 percent. Yet during this time, a Eugene worker-owned company was born and within a few years was among Lane County’s top 10 payrolls. It became a private sector version of the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

The Hoedads began in 1971 as a 20-person partnership. Two years later, when it became Hoedads Co-op Inc., it had expanded to 13 work crews employing close to 300 people — all during a severe recession. The Hoedads did reforestation work in every state west of the Rockies, including Alaska. In addition to planting trees, Hoedads fought forest fires, built hiking trails, restored watersheds, performed technical forestry work, collected seed cones, did precommercial thinning, and built campgrounds, fences and bridges.

Hoedads advocated for the right for women to work in the woods, formed a crew of Mexican-American workers and an all-women crew, and fought in the Oregon Legislature against the rampant use of herbicides. The Hoedads also lobbied extensively at the national and state levels for increased funds for reforestation, for worker safety and for the promotion of sustainable forestry practices.

In Eugene, Hoedads provided loans and grants to many local alternative businesses — from providing initial operating expenses for the WOW Hall to providing startup money for cooperative businesses — including restaurants, auto repair shops, wholesale food suppliers and construction companies. Hoedads also provided financial resources to environmental groups and a number of new community-based agencies.

Additionally, Hoedads spawned a dozen other forestry cooperatives in the Pacific Northwest, providing the business management and forestry skill training ground for many of those other worker-owned enterprises. The Hoedads also served as a role model for the national worker cooperative movement of the 1970s. Hoedads earned the respect of people throughout the United States for putting their ideals into practice.

The O&O Supermarkets were a series of worker cooperatives in the Philadelphia area in the 1980s.  The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1357, in partnership with Philadelphia Area Cooperative Enterprise (PACE), organized the first two stores in 1982 as part of a negotiation to keep the stores from being shut down by A&P.  Three other buy-outs followed, and one supermarket was started from scratch with city support.    At peak in 1987, there were s