Business

Power To The People! Zingerman's Deli Will Become A Workers' Co-Op

June 18, 2014, 8:16 PM

Featured_imgres_13099

In the next few years, Zingerman's deli in Ann Arbor plans to adopt a radical business model, becoming a worker cooperative, where its 600-plus employees will own the company and influence its direction, reports Richard Feloni in Business Insider.

Zingerman's has long been an outlier when it comes to business practice, Feloni notes, but this is a true transformation.

A worker co-op is an old business model that has seen renewed interest post-recession due to a lack of investors creating jobs in communities. But Zingerman's has been focused on getting its employees to think like owners long before hard economic times.

One of the tenets of modern cooperatives, open-book management, has been in effect at Zingerman's for 20 years. It is a management philosophy founded on the idea that even the lowest-level employee will work better if they know how the company is doing financially and should have a stake in its success.

Weinzweig and cofounder Paul Saginaw have a vision for what Zingerman's will be in the year 2020: It will consist of 12 to 18 businesses in the Ann Arbor area, each managed by partners, and will be owned and partially controlled by employees.

 


Read more:  Business Insider


Leave a Comment:

Photo Of The Day