We are primarily small scale, “mom and pop” enterprises, where the workers are the owners. We also welcome large scale worker cooperatives, as long as the majority of workers are owners, and vice-versa. Our goal is to enable an economy where people are doing what they love, under the conditions that work best for them. We want to minimize the extraction by external corporations. We want to maximize the circulation of value generated by workers, and the places in which they live, back to those workers and living environments and communities.

Worker cooperatives are defined by the International Cooperative Alliance as meeting the following criteria:

1. They have the objective of creating and maintaining sustainable jobs and generating wealth, to improve the quality of life of the worker-members, dignify human work, allow workers' democratic self-management and promote community and local development.
2. The free and voluntary membership of their members, in order to contribute with their personal work and economic resources, is conditioned by the existence of workplaces.
3. As a general rule, work shall be carried out by the members. This implies that the majority of the workers in a given worker cooperative enterprise are members and vice versa.
4. The worker-members' relation with their cooperative shall be considered as different from that of conventional wage-based labor and to that of autonomous individual work.
5. Their internal regulation is formally defined by regimes that are democratically agreed upon and accepted by the worker-members.
6. They shall be autonomous and independent, before the State and third parties, in their labor relations and management, and in the usage and management of the means of production

We Do Not Accept:

1. No corporations like Walmart. That excludes both chain businesses, like Chipotle, where the parent company owns each location, and franchise business like McDonald's, where different stores or branches are owned by separate individuals. Both are not eligible, because the workers are not the owners.
2. No corporations pretending to be a co-op. For example, “REI Coop” is misusing the word. They are not a worker cooperative. They are just a company that offers the consumers a membership, just for discount, like Costco or Sam's club.
3. No criminal enterprise, obviously, but there are gray areas like marijuana, which is legal in Michigan but not by federal law. However we don't know of any marijuana companies that are worker-owned.