A Sustainable

Design/Build

Co-operative

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Why is a Worker Co-op good for our clients?

• Our workers are vested in the projects.
• Due to higher retention than most midsize companies, our workers have more focused training.
• With workers profit sharing in the company, they have living wages that make them healthier and more attentive.
• With all workers looking out for losses in efficiency, projects get completed on time.
• The client can feel good that their project is creating full time living wage jobs.

Why is a Worker Co-op good for Prospect Development and Construction and Prospect Architecture?

• Combine our work into one company.
• Ownership leads to respect for fellow workers and the work that we are committed to.
• Profit Sharing.
• Better way of living together and with the environment.
• Increased quality of work.
• More emphasis on training existing employees than hiring outside help.
• Better training creates safer job sites.

Cornerstones of our shared Business values.

• Shared Ownership
• Cultivating Workplace democracy
• Challenging the gospel of growth
• Celebrating the spirit of craft
• Practicing community entrepreneurism

Worker Cooperative

At its core, climate change is not a technical problem.  It’s about how we live, what we value, and how we organize our economy to serve our lifestyles and values.  To change our relationship to the Earth we must change our relationships to one another.”  

John Abrams, ‘Companies We Keep’.

Prospect Development and Construction is in a multiyear transition to a full worker co-op that started in 2012.  We will be the first construction industry based Worker Co-op in NYC.  This combined with our mission to promote and build low energy buildings makes us a very unique construction company offering our clients projects that are healthy, sustainable, energy efficient, and socially responsible.

What is a Worker Co-op?

A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and democratically managed by its worker-owners. This control may be exercised in a number of ways. A cooperative enterprise may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which managers and administration is elected by every worker-owner, and finally it can refer to a situation in which managers are considered, and treated as, workers of the firm. In traditional forms of worker cooperative, all shares are held by the workforce with no outside or consumer owners, and each member has one voting share. In practice, control by worker-owners may be exercised through individual, collective or majority ownership by the workforce, or the retention of individual, collective or majority voting rights (exercised on a one-member one-vote basis).  A worker cooperative, therefore, has the characteristic that the majority of its workforce own shares, and the majority of shares are owned by the workforce.