The first thing that strikes an observer of the cooperative movement [in the 1980s] is that its participants are young (average age 27.7 years), educated (51% have college degrees, and an additional 34% have some college), and white (93%). In short, the movement is a distinctly white middle-class phenomenon; the low salaries and erratic uncertain career paths exclude, by self-selection, most minorities and all but a handful of those from working-clads origins. This movement is one of the direct successors of the social upheavals of the late 1960s which were largely middle-class based — specifically, the antiwar, university reform, and counterculture movements.

— Worker Cooperatives in America by Robert Jackall, Henry M. Levin