WHO WE ARE

About Us

COVID19 Team Photo

About Us

How do we ensure that our jobs are safe, satisfying, and secure in the 21st century? In what ways can working people effectively shift power in a rapidly changing economy? How do we create digital tools and communities for employees to share information, form collectives, and advocate for change? How do we prevent employers from dismantling hard-won labor and employment rights through increasingly sophisticated employer surveillance, data mining, and the fissuring of the workplace? At Coworker.org, we deploy digital tools, data, and strategies in service of helping people improve their work lives. Coworker.org is a laboratory for workers to experiment with power-building strategies and win meaningful changes in the 21st century economy. 

At Coworker, we invest in the brilliance of workers like you by hosting and promoting your workplace petition campaigns, prototyping fresh ideas for wielding influence in your companies and industries, researching answers to questions you pose to us about your working conditions, and leveraging our vast network of workers in a wide variety of industries to reveal new insights, analysis, and data about what’s happening in our economy. We support the leadership and vision of working people to imagine, design, and create our collective future.

Coworker.org is a nonprofit organization fiscally sponsored by the New Venture Fund. Contributions are tax deductible. If you have an idea to improve your workplace and are looking for support, or if you have a press inquiry, you can reach us at [email protected]. You can also contact individual campaign leaders through their petition pages.

To support our work, click here to make a tax-deductible contribution.

To give you a sense of the breadth and scope of our current work, Coworker.org staff are involved in the following projects:

  • Assisting drag performers in San Francisco who are campaigning to get clubs to pay, at a minimum, a $40 flat booking fee to all performers
  • Partnering with media organizations to gather information from workers at companies like Starbucks, Apple, and American Airlines about third-party benefits administrators and their impact on workers forced to interface with them to access benefits like workers’ comp.
  • Supporting the leadership of Rylinda Rhodes, former Comcast call center employee, who’s gone on to receive a Wayfinder Fellowship and funding from the TimesUp Legal Fund as part of her campaign to address sexual harassment in call centers
  • Partnering with a financial institution to launch a mutual aid fund to support workers in the tech industry engaged in workplace organizing

Our process is informed by experience.

Coworker is guided by nationally-recognized leaders.

team member headshot

Michelle Miller

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

team member headshot

Jess Kutch

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

team member headshot

Michelle Miller

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

Michelle Miller

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

Michelle takes the lead on organizational development and fundraising. She also engages partners, allies and researches on questions related to the economy, technology and the future of the labor movement. She shares responsibility with Jess on strategic planning, programming and organizational growth. Michelle has published research and analysis on labor market impacts of technology in partnership with the Roosevelt Institute and the Century Foundation. In 2015, Michelle was proud to join President Barack Obama as co-moderator of the first ever Town Hall on Worker Voice, bringing the voices of workers directly to the White House. Before co-founding Coworker.org, Michelle spent a decade at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) where she used creative media and the arts to advance union campaigns. She is on the boards of Arts and Democracy and the Brooklyn Institute For Social Research, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
team member headshot

Jess Kutch

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

Jess Kutch

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

Jess Kutch is the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Coworker.org. Jess has more than 15 years’ experience innovating at the intersection of technology and social change, building platforms and digital campaigns to shift power and win change. She is a TED Fellow, an Echoing Green Global Fellow, a J.M.K. Innovation Prize winner, and an Aspen Institute Job Quality Fellow. She lives with her family in Asheville, North Carolina.

We’re humans, just like you. Together we can transform workplaces and the world.

Our Team - Join The Team

The Coworker team is a motivated group of individuals here to help you effect positive change. We’re here to listen, to question, to advise, and to support.

Our Team - Join The Team

We are a peer-based platform designed to support workers of all kinds.

The workplace is constantly evolving — and so is Coworker.org. We experiment. We reflect. We ask “Why?” And then we do it all over again.

about us line@2x

Featured Projects

STARBUCKS EMPLOYEES

Thousands of Starbucks employees around the world have used Coworker’s resources to call for improvements in their workplaces.

COWORKER SOLIDARITY FUND

Coworker is working to launch a crowdfunded mutual aid fund.

GIG ECONOMY

Coworker is a place for continued innovation to ensure that the future of work is fair for workers.

Stay in the loop.

When you share your email address with us, we'll send you news about workers using Coworker.org to make positive change in your industry, resources for improving your workplace, and occasional surveys. (Read the full terms and conditions here.)