Job Retention and Ensuring Business Continuity through Workers’ Buyouts: The REWIND Project Experience

When businesses face closure, bankruptcy, or relocation, workers are often the first to bear the consequences. Factories shut down, offices empty, and communities lose vital sources of income and stability. But what if employees could step in not only as workers, but as also owners?

This is the promise of Workers Buyouts (WBOs). Also known as employee takeovers, WBOs allow staff to purchase all or part of their company to keep it alive, preserve jobs, and maintain continuity. Most often, these buyouts are structured as cooperatives, transforming traditional top-down hierarchies into democratic enterprises where decision-making is shared and profits reinvested in the community. Unlike management buyouts, which are usually limited to executives, WBOs are inclusive: they give the majority of workers a real stake and a voice. This inclusiveness makes them powerful tools for fairness, workplace democracy, and resilience.

The REWIND Project: Background and Objectives

To unlock this potential, the European Union launched REWIND (Relaunching Enterprises through Workers’ Innovation and New Dynamics). The project was created to promote WBOs as a practical solution for job retention and business continuity across Europe.

Its mission is clear: to empower workers to take over enterprises facing closure or crisis and turn them into sustainable, democratic cooperatives that preserve employment and strengthen employee participation. To do this, REWIND focuses on three key goals.

First, it works to prevent business closures and layoffs by enabling workers to purchase and manage companies at risk. Second, it equips employees with the tools they need to succeed as cooperative owners offering tailored training, digital learning opportunities, and confidence-building resources. Third, it engages policymakers with guidelines and recommendations to improve the legislative, financial, and educational frameworks that make WBOs viable.

REWIND’s approach is comprehensive. It supports workers and employees directly affected by business closures or ownership transfers, while also assisting entrepreneurs who want to preserve their company’s legacy through cooperative succession. The project reaches vocational and adult training providers, encouraging them to integrate cooperative entrepreneurship into lifelong learning. And it collaborates closely with trade unions, cooperative federations, and policymakers, actors who are critical in building supportive ecosystems that include legislation, funding mechanisms, and early-warning systems.

Benchmarking Across Europe: Disparities and Common Challenges

One of REWIND’s most significant contributions has been its comparative research across six countries: Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. Through desk research and interviews with 31 stakeholders, the project examined how WBOs are understood, supported, and implemented in different contexts.

The findings revealed stark disparities. In Italy, France, and Spain, WBOs enjoy strong traditions, supportive legal frameworks, and well-established cooperative ecosystems. Italy, for example, has backed worker takeovers since the 1980s, with institutions such as Legacoop, Coopfond, and Cooperazione Finanza Impresa (CFI) offering financing, training, and legal advice. France’s SCOP model (Sociétés Coopératives et Participatives) has strong legal recognition and institutional support. Spain combines worker cooperatives with sociedades laborales, backed by regional policies.

In contrast, Belgium, Greece, and Sweden present a different picture. Belgium has seen small-scale successes, such as Retritech, but lacks comprehensive policies or strong awareness campaigns. Greece’s famous case of Vio.Me illustrates resilience but also the challenges of operating in a weak policy environment with complex property laws. Sweden has only a handful of examples, such as Facit AB and Vaggeryd Textile Factory, with little recognition of the model and limited access to financing.

What emerges is a divided landscape. Southern Europe benefits from cooperative funds, guarantees, and supportive legislation, while in Northern Europe, cooperatives are often seen as risky, and support systems are thin or fragmented. Across the board, workers face cultural barriers, limited training opportunities, and emotional strain when taking on ownership.

The message is clear: Europe needs a more unified framework if WBOs are to succeed beyond isolated national models.

Key Lessons and Policy Recommendations from REWIND

The research and consultations carried out by the REWIND project revealed that while Workers Buyouts (WBOs) are powerful tools for saving jobs and businesses, they cannot succeed in isolation. They depend on ecosystems that bring together training, awareness, legal recognition, financial support, and proactive policy intervention.

One of the clearest lessons concerns training. Transitioning from employee to cooperative owner requires a new set of skills financial literacy, risk management, strategic leadership, and digital know-how. Yet across Europe, training provision remains inconsistent, often limited to short-term initiatives rather than the continuous, flexible learning environments that workers need to succeed both during and after the transition.

Cultural and legal barriers also emerged as a recurring theme. In some countries, cooperatives are still seen as a “second-choice” model, with skepticism from both workers and banks. Legal frameworks vary widely from supportive laws in Italy and Spain to the near invisibility of WBOs in Sweden making access to ownership transfers uneven and, in some cases, nearly impossible. Without stronger and more harmonised recognition, the potential of WBOs will remain underutilised.

Timing is another critical factor. Too often, WBOs are attempted only when companies are already in collapse, leaving employees with too few resources to rescue them. Stakeholders consistently stressed the need for early-warning systems to identify risks and enable interventions before a crisis becomes irreversible.

Perhaps most importantly, REWIND underlined that WBOs are not just an economic mechanism they represent a civil economy model. They prioritise people over profit, embed sustainability in business practices, and ensure that wealth stays anchored in local communities. In doing so, they challenge the excesses of profit-driven capitalism and propose a fairer, people-centred way of doing business.

To respond to these challenges, the REWIND consortium developed a set of guidelines and policy recommendations designed to close the gaps and create a more enabling ecosystem. These guidelines serve three purposes: they inform stakeholders, ensuring workers, entrepreneurs, and advisors see WBOs as a real option; they guide policymakers, offering concrete measures at both national and EU level; and they inspire practitioners, equipping cooperative federations, trainers, and consultants with tools to support worker-led transitions.

The recommendations call for greater awareness of WBOs through targeted campaigns and the promotion of success stories, embedding them firmly in succession planning practices. They also urge the integration of cooperative entrepreneurship into education and training systems, from vocational schools to lifelong learning, with peer-to-peer mentoring as a central tool.

At the policy and ecosystem level, the guidelines highlight the importance of partnerships between public authorities, cooperative federations, trade unions, and civil society. They stress the need to expand access to financial instruments such as cooperative investment funds, risk guarantees, and tax incentives, while also encouraging territorial alliances to ensure communities remain invested in sustaining cooperative enterprises.

Equally important is the call for democratic and inclusive governance within WBOs themselves—structures that are transparent, accountable, gender-balanced, and diverse. Finally, the guidelines advocate for the establishment of early-warning mechanisms and the training of public authorities to coordinate crisis responses effectively, providing workers with technical assistance and coaching during the critical transition from employee to owner.

Together, these lessons and recommendations form a roadmap for action. They show that with the right support, WBOs can move from being rare exceptions to becoming a mainstream pillar of Europe’s social economy, ensuring job retention, business continuity, and fairer economic futures for communities across the continent.

What REWIND Offers

Beyond policy advice, Beyond research and policy recommendations,REWIND delivers practical tools to help workers, educators, and policymakers act. The project developed tailored training modules covering entrepreneurship, cooperative governance, ICT innovation, and sustainable business transformation. It created an interactive eLearning platform for self-directed and lifelong learning, and a collaborative co-working space to foster peer-to-peer exchange and problem-solving. These resources are freely available:

• Explore the Training Plans
• Visit the eLearning Platform
• Access the Collaborative Platform
• Read the Full Guidelines

Through these tools, REWIND ensures that WBOs are not abstract ideals but practical realities. Workers gain the knowledge they need, educators receive ready-to-use materials, and policymakers have evidence-based strategies at their disposal.

Conclusion 

The REWIND project demonstrates that Workers Buyouts are not just about saving jobs they are about transforming the way businesses operate. They empower workers, preserve local economies, and embed democratic values in the heart of enterprise.

But for WBOs to reach their full potential, Europe cannot rely solely on the strong ecosystems of Italy, France, and Spain while leaving other countries behind. A unified EU framework is urgently needed, one that harmonizes legislation, ensures access to finance, integrates cooperative entrepreneurship into education, and establishes early-warning systems across Member States.

With such a framework, WBOs could move from being a niche solution to a mainstream pillar of Europe’s social economy, helping to build a fairer, more sustainable, and more resilient future.

 Stay connected on LinkedIn: REWIND Project

Learn more at https://rewindproject.net/ 

Consortium Partners

	Sc’opara – France
	SPEHA FRESIA SC – Italy
	IDEC – Greece
	DISRUPTIA, S.L.U. – Spain
	ELDERBERRY AB – Sweden
	CEC – Acting for Social Inclusion – Belgium

Article author : Cec _Acting for Social Inclusion