Spotlight: CPL Concordia

CPL Concordia is a worker cooperative in Concordia sulla Secchia, near Modena, Italy. It builds and runs energy infrastructure: gas and water networks, heating systems for hospitals and public buildings, district heating, solar installations and, more recently, hydrogen refueling stations. It has about 1,800 employees and reported 372 million euros in revenue in 2025. It is one of the largest and oldest worker-owned companies anywhere, and a useful answer to the question of whether the co-op model works past a certain size.

The basics

• Founded: 1899
• Headquarters: Concordia sulla Secchia, Modena, Italy
• Ownership: worker cooperative. Members are employees who buy a share and get one vote each
• Size: 1,826 employees at the end of 2025
• Revenue: 372.6 million euros in 2025, with 9 million euros in profit
• Known for: gas network construction, energy management for public buildings, district heating, solar and hydrogen projects

How it started

On April 23, 1899, 382 laborers in Concordia signed the founding charter of a workers' association. Most of them could not read. Each pledged 30 lire for a share. The work was earthmoving: digging canals, reclaiming marshland, building roads. By the early 1900s the cooperative had around 1,500 members.

The company changed its trade twice. In the 1960s, as road work dried up, it moved into building methane gas distribution networks and went on to build more than 200 of them across Italy. In the 1970s and 80s it added heat management and cogeneration. Today energy services are the core of the business.

How the ownership works

Not every employee is an owner. CPL has a membership base of a few hundred worker-members alongside a larger group of regular employees. A 2025 documentary reported around 750 member-shareholders out of roughly 2,000 total staff. Employees can apply to become members after working there, and membership means buying a share in the cooperative.

Members have real power. The general assembly of members elects the board of directors, and each member has one vote regardless of role or seniority. The board elects the chairman and appoints a general director who runs day-to-day operations. That split, between an elected board and a hired manager, was formalized in a governance overhaul in 2015 and 2016.

In practice that means the workers who own the company decide who leads it and how much leadership is paid. When a journalist asked a call center worker how she would feel if the president earned 300 times her pay, her answer was that she would vote for someone else.

Why it is on this blog

Most worker co-ops people can name are small: a bakery, a bike shop, a print shop. CPL Concordia is a 1,800-person engineering and construction company competing for public contracts against conventional firms. It has survived two world wars, a fascist government that suppressed cooperatives, and the 2008 financial crisis. It publishes annual financial statements and a sustainability report like any listed company would.

It also shows the model at its most ordinary. Most people there are engineers, technicians, project managers and call center staff doing normal jobs. The difference is who the company answers to.

What Italy does differently

CPL did not grow this large on its own. Italy's constitution has recognized cooperatives since 1948, every cooperative pays 3 percent of profits into a fund that seeds new ones, and a 1985 law called the Marcora law lets workers buy out a failing company and run it as a co-op. Cooperatives make up about a fifth of the economy in Emilia-Romagna, the region where CPL is based.

None of that exists at the same scale in the United States, which is part of why American worker co-ops tend to stay small. If you want to see what the model looks like at industrial scale, this is one of the clearest examples.

Worth knowing before you apply

CPL hires across Italy, with offices in Modena, Florence, Fano and Sant'Omero, and posts openings on its own careers page. Roles are mostly in engineering, plant maintenance, project management and energy services. Membership is not automatic with employment; it is a separate step after you join.

If you are in the United States, the closest comparisons on our platform are the worker cooperatives and employee-owned companies we list. Read our explainer on worker cooperatives for how the model works here.