Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

On Oct. 27, the United Steelworkers announced an agreement with Mondragon International to move toward establishment of manufacturing cooperatives in the United States and Canada.

Maybe this agreement represents a symbolic gesture that will not generate any significant economic benefits. Maybe it represents a step in the evolution of a new institutional form for the modern manufacturing firm.

It certainly represents a new direction for the American labor movement.

The United Steelworkers is the largest industrial union in the United States, with 1.2 million workers. Its ranks have been devastated by the decline in domestic steel production, and it now represents workers in a variety of industries, including health and education.

With almost 100,000 workers, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (M.C.C.) is the seventh largest business group in Spain and the world’s largest workers’ cooperative. Its diverse enterprises, including manufacturing firms, a university, retail shops and financial institutions, are not only worker-owned; they are also democratically managed on the principle of one worker, one vote.

Unions have long been suspicious of worker-ownership proposals intended to co-opt organizing campaigns or as last-ditch efforts to rescue failing companies. But unions also have a long history of collaboration with worker co-ops, based on a broad set of shared values — commitments to democracy and solidarity.

And worker ownership represents an alternative to ineffectual collective bargaining.

If an industry makes money producing something of lasting value, workers want to bargain for a larger share of the pie. If an industry moves jobs overseas or pursues short-run financial profit, there may be no local pie to bargain over.

The United Steelworkers’ leadership has long been critical of business as usual in the United States. The union helped found a Blue-Green Alliance in collaboration with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, and strongly supports greater public spending on energy conservation and sustainable energy technology.

The proposed Mondragon collaboration grew out of a United Steelworkers partnership with a Spanish wind turbine firm, Gamesa, to refit steel plants in Pennsylvania for wind-turbine manufacture. Mondragon could provide the organizational expertise and help raise the venture capital necessary to expand such initiatives.

Expansion of worker-owned enterprises could potentially increase the demand for skilled manufacturing workers in so-called “green jobs.”

Why not just sit back and wait for conventional investors?

Firms that aim only to maximize shareholder profit may be slow to move into risky investments that promise a high social as well as private rate of return. Such firms don’t stand to gain financially by improving the environment or creating local jobs.

Can worker cooperatives successfully expand in this day and age? This question is harder to answer. Commitments to democracy and solidarity can be frayed by the sharp edge of economic reality. But co-ops may be better than conventional firms at riding out hard times, and Mondragon has proved remarkably resilient.

The announcement of the steelworkers’ initiative sent me scurrying into economics textbooks and journal articles to ferret out research on these issues. I’ll report on that venture next week, perhaps from the nearby Leverett-Shutesbury Village Co-op coffee shop.