Workers’ buy-outs (hereafter: WBO) achieve the recovery of a company in crisis or insolvency through the involvement of workers who take over and continue its activity, resulting in a real ‘regeneration’. This strategy is fully in line with the debate on Corporate Social Responsibility and the ESG profiles of sustainability, and it becomes even more relevant in the current paradigm shift towards circular economy. In particular, WBO succeed in crossing the two main lines of development of modern (European) business crisis law: the demand for social and economic sustainability, on the one hand, and the incentive to preserve business continuity, on the other hand. Furthermore, the new attitude of cooperative enterprises to play a crucial role in the social and economic development of a territory is also improved, also through the support of employment and the regeneration of distressed enterprises. Moreover, it is also a matter of carrying out the idea of placing the rights of the individual as such at the center of regulatory policy options, with regard to the law of the enterprise and the enterprise in crisis, in a human-centred logic that could be at risk of being diluted in the purely capitalist and profit-oriented perspective. The rights of the individual that come into consideration are not only the right to work and to work in dignity, but also to the full expression of one’s personality. In this framework, the analysis of the WBO proceeds through a brief overview of three different WBO dynamics: respectively the so-called conflictual one, the negotiated one and the one based on Employee Stock Ownership Plans; finally, a focus on the Italian legislation is provided as a relevant case study.