A Cautionary Tale From The US Federation Of Worker Co-ops

An interview with Rebecca Kemble.

In this episode of Punchcard, we speak to Rebecca Kemble, an experienced cooperator from the US, who is a member of Union Cabs Worker Cooperative in Madison and co-founder of the Solidarity Economy Principles Project. From 2009-2016 Rebecca was a member of the board of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and in late 2024, Rebecca penned an article pointing a finger at the Federation for having drifted away from its grassroots cooperative movement origins, by centralising power and becoming unaccountable to the cooperatives that it claims to represent. In response to the Federations shift Rebecca and others have developed the Solidarity Economy Principles Project. The project was founded to help guide and ground organisations in cooperative practices & principles to avoid them going the same way as the US Federation. To hear the full story, listen to episode 5 of Punchcard – A Warning From The US Federation of Worker Coops w/ Rebecca Kemble. Additional resources

• Back to Basics: Aligning Our National Organizations with Co-op Principles – by Rebecca Kemble
• Remembering the Democracy at Work Network | GEO Live #18 w/ Jim Johnson and John McNamara
• Mapping Our Futures: Economics and Governance Curriculum by Elandria Williams, Susan Williams and Samir Hazboun

Transcript

Caleb Elliott: Welcome everyone to the first live recording of PUNCHCARD. Thank you for coming. A nice amount of people. And hopefully, this won’t be the last. We shall see. And so today, I’ll be speaking to Rebecca Kemble. Rebecca is a taxi driver and member of Union Cab Workers Cooperative, through which she got involved in the US Federation of Worker Coops, serving as a board member between 2009 and 2016. In 2024 – so this year – the 20th anniversary of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, Rebecca wrote an article outlining the history of the US Federation and how it has moved away from its collectivist and democratic roots. Since stepping down from the board, she has co-founded the Solidarity Economy Principles Project and focused on developing local cooperative networks in Madison. Rebecca, welcome to Punch Card.

Rebecca Kemble: Thank you very much.

Caleb Elliott: So first question I like to ask is for the listeners who might be newer to worker cooperatives is can you explain in your own words what a work of cooperative is?

Rebecca Kemble: To me, a worker cooperative is a business that is owned democratically and equally by its members and ideally managed democratically by its members. That is, every single worker owns an equal share of the business, and every single worker has an equal vote in at least electing its board of directors if not other aspects of the business. Worker cooperatives aren’t really powerful unless they’re connected to other worker co-ops, to other cooperatives, and to larger solidarity economy movements when they can be truly transformative of social conditions in the community. Because ultimately, when you ask me, “what is a worker cooperative?”, I really like what Jose Arizmendiarietta said, that worker cooperative entities are the vehicles to develop cooperative humans. And that’s basically what we need. We need humans to be cooperative in all areas of our life. And the worker cooperative enterprise is the vehicle through which we can do that.

Caleb Elliott: And that will very much tie into what we’re talking about later. So looking back at your life, what were some of the early experiences that formed your political outlook and kind of led you on this path?

Rebecca Kemble: Well, I grew up in a family..I grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut, which is on the east coast of the United States to a family who were..they were organic farmers and they were social activists and active in social movements, in peace movements, in racial justice movements and economic justice movements. I was daughter number four in a family of five children. And my parents’ ethic of sharing hospitality, care of the land, care for the water, care for community was just the air I breathed. So I thank my parents for raising me as they did. I knew about cooperation as a value, as a practice. My family was involved in a food buying club where neighbors would take turns going to the wholesale market in the nearby city and bringing food in and sharing that food and also sharing the food we grew. As I became a young teenager actually I got involved in the no nukes movement in the late 70s, as well as international solidarity with the people of El Salvador and Nicaragua as they were in struggle in revolutionary conditions against US backed dictatorships in their countries and so did direct actions. I didn’t personally travel to those countries, but my sisters did and we were all very involved in those movements.

Caleb Elliott: So your whole family was very involved and very inspirational for you I would say. Well, would you say so?

Rebecca Kemble: Like I said, it was the era. It was just the culture. It was how you humaned, you know, in community was to be in solidarity, to care for the land, to care for each other.

Caleb Elliott: And was there a big network of that? Like was everybody you knew kind of like that or were you the outliers?

Rebecca Kemble: We..the community we lived in was..it was rural but also kind of suburban to the city of Hartford, which was at the time the insurance capital of the US. So there were insurance executives and there was sort of middle class culture in the town. So in the public schools, we felt very different I would say. Like one of the things I remember as a kid was taking our lunch to school and everyone else had the soft white bread sandwiches and I had this wheat multigrain bread that my mother baked – like she never bought bread – and I just was so ashamed of that. I just wanted the white bread. And now as an adult, I’m baking bread and I’m like, you know, like, why did I ever, you know, complain about that? But so, yeah, like in the in the overculture, we were, yeah, we were outliers, but we connected through..my parents were Unitarian Universalists. So it was just..it was not a spiritual family in that way or a conventionally religious family. But what I learned from that was it’s really..it is important to be part of an organization if you want to collectively move. You can’t..it’s not enough to just have your values and do your own thing. Being part of an organization, be it, you know, a church or movement organization is really necessary..or a political organization to move collectively for for social transformation.

Caleb Elliott: Was university just the kind of the natural step after that? Or what you know..was that a choice you made?

Rebecca Kemble: Just felt like that’s what you do after high school. In my family, that’s what we did. We just went to university. I started off studying Latin American studies. Again, informed by that political work I had done and my family was involved in. My bachelor’s is from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. So I spent my last year at university at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. I ended up staying there, getting married there, starting my family there, having my first child there. And so for graduate school, when I applied for graduate school, my topic was the decolonization period in Kenya, specifically looking at how formal colonialism shifted into neo-colonialism and embraced like all of the same colonial or similar colonial policies and programs. Basically, 25% of the population of Kenya was put into labor camps, concentration camps, and put through a process known as “the pipeline” to renounce their atavistic identity as African people basically. It was just an incredible amount of violence, both physically and psychically that people went through during this decolonizing period. Anyways, that’s maybe too much but that really got me thinking about globally economics, globally economic relationships and how those sort of global powers like colonialism — how the very specific actions that had to happen on the ground in order to coerce people to be part of, you know, a transformed system in the way that global capital was shifting its methods, right?

So I became very aware in my oral history work and my archival history work of the very specific things, choices that people made, choices that government, people who worked in government, that settlers in Kenya made, that different classes of Kenyan people made, how the divides and conquers that happened. So that really spurred my imagination on to think about how those same dynamics happen all over the world in different ways and how people are located differently within that sort of global system of capital. In the year 2000, we came back to Madison and I was promised a job at the University of Wisconsin as a policy dean. So supporting students like in student academic affairs. I was staying with my sister and waiting for this other job to start. That was in June. That other job didn’t start until October. And my whole life, I’ve been working at jobs since I was 11 years old from delivering newspapers, to working on an orchard and a cider mill, and groundskeeping at golf courses. I’ve always been, you know, I’m kind of a workaholic, yeah. But working is also just part of like the culture that I grew up. So I couldn’t just sit there waiting until October.

And part of my earlier years, I had lived in Manhattan in New York City for a year and became fascinated with public transportation systems and taxi driving. And near my sister was this taxi company called Union Cab. I thought, I can just..let me go drive a cab for the summer until this other job starts. And I went there and I just loved the work. I was assigned a night shift driving from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. on the weekends, and I just loved driving. I loved the 5 to 30 minute interactions with people, I loved the mystery of you never know what your day is going to be like, what kind of journey you’re going to go on, what adventures you’ll have with whom, if you’re going to have to clean up puke, what’s going to happen today? It was just fascinating. And also that my brain has this — I’m very spatially oriented. So I loved having that map of the city in my brain and figuring out how to get places the most efficient way.

So I didn’t know anything about worker cooperatives at all or that Union Cab was one. I just knew I wanted a job to help support the household that I was living in with my sister. And after I got hired, the orientation process is there’s democracy orientation and all of this stuff, I was like, “Whoa, what is this?” I didn’t really understand it, but I thought it was cool in theory. And then several weeks later, the cooperative, which had a taxi division, a bus division and a paratransit division to vehicles that can carry wheelchairs..the bus and paratransit had gotten into contracts with the city and other agencies that were very exploitative, and they..we were actually losing money on that. So the co-op had to decide what do we do with these divisions? And so I was maybe 4 to 6 weeks into working at Union Cab and I was asked..I wasn’t even a member yet, I was on probation but I was asked and encouraged to participate in these assemblies, these member meetings of at the time I think we were about 180 or 190 members, worker owners, to decide about this $6 million a year business.

And I was just dumbfounded, like, what do I know about a taxi company? I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know how to read a balance sheet. I don’t know. I don’t know how to make these decisions. And yet they’re asking me to be part of this. And so there were a series of member meetings. And our membership, by the way, is very diverse — a lot of people who hadn’t even finished secondary school, people for whom English was a second language, just a great diversity of people. And yet at these meetings I was observing them all really debating on an equal basis, and everyone’s voice is being heard, some being more loud and obnoxious than others. It wasn’t really pretty like how it happened, but it happened that the collective made a decision to put an end to the paratransit and bus division but offer employment to the workers in those divisions in the taxi side. So nobody was laid off and, you know, made a plan about selling the asset, etc. And this was all done like collectively by the members and it just blew me away that people could trust each other to do that. Like, isn’t that what managers are for? Isn’t that what you hire a consultant to help you figure out? No, like we actually..so that was my first real felt experience in the power of collective self-determination.

Caleb Elliott: I want to ask a technical question. Did you use majority or did you use consensus or how was that decision actually like come to? Obviously, you said there were some like ferocious debates.

Rebecca Kemble: So it was..the debates happened amongst the general membership and proposals were made by the general membership and temperatures were taken. There wasn’t an official like tally of votes for this or this or this, but it was basically conversations that came up with a proposal that was..that most of the people could agree with. And then that got formalized at the board meeting, and the board unanimously passed a series of decisions that would implement the collective will of the membership.

Caleb Elliott: And I just wanted to get you to maybe reflect on how that was different to your previous jobs. You’ve kind of alluded to it somewhat, but if you could draw a more direct parallel.

Rebecca Kemble: Well, in previous jobs, I was..always..like I never had much seniority. I could type very fast so I could get office jobs. And I got an office job when I was working in New York City at an immigration lawyer’s office. I could also speak Spanish. So I like was a self-taught paralegal in immigration law. And I got treated like crap. And I worked in order to make my way through college. I did..I worked in law offices just because I had happened to fallen into that job. And in all those jobs, I got treated like crap. And I had no..I and my coworkers in the sort of secretarial and paralegal level and within law, law office hierarchies had no power at all. We were verbally abused and sometimes..and you know, our time was abused and it was just not a healthy or happy working environment. So I was surprised to, number one, get in a taxi and love the job and then number two, be actually engaged in creating the working conditions that we found ourselves in and helping to change them. And we did a lot of changing of our working conditions over, you know, over the past 24 years that I’ve been there. And again, that power of collective self-determination.

At one point, we had a deep crisis of management and not so much governance, but accountability. And there was a lot of harm happening between workers and at the time we had a general manager and they were in charge of sort of accountability and discipline and weren’t handling it. And so we took about a year and a half to eliminate the position of general manager, institute team management, and then create this very elaborate system of peer review and peer accountability, where we trained up people to be mediators, we trained people to be facilitators and set up formal councils. And there’s a wicked flowchart of what we created in order to stop the really harmful, harmful behaviors that were going on and be more..have more members engaged in the running of the cooperative. So yet another example of collective self-determination, which..it happened over a year and a half, many member meetings were held to talk about how do we want to do this differently, etc., etc., to really improve the working conditions for workers.

Caleb Elliott: And both those stories that you just told in this article that you wrote, which is called “Back to Basics: Aligning our National Organizations with the Cooperative Principles.” And the crux of that article is kind of reflecting on the 20 years that the US Federation has been operating, the changes that its gone through. So before we get on to how the US Federation has changed, what was it like originally at the beginning? I know you weren’t one of the co founders, but you were there kind of at the beginning. How was it? How was it run? How was it organized?

Rebecca Kemble: So in 2004, the the initial conference was held in Minneapolis to form the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives. So it really grew out of already existing or newly existing regional formations. And the impetus and the energy really came from the worker co-ops themselves. To have this national organization. Prior to 2004, there was the Western Worker Co-op Conference. There was also a specific San Francisco Bay Area organization called No Boss. The East Coast did not have a similar organization, but they started working on one in 2000, 2001, 2002 through the Grassroots Economic Organizing Collective, which is a media collective that reports on grassroots economic activity. So by the time I came on the board in 2009, we were really a similar sized organization to workers.coop, little over around 100, 150 members, turnover of about $50,000 a year. We had a full time staff person and then a half time member coordinator, very similar size and situation, although over a vast territory. So we had the board of directors of the federation has nine directors, five of them are at large elected by the membership at large. Four of them are regional represented or were regional representatives from the east, west, north and south and at every annual AGM, those regional caucuses would meet and every other year would elect a director to represent those regions.

So in 2009, I was elected representative for the northern region. And part of my job, a big part of my job, was engaging the co-ops in that region, being the comms person, the communication link to the co-ops on the ground and to whatever sub regional organizations or events they might be having. I would either attend or try to be a part of that and be that link to the federation on the board. We also had a similar kind of committees, numbers of different kind of committees of the board that was all mostly volunteer work. So very much a labor of love and a labor of commitment to a larger vision of this idea I brought up at the beginning that a single worker cooperative is just a business but when we’re federated together, when we’re linked to each other and to other social movement, we can be a real transformative force in our communities.

Caleb Elliott: And then in 2011, Occupy Wall Street was a very pivotal moment for the US Federation as more people became interested in worker cooperatives. And what direction did the Fed go in the aftermath of that?

Rebecca Kemble: Just millions and millions of people lost their homes in the financial crisis of 2009 and 2008. This insanity of the way the financial system is organized. So a lot of us in the US, there were a lot of encampments in cities. And so in these encampments, there were a lot of teach ins, there was a lot of education about the system as it is, and also a lot of dreaming about how we needed to be, how we need to organize to take care of ourselves and the land and the water and everyone. So worker co-ops, we were very, very present in those encampments and we were able to educate and inform people about cooperativism in general and worker cooperatives specifically as a way to democratically and justly organize workplaces. And that scaled up, we could actually run entire economies if we all organized like this. So worker co-ops for the first time, I’m going to say for the first time in US history became a topic of national conversation. Not that the people talking about it actually knew what they were talking about, but all of a sudden people had heard it in the encampment and “worker co-ops, worker co-ops.” So there was a lot of attention focused on “what are these things called worker co-ops?” And all of a sudden, big funding agencies, foundations, charitable organizations wanted to put money into “let’s build worker co-ops.”

The federation at that time, we were not equipped to really do cooperative development on that scale that was being asked. So at the time, the board decided, let’s launch DAWI, the Democracy at Work Institute, as a tax exempt 501c3 organization that could receive grant money and do co-op development. So in 2012, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops approached us saying, we want to give you $750,000 to organize worker co-ops in immigrant communities. And in retrospect, I think that was a real mistake because it was a decision made by staff and board members without consultation of the membership. And so that’s how it sort of laid the foundation for both of these organizations to fundamentally shift their sort of priorities and visions away from the needs of members and more toward how do we handle money.

Caleb Elliott: Can you go into a bit more detail about how that then caused the erosion of collectivism?

Rebecca Kemble: There was a conflict of interest policy that was written so that there could be self-dealing, so that board members could access the funds coming through DAWI for their own personal consulting agency or whatever. And I was very uncomfortable with that. And secondarily, DAWI was supposed to be controlled by the US Federation of Worker Co-ops. In effect, it was controlled by the executive director of DAWI itself, making all of the decisions about where the money goes, how the money flows, including her ability to organize for a majority of the board appointees. And then keeping..it was like a patron client network. And also over time, the US Federation eliminated their regional representative positions. So there is no more organizing. With the loss of that democracy and that accountability there, these national organizations that are supposed to be representing worker cooperatives really have lost touch with the actual worker cooperatives, and have lost many of their founding members because the organizations aren’t relevant to them anymore. And not just democracy for democracy’s sake, but, you know, as my stories at Union Cab demonstrate, democracy for the sake of actually containing and using that power of collective self-determination to chart a course that is transformative for the organization, the people involved in it, and even people who are affected by that organization.

And that to me is the real promise of worker co-ops is having that collective self-determination and having our organizations shaped around our ability to build that. So I don’t think there is a single staff member in that organization who has lived experience as a worker cooperator. Even most of the board members are not worker cooperators. It’s just a profession they’re in, right? And no real experience of what does it even mean. So they’re making things that they don’t even personally know what it means. They’re just really following the money at this point. They have like a 3 or $4 million a year budget, and they’re claiming to be accountable to the worker cooperative movement which they are not. I resigned quite publicly from that board with my specific objections, but the movement itself wasn’t powerful enough to actually intervene. So that was another really important lesson. If you say you’re representing a movement like really be in touch with that movement and really have that movement organize to have your back when you’re raising these issues.

Caleb Elliott: So since we’re talking about the dangers of grant and philanthropic funding, if you’re enjoying Punch Card, then consider supporting us for as little as 1 pound a month. The only way that Punch Card will be able to stay independent from advertising money and big philanthropy is if the listeners fund it. To set up a contribution, go to open collective.com/workerscoop/projects/punchcard. The link will be in the show notes..You still want to ask your question?

Speaker 3 So it sounds like you have some bad or not so good experiences of foundations or government trying to inject cash into the worker coop movement. I think it’s fair to say that worker coops across the world probably do need money. Do you think that there is a place for kind of government or philanthropic or, you know, charitable foundation money going into worker coops? Or do you think that the money needs to be generated from selling those goods and services that are essential to society that you mentioned.

Rebecca Kemble: Absolute. That’s public money, it should be going to the people. It should be going to the people who are working for the community, in the community. But we have to be organized and savvy enough to say “you want to give us this money, you’ll give it to us on our terms.” And if you’re going to do things in the name of worker cooperatives, you need our buy-in. You can’t just say we’re giving money to so-and-so because they’re doing worker cooperatives, that’s not legitimate. We hold the legitimacy of what is worker cooperation, right? This organization holds it. And so you can make the terms upon which that is accepted, that should even be demanded.

Caleb Elliott: And I believe you have another story which illustrates this quite well, which is in the in the Back to Basics article.

Rebecca Kemble: So, a lot of union cabs business is was contracted through the county for our version of the NHS. Transportation rides for people to and from their medical appointments, for people who are on government supported medical insurance. And all of this was brokered through the counties. Well, in this mess of privatization in the 2000s, the state of Wisconsin decided they were going to privatize the brokering of those rides — take them out of the county government and give it to a corporation that boasted to their investors that their investors could earn a profit on privatizing prisons, privatizing medical care — just disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.

So this operation had call centers in Arizona and Florida, and they came to us with a contract about how that was going to work. That contract included everyone had to get drug tested, that contract included no payment for if we showed up and the person didn’t go on their ride but we went anyway, and below the market rates. And since 35% of our business was in that medical ride sector at the time, our general manager — this was before we axed the position — our general manager recommended to the membership that we sign this. And as soon as that board agenda hit the bulletin board members just were irate, and they put up a petition, or a special member meeting was called, and we talked about how the principle of autonomy was being violated, and how we didn’t care if it was 35% of our business we are not getting into another crappy contract like this. And we brainstormed ideas of how to get more hotel business, how to get more airport business to overcome that potential loss.

So we ordered the director to go back to this company, LogistiCare and say, “We are not signing your contract, but if you want to contract our services, you can sign-on just like any other corporate client we have.” So we did that. And there were three other cab companies. One of them followed suit and didn’t sign. The other one that did sign, they opted out of the contract before the first day was even done because it was such a mess. And so all of a sudden, this LogistiCare had responsibilities to the to the government to provide rides for people, and they had no providers because we all said, “screw you, we’re not going to do this.” So they came back to us and they were like, “okay, we’ll just be your client.” I mean, they still suck, you know. They’re still terrible, and they’re intervening again with these service relationships that we’ve had for decades with people.

So this is, again, the collective self-determination of members who knew that, a) we didn’t have to take our manager’s decision for it; we had democratic mechanisms to call a meeting and discuss it and then make that decision. We had that collective confidence to do that, and then we enacted that. Not only did that make a difference for us, it made a difference for the whole industry.

Caleb Elliott: But I was drawing the parallel between that and saying ‘no’ to funding.

Rebecca Kemble: Yeah, the same thing.

Caleb Elliott: If we all collectively say ‘no’ to funding.

Rebecca Kemble: No, but if you all collectively say, “yes to funding, and here are the terms on which we’ll take it.” Do that. As the member organization, as the people who are the co-ops, you have a lot of power in this situation.

Caleb Elliott: So in an attempt to course correct, in a sense, the worker cooperative movement in the US, you convened a group of elders and co-developed what is called the Solidarity Economy Principles Project. And so firstly, please explain what the solidarity economy is.

Rebecca Kemble: Okay? The solidarity economy is an economy whereby people own, operate and control everything that we need to take care of each other and to take care of life in the communities we live in. So worker co-ops are a part of the solidarity economy, are a part of the productive part of the solidarity economy, but they are by no means the entire solidarity economy. A solidarity economy involves land ownership, creative things like how are you growing food? What is the culture? There are barter and trade networks. There are community gardens. There are ways that you handle surplus in the system that can all be organized along solidarity principles that are very similar to and include cooperative principles.

The first convening of worker co-op elders at Red Emma’s Cafe to sit down over lunch and go, “What is going on here?” We really need to — especially for the new people coming into the movement — they need to know that worker co-ops, and the worker co-op movement is not what the Federation and DAWI is putting out, because what they’re putting out is very corporatized, and very much what we call the nonprofit industrial complex. They’ve turned into basically just money chasing organizations that want to show numbers, numbers, numbers of worker co-ops, but aren’t actually paying attention to the health of the co-ops that exist to the bond between them, to the strength of those co-ops, which is ultimately really more important than how many worker co-ops there are.

So we developed what we call the Baltimore Principles at that at that time. And those formed the foundation of what later became the Solidarity Economy Principles. So there was that one — that Red Emma’s meeting in Baltimore, 2019 — then a year later, a group of four friends, I was one of them, got together after that, after the death of a Elandria Williams, who was just a giant in solidarity economy thinking and practice; came out of the black Appalachian Solidarity Economy movement. Elandria was a popular educator, had developed this curriculum called Mapping Our Futures, which is basically power mapping for communities with a solidarity economy bent to help groups and communities figure out how do we build solidarity economy in our physical location? And in all of those pieces of work, there was this critique of the national organizations, not only these two worker co-op organizations, but other so-called movement organizations that had just — they say they’re about racial justice, they say they’re about economic justice, but they’re involved in the same trap of just chasing money and then orienting their activities around what their funders demand and not actually serving the missions that they say they’re serving.

So we were just bereft by Elandria’s death, and what about the legacy of their work, and who’s going to finish it, and how are we going to finish it without Elandria? So for six months or so, we had meetings and discussed, and ended up writing a document of principles that we then divided into 24 principles in five different themes. There’s a website called SolidarityEconomyPrinciples.org. It looks like this to all of those in the room. On every page there’s a listing of the themes, and if you click on it you get to the principles. It’s translated into Spanish, Québécois French, and English. And what’s super useful about it is the reflection tool and resources with a facilitation guide — a tool for actually working with your group, or amongst groups, on principles that you want to develop. And dozens and dozens and dozens of very specific practices under each principle that can help you. Think of, you know, if we want to embody this principle, here’s one way we can do it.

Caleb Elliott: Yeah. Could you dive into one of those and expand it a little bit more.

Rebecca Kemble: So for example, Principle One: we value relationships over transactions and single outcomes. So, for example, national policy advocacy should always include local associations and grassroots members who live and work within the districts represented by these legislative champions. Even if a group does not have the capacity, an invitation should be issued out of respect for the relationship and grassroots needs. And that came specifically out of the US Federation lobbying for law changes within that state without consulting the worker co-ops in that state at all.

And so you would think you wouldn’t have to say this, but we do; unfortunately, we have to spell this out. If you’re going to lobby on behalf of someone, maybe check in with them, maybe value that relationship and ask them to lead the effort, right? So these are really specific things that, for example, staff in the US Federation who are doing policy advocacy, do they know to do this? I don’t know. We have to spell it out because we want to support the Federation to be accountable to members, and to do things in the right way.

Caleb Elliott: Thanks. Let’s end by asking you about the UK context. So the UK Federation could be potentially in a similar pivotal moment where we’ve got a new UK government. They say that they want to see the co-operative economy double. They haven’t specifically said anything about worker cooperatives, but that could mean an influx of interest and money. I guess what would potentially be your advice around that, or what things might you say we should watch out for?

Rebecca Kemble: I would say have a make a plan for that if you know that’s on the horizon. You’re here together today. You’ll be having your spring event. You’re doing a lot of member brainstorming right now. Keep doing that and make a plan. Say, “oh, the worker co-op sector is getting 5 million next year, what would we do with that?” And make sure everyone’s voice is heard and then really decide what are your priorities, and what are the supports you would need to make this thing a reality? And who has responsibility for what? So dream big, but dream big together collectively.

I just became convinced that we have to go back to the basic unit of cooperativism, which is human beings cooperating with each other based on trust, and moving at the speed of trust. You understand that those relationships are the things that will enable us to take care of each other and ourselves and our families as these crises in climate and economy come crashing down on us. I think having national organizations is important, but the life of them really has to be at these manageable sized local groups, local communities. We talk about scaling up; why do we need to have more co-ops? Why can’t we just strengthen the ones we have and in addition, strengthen the cooperativism of the people who are inside those co-ops?

Caleb Elliott: Let me just wrap up. So thank you, Rebecca, so much for coming and speaking with us. Thank you, everybody, for listening and asking questions. I have found it interesting and inspiring. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Punch Card on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube. And we’re currently producing about one a month, hit or miss, so keep an eye out for the next episode. If you are interested in finding out more about work cooperatives, then check out the workers.coop website and don’t be shy to send any questions you have or ask for support by emailing. solidarity[at]workers[dot]coop. If you enjoyed listening, please consider supporting PUNCHCARD by going to our Open Collective page, opencollective.com/workerscoop/projects/punchcard and starting a monthly contribution.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.