Cooperatives

America’s Largest Worker Owned Co-Op Lifts People Out Of Poverty

August 16, 2014 Laura Flanders, www.yesmagazine.org Create! Cooperatives, Poverty, Worker's Rights

Before Zaida Ramos joined Cooperative Home Care Associates, she was raising her daughter on public assistance, shuttling between dead-end office jobs, and not making ends meet. “I earned in a week what my family spent in a day,” she recalled. After 17 years as a home health aide at Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the largest worker-owned co-op in the United States, Ramos recently celebrated her daughter’s college graduation. She’s paying half of her son’s tuition at a Catholic school, and she’s a worker-owner in a business where she enjoys flexible hours, steady earnings, health and dental insurance, plus an annual share in the profits. She’s not rich, she says, “but I’m financially independent. I belong to a union, and I have a chance to make a difference.” Can worker-owned businesses lift families out of poverty? “They did mine,” Ramos said. Should other low-income New Yorkers get involved in co-ops? She says, “Go for it.” New York City is going—in a big way—for worker-owned cooperatives. Inspired by the model of CHCA and prodded by a new network of co-op members and enthusiasts, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council allocated $1.2 million to support worker cooperatives in 2015’s budget. According to the Democracy at Work Institute, New York’s investment in co-ops is the largest by any U.S. city government to date.

Is Worker Ownership A Way Forward For Market Basket?

August 15, 2014 Gar Alperovitz, www.truth-out.org Create! Cooperatives, Labor, Worker Rights and Jobs

The Market Basket situation is indeed, as many commentators have remarked, nearly unprecedented in the annals of American labor relations: When have we ever seen so many workers protest so vigorously for, rather than against, their boss! (For those new to the story, the New England supermarket chain has been wracked by massive employee protests, organized without any union involvement, after a faction of the family that owns the chain took control and ousted extremely popular CEO Arthur T. Demoulas. The mobilization in support of the former chief executive has resulted in nearly empty shelves and the mobilization of angry communities of formerly happy customers.) But beneath the surface of the singular job action, in which workers and community have banded together to demand the reinstatement of the former CEO, the conflict in New England points toward something much more fundamental: the need to build institutions that can sustain the kind of community- and worker-friendly business leadership that earned "good brother" Arthur T. such incredible loyalty. Happily, such institutions already exist, here in the United States. While undoubtedly not perfect as a form of workplace democracy, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) offers a proven template for making the interest workers have in a thriving business part of the discussions about a company's future.

From “New Economy” To Cooperative Commonwealth

August 10, 2014 John De Graaf, www.truthout.org Create! Commons, Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy

At the same time, the term commonwealth is as American as Massachusetts, Kentucky, Pennsylvania or Virginia, all of which call themselves commonwealths. It conveys the sense of things we hold in common, including our precious natural resources, offering a broader vision for ideas like Peter Barnes' guaranteed national income supplement from taxes on fossil fuels. Adding to its usefulness, the idea of the Cooperative Commonwealth fits nicely with the emphasis on building new producer and consumer cooperatives in the United States, an effort Gar Alperovitz and colleagues have been promoting in Cleveland and other cities, with the success and scope of the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain as an example.

Great Tool To Learn About New Economy

August 7, 2014 Staff, www.shiftchange.org Educate! Cooperatives, Movies, Worker Rights and Jobs

SHIFT CHANGE is a documentary film by veteran award-winning filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin. It tells the little known stories of employee owned businesses that compete successfully in today’s economy while providing secure, dignified jobs in democratic workplaces. With the long decline in US manufacturing and today’s economic crisis, millions have been thrown out of work, and many are losing their homes. The usual economic solutions are not working, so some citizens and public officials are ready to think outside of the box, to reinvent our failing economy in order to restore long term community stability and a more egalitarian way of life. There is growing interest in firms that are owned and managed by their workers. Such firms tend to be more profitable and innovative, and more committed to the communities where they are based. Yet the public has little knowledge of their success, and the promise they offer for a better life.

Across Latin America: Struggle for Communal Land & Indigenous Autonomy

July 22, 2014 Renata Bessi and Santiago Navarro F., www.truth-out.org Resist! Cooperatives, Economic Democracy, Indigenous Rights, Mutual Aid

"We recognize that we must confront the plundering by transnational companies and the harassment of bad governments through their political parties that offer programs and money that corrupt many leaders and divide our communities," states the declaration of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) of the Isthmus region, which took place in March 2014. While a furious battle has been unleashed for the recognition of indigenous rights and culture in other communities in Mexico and Latin America, in Oaxaca, new legislation is being debated on this very theme while large-scale projects continue to advance.

USFWC: Ten Years of Achievement

July 17, 2014 Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, www.geo.coop Create! Conference, Cooperatives, New Orleans

In 2008, a year after the 2007 ECWD conference, Hurricane Katrina battered the city of jazz and Mardi Gras. Quite a few cooperatives, along with musical bands and community members, lost homes and businesses. At the ECWD conference in Asheville, grassroots organizer Shakoor Aljuwani and former Collective Copies member Erin Rice made a strong plea for the next USFWC national conference to take place in New Orleans to help in rebuilding efforts. The Federation board not only took up the challenge, but also organized cooperators to stay an extra week, called a work week, to offer New Orleans residents skills on cooperative building, and to help in locally determined ways. Cooperators helped the Latino Farmers Cooperative, building community organization strength particularly through Common Ground, the coalition of groups working to help poor people get back on their feet. In addition, Jessica Gordon Nembhard led the organizing of a "Showcase of Cooperatives" to explain to local folks what kinds of cooperatives were now functioning, and to model what could be done. That program was a huge success--enjoyed by the locals and the veteran cooperators alike--as everyone got a chance to learn details of what others were doing around the country. That practice has now become a standard part of conferences.

Village Where People Come Before Profit

July 17, 2014 Jen Wilton, www.roarmag.org Educate! Cooperatives, Direct Action, Mutual Aid, Spain

In the south of Spain, the street is the collective living room. Vibrant sidewalk cafes are interspersed between configurations of two to five lawn chairs where neighbors come together to chat over the day’s events late into the night. In mid-June the weather peaks well over 40 degrees Celsius and the smells of fresh seafood waft from kitchens and restaurants as the seasonably-late dining hour begins to approach. The scene is archetypally Spanish, particularly for the Andalusian region to the country’s south, where life is lived more in public than in private, when given half a chance. Specifically, this imagery above describes Marinaleda. Initially indistinguishable from several of its local counterparts in the Sierra Sur southern mountain range, were it not for a few tell-tale signs. Maybe it’s the street names (Ernesto Che Guevara, Solidarity and Salvador Allende Plaza, to name a few); maybe it’s the graffiti (hand drawn hammers-and-sickles sit happily alongside encircled A’s, oblivious to the differences the two ideologies have shared, even in the country’s recent past); maybe it’s the two-story Che head which emblazons the outer wall of the local sports stadium. Marinaleda has been called Spain’s ‘communist utopia,’ though the local variation bears little resemblance to the Soviet model most associate with the phrase. Classifications aside, this is a town whose social fabric has been woven from very different economic threads to the rest of the country since the fall of the Franco dictatorship in the mid 1970s.

Worker-Owners Cheer Creation Of Co-op Development Fund

July 7, 2014 Rebecca Burns, www.inthesetimes.com Create! Budgets, Cooperatives, New York City (NYC)

In a victory for new economy advocates, the New York City Council passed a budget last week that will create a $1.2 million fund for the growth of worker-owned cooperative businesses. The investment is the largest a municipal government in the U.S. has ever made in the sector, breaking new ground for the cooperative development movement. Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the Democracy at Work Institute, hails the New York City Council’s move as “historic.” “We have seen bits and pieces here and there, but New York City is the first place to make an investment at that level,” she says. New York’s cooperative development fund was the brainchild of a coalition of community groups—including the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, the Democracy at Work Institute, Make the Road New York and others—that came together to stage a series of public forums and advocacy days to secure widespread support for the initiative on the City Council. Over the next year, the fund will provide financial and technical assistance in the planned launch of 28 new cooperatives and the continued growth of 20 existing cooperatives, supporting the creation of 234 jobs in total.

Medical Cooperative Provided Health Services At World Cup

July 4, 2014 International Co-operative Alliance, www.ica.coop Create! Brazil, Cooperatives, health, world cup

UNIMED, the largest system of medical co-operatives in the world and also the largest healthcare network in Brazil, is the official provider of emergency medical services at this year’s World Cup. Throughout the event that runs from 12 June to 13 July, UNIMED will be providing medical services to all athletes and technical staff of all delegations taking part in the World Cup. “We have an infrastructure across the country, with centres and hospitals and we will be responding to all necessities and requirements directly and individually. We are responsible for the health of all athletes, teams, officials and technical staff that will be involved in the World Cup,” explained Eudes de Freitas Aquino, President of UNIMED. Founded in 1967 by Doctor Edmundo Castillo, UNIMED consists today of 354 medical co-operatives, which offer health services to more than 20 million customers. It has over 109,000 active physicians and 106 hospitals, as well as emergency care, laboratories and ambulances. Dr Eudes de Freitas Aquino thinks the success of UNIMED was determined by the co-operative structure of the organisation.

Movements Of 2011: From Occupation To Reconstruction

July 1, 2014 Nathan Schneider, www.america.aljazeera.com Create! Commons, Cooperatives, Mass Movement, Occupy, Organizing, Politics

Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: The networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new. The 2011 movements were always prefigurative in some respects. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to Zuccotti Park in New York, protesters eschewed formal leadership in order to practice direct democracy, a means of revealing just how false our societies’ claims to being democratic have become. They built little utopias that provided free food, libraries, music, religious services and classes, trying to put on display what they thought a good society should look like. The 2011 movements also reflected the emergence of a global community that spans borders as protesters in different countries borrowed strategies and slogans from one another.

City Governments Build Community Wealth

June 26, 2014 John Duda, www.community-wealth.org Create! Cities, Community, Cooperatives, New Economy

The past few weeks have seen a flurry of impressive activity at the level of city government, all around policies designed to build community wealth and encourage the growth of cooperative local economies. It's encouraging to see that the work of grassroots developers, local foundations, community activists, and field builders (like ourselves here at the Democracy Collaborative) is beginning to gain a foothold in the world of municipal policy. While certainly many of the models that have currently proven themselves on the ground have done so with the invaluable support and close cooperation of local policymakers, what's new and exciting in 2014 is the way an increasing number of city governments are stepping into leadership roles and catalyzing new projects and initiatives. Concentrated urban poverty remains a pressing issue; 2012 data shows that nearly 1 in 6 people living in major metropolitain areas lives below the poverty line. In Jacksonville, Florida—the state's most populated city and, geographically, the largest in the contiguous United States—Mayor Alvin Brown has the distinction of being not only the first African American to hold his position, but is also the first mayor in the United States to commission and convene a Community Wealth Building Roundtable to explore comprehensive approaches to tackling this problem head on.

Catalyzing Big Growth For Worker Co-ops

June 25, 2014 Hilary Abell, www.geo.coop Create! Cooperatives, Future, Labor, Worker's Rights

Today, corporate profits are at an all-time high and employee wages are at their lowest ever as a percent of GDP.i Worker cooperatives embody the hope that we can reverse the downward spiral in wage stagnation, wealth distribution, and concentration of ownership to build an economy that truly serves people and communities. But what will it really take to create a more cooperative economy? My new white paper Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale, published by The Democracy Collaborative, describes the many benefits of worker cooperatives for their members, for business and for society; explores barriers and success factors in worker co-op development; and proposes strategies for increasing the scale and impact of worker co-ops in the United States. This article, adapted from the paper, summarizes three high-level strategies for scaling up the worker cooperative sector and illustrates the need for capacity building through a story of two cooperatives.

Leveling The Playing Field For Worker Cooperatives

June 25, 2014 AbScher, www.truth-out.org Create! Cooperatives, New York City (NYC), Poverty, Worker's Rights

A quiet revolution is rumbling through New York's municipal offices as they retool to support the creation of worker cooperatives as a way to fight poverty. Spurred by the powerful example of immigrant-owned cleaning cooperatives and the longstanding example of Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx - the largest worker cooperative in the country - progressive city council members are allying with a new network of worker cooperatives, community based organizations that incubated immigrant-owned coops and the influential Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies to figure out how the city can encourage this still-tiny economic sector. Once fully in place, New York City will be a national leader in providing municipal support for these democratic enterprises. The pace of change is dizzying. In January, the federation released a short report arguing that worker coops help improve traditionally low-wage jobs by channeling the enterprises' profits directly to their worker members, improving their lives in tangible ways. Then in February, Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo, chairwoman of the Committee on Community Development, held a hearing which put staff from the city's Small Business Services and Economic Development Agency in the hot seat about how they were promoting worker cooperatives.

How A Large Worker Co-op Got Started

June 20, 2014 Undernews, www.prorevnews.blogspot.com Create! Cooperatives, Maine, Worker's Rights

Cooperative Development Institute - Employees of three rural Maine businesses – Burnt Cove Market, V&S Variety and Pharmacy, and The Galley – are now the owners. All of them. By forming the Island Employee Cooperative , the largest worker cooperative in Maine and one of the larger worker co - ops in the United States, the employees were able to purchase the businesses from retiring owners Vern and Sand ra Seile. Combined, the three businesses are one of the island’s largest employers and provide the community with a full array of groceries, hardware, prescription drugs, pharmacy items, craft supplies, and other goods and services. The employees were concerned when word first circulated that the Seiles were thinking about selling the stores and retiring. Potential buyers who were not part of the community would doubtfully have maintained the same level of jobs and services, and other employment options on the island are limited.

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