Cooperatives

Cooperative Economics and Civil Rights

April 14, 2014 Jessica Gordon Nembhard, www.grittv.org Create! Civil Rights, Cooperatives

Cooperative economics and civil rights don't often appear together in our history books, but they should! From the mutual aid societies that bought enslaved people's freedom to the underground railroad network that brought endangered blacks to the north, cooperative structures were key to evading the repression of white supremacy. And they was a vicious backlash when Black co-ops threatened the status quo. "The white economic structure depended on all of these blacks having to buy from the white store, rent from the white landowner. They were going to lose out if you did something alternatively," Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African-American Economic Thought and Practice tells GRITtv's Laura Flanders this week.

The New Union-Cooperative Model

April 14, 2014 Rob Witherell, www.portside.org Create! Cooperatives, Unions

In March 2012, the United Steelworkers, Mondragon International USA, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center published a white paper detailing our union cooperative model, written by myself, Chris Cooper (OEOC), and Michael Peck (Mondragon International USA). This article seeks to expand on the need and potential for that model, with many thanks to Chris Cooper and Michael Peck for providing their insights and advice along the way. If we were to re-imagine what work and the workplace should look like, what businesses should look like, what would that be? We might think of small businesses and people who are self-employed. We might think of work as something we are proud of and enjoy doing. We might think of compensation for work as reflecting our efforts, our talents, and our ability. We might think of work as providing us with a comfortable standard of living, with food on the table and time off to enjoy with our friends and families.

How To Start A Workers Co-operative

April 12, 2014 Staff, www.american.coop Create! Cooperatives, Worker Rights and Jobs

We believe that we are in the midst of economic and political transformation. There are many aspects to the changes people are helping to make happen. On the economic side we advocate for economic democracy -- where people have greater control over their economic lives. One foundational change is ownership? The workplace where most work is not owned or managed by the workers. One way that changes is the creation of a worker owned cooperative. More people are moving in this direction and as a result there is more information available about how to create a worker owned coop. Worker Cooperative Startup Guides There are several written guides for starting worker cooperatives, and many more for starting cooperatives in general that include sections on worker cooperatives. Having a good organizer or consultant, or mentor, surely makes any of the guides more useful.

After Death Of Radical Mayor, Mississippi’s Capital Wrestles With His Economic Vision

April 6, 2014 Laura Flanders, www.yesmagazine.org Educate! Cooperatives, Urban Design

On his way into work every morning, Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor of Jackson, Miss., used to pass a historical marker: “Jackson City Hall: built 1846-7 by slave labor.” Mayor Lumumba had a plan. Believing that history of a new sort could be made here in Jackson, he sought to use public spending to boost local wealth through worker owned cooperatives, urban gardening, and a community-based approach to urban development. His vision, developed over years in social movements, not only prized black experience and drew on the survival strategies that black Americans had come up with over the decades, but also set out to prioritize in the city’s policies the very people who until now had been on the bottom of the state's list. The goal, he said, was “revolutionary transformation.”

Who Needs a Boss?

March 26, 2014 Sheila Dewan, ://www.nytimes.com Create! Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy, Inequality, Worker Rights and Jobs

Support for full-fledged co-ops has inched into the mainstream as communities have grown weary of waiting for private investors to create good jobs — or sick of watching them take jobs away. In Cleveland in 2009, hospitals and a university gave seed money to a new group of businesses, the Evergreen Cooperatives, and now contract with them for laundry, energy retrofits and fresh produce. Last month, a government commission in Wales announced that “conventional approaches to economic development” were insufficient; it needed cooperatives. That same month, the New York City Council held a hearing called “Worker Cooperatives — Is This a Model That Can Lift Families Out of Poverty?”

Half The World’s Population Made Secure By Cooperatives

March 24, 2014 Patricia Bradshaw www.universityaffairs.ca Educate! Cooperatives, Wealth, Worker Rights and Jobs

The United Nations designated 2012 as “International Year of Co-operatives” to highlight that co-operatives are major players in the world economy. The International Co-operative Alliance claims that the livelihood of half the world’s population is made secure by co-operatives; they have a billion members, and they employ over 100 million people – 20 percent more than multinational enterprises. The “Global 300” (the largest co-ops) have revenues equalling the tenth largest economy in the world. According to the Canadian Co-operative Association, 17 million Canadians are co-op members, 150,000 Canadians work for co-ops, and 100,000 volunteer on their boards and committees. Canadian co-ops have $275 billion in assets, and recent studies show the survival rate of co-operative enterprises is 25 percent higher than that of investor-owned businesses. The Global 300 not only defied the financial crisis but actually grew during the recession. Yet co-operatives are virtually unknown in the halls of academe, and certainly in business schools.

Help Jackson, MS Become A Beacon Of Economic Democracy

March 2, 2014 Jackson Rising, www.indiegogo.com Create! Cooperatives, Economic Democracy, New Economy

The Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference, and the Grassroots Economic Series leading up to the conference, aim to educate and mobilize the people of Jackson to build cooperatives and worker owned enterprises that can meet the economic and sustainability needs of the community. In the process, we aim to expand the discussion about alternative economic models and systems and to confront the harsh economic realities faced by low-income and impoverished communities. As an initiative of the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Community Aid and Development, Inc., the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives, and the Fund for Democratic Communities, the Jackson Rising Conference promises to be a major advance in the struggle for working class organization, wealth equity, economic democracy and self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi.

Diary of a Young Co-Op Start-Up

February 25, 2014 Rhiannon Colvin /www.theguardian.com Create! Alternatives, Cooperatives

I have had moments where I would give anything to have a "normal job", with someone to tell me what to do, when to do it and to praise me for it. I have found myself valuing what I did in my paid work higher than the time I spent on AltGen, because the rest of society valued that more, too. There seems to be an inherent value in work, but not on the impact that work has on society. Can you relate to the experience of a friend posting on Facebook, "I've got a job" and getting fifty likes before someone actually asks what the job is? Is there not a difference in thecontribution to society of a teacher and a chemical weapon engineer, between a charity worker and an advertiser? If we are to feel worthwhile as we create a new economy we need to begin to value all the different ways we contribute to the wellbeing of society and move beyond the narrow confines of work and money.

Co-ops May Increase Worker Life Expectancy

February 22, 2014 Nina Misuraca Ignaczak, www.shareable.net Create! Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy

Dave Boyle, a UK-based cooperatives expert, wrote in Economia last March on “the strange re-birth of co-operatives in Britain.” The article cited research conducted by Co-operatives UK, which documented the superior performance of Britain’s co-ops throughout the recession. Among the organizations’ findings: 98% of UK co-operatives were still trading three years after formation compared to 65% of traditional companies Since 2008 the UK economy shrank 1.7% while co-ops grew 23% 56% of UK coops are in disadvantaged areas 88% of UK coops seek to minimize their environmental impact compared to 44% of traditional businesses who say they have “taken no action whatsoever" Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave an organization 85% ‘agree’ or ‘very much agree’ that being a co-operative gives them a business advantage. 85% actively use their co-operative status in marketing

Meet The Employee-Centered Company That Could Eventually Take Down Wal-Mart

February 18, 2014 Manny Schewitz www.forwardprogressives.com Create! Cooperatives, WinCo, Worker Rights and Jobs

Ok, 93 locations in 7 states isn’t even close to being in the same league as Wal-Mart currently finds itself sitting in all alone, but it shows that you CAN take care of your employees AND still be a profitable company. Because they’re not a publicly traded entity, they don’t have stockholders demanding ever larger returns on dividends every quarter at the the expense of both the consumer and the employees. The employees are the stockholders and the better the company does, the better they do. Crazy concept isn’t it? Oh yeah, and they’re also eco-friendly – and they’re expanding. I’ve hated Wal-Mart ever since they put many of the stores out of business in the town that I grew up in nearly two decades ago, and I don’t find Target that much more palatable either. If WinCo can thrive and expand in Texas, I fully expect that they will be able to do so across the rest of the United States and finally give Wal-Mart the competition they so desperately need. It’s about time.

The Co-op That Changed The South

February 9, 2014 David J. Thompson, www.ncba.coop Educate! Civil Rights, Cooperatives, Racism, Video

It was a small cooperative store on a little known island off the coast of South Carolina. During the harshest days of the civil rights struggle, embattled black leaders came through its doors seeking inspiration. Among the legendary leaders who visited the co-op were: Ralph Abernathy, Dorothy Cotton, Conrad Brown, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr, John Lewis, Bernice Reagon, Cleveland Sellers, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Andrew Young, Hosea Williams and many others. What began in that co-op was a Citizenship School to teach blacks on Johns Island, South Carolina how to qualify to vote. Later, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) spread that program throughout the South. That one class in the co-op became thousands of classes in churches, schools and homes. In 1962, the SCLC brought in other groups who then formed the Voter Education Project (VEP). Between 1962 and 1966 VEP trained 10,000 teachers for Citizenship Schools and 700,000 black voters registered throughout the South. By 1970, another million black voters had registered.

New Index Measures How Co-ops Benefit Communities

January 15, 2014 Co-operative News, thenews.coop Create! Community, Cooperatives

Overall, the 10 largest consumer co-operatives outperform the major supermarkets by 2.6 percentage points, with co-operatives overall investing 6.3% of pre-tax profits in helping communities compared to only 3.7% of the supermarkets. Given the resource cost of investing time and energy into community investment activities and reporting, it is all the more impressive. The multi-billion pound turnover enjoyed by most of the supermarkets gives them access to resources and expertise not available to all, but the very largest co-operatives.

Economic Prosperity and Economic Democracy: The Worker Co-Op Solution

January 13, 2014 Richard D. Wolff, www.democracyatwork.info Create! Cooperatives, Socialism, Worker Rights and Jobs

The importance of such micro-level transformations of enterprises into WSDEs cannot be overstated. Because it had located key economic powers in state hands (regulating or owning enterprises and imposing planning above or in place of market exchanges), traditional socialism usually accumulated too much power in the state alone or in the state together with the major capitalist businesses it “regulated.” Far too little real, institutionalized countervailing power resided with the workers inside enterprises. As a result, accountability and transparency were absent from economic life, as was economic democracy. That in turn undermined real political democracy.

Join The Growing Federation Of Worker Cooperatives

December 29, 2013 Rebecca Kemble, www.theprogressive.org Create! Cooperatives, Worker Rights and Jobs

WHEN BILL MOYERS ASKED Wendell Berry in a recent interview what gives him hope in a world where corporations rule over people, Berry looked into the audience that was gathered to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of his classic book, The Unsettling of America, and said, “These people.” Berry elaborated: “The world is full of people now who are seeing something that needs to be done and starting to do it, without the government’s permission, or official advice, or expert advice, or applying for grants, or anything else. They just start doing it.” Ten years ago, I decided that the only way I could live with myself was to become one of these people, too.

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