When Workers Take Charge
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/10345
When workers take charge
From CNN
It's a unique model - the worker-owned business. Some say it sounds like
socialism, but these six companies say it's helped them tough out the
recession.
We Can Do It!
In 2006, Latina immigrants in Brooklyn, N.Y. formed a housekeepers'
co-op to avoid exploitation, according to Vanessa Bransburg, cooperative
coordinator of the Center for Family Life. With the help of the
community organization, 19 women from Mexico and the Dominican Republic
formed We Can Do It!, or Si Se Puede!, a slogan used by organized
workers in Latin American and California.
"A lot of these people really had the entrepreneurial spirit, but a lot
of them don't really have up to high school education, so they weren't
able to get a traditional job," said Bransburg. "Instead of following
somebody else's rules, they wanted to be the bosses."
The Center acts as their agent, with 100% of the cleaning fees going to
the workers, who pay $40 in monthly dues to cover marketing costs. The
organization has spun off two other worker co-ops: Beyond Care, with 19
child care workers, and �migr� Gourmet, a cooking collective.
All the worker-owners have equal control over marketing and they develop
their own relationships with their clients, said Bransburg. "With all of
this happening, they've been able to withstand the recession and even
grow in the last few months," she said.
Full Sail Brewing Co.
Chief Executive Irene Firmat and her brewmaster husband James Emmerson
converted their business, Full Sail Brewing in Hood River, Ore., to a
worker-owned company in 1999. Firmat said they wanted to avoid being
bought by a larger company and "incentivize the [47] people already
working there."
Now, 55 of the 90 workers are partial owners, and she said this
arrangement has helped the company find ways to save money and increase
profits in the face of a recession.
Last year, when the brewery faced soaring commodity costs, she said that
owners from different departments agreed to buy efficient new machines
that saved on expensive raw materials. This year, the owners agreed to
accept smaller margins and make new hires even as job cutting became
rampant nationwide.
"The decision to live out this time with smaller margins was supported
by our investors -- our employees who were implementing this strategy
and seeing results daily," she said. "I think it would have been far
different if we had a more traditional ownership with disengaged
investors just seeking shorter-term results."
Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing
Isthmus Engineering in Madison, Wis. is a custom designer and builder of
factory machines. The company was formed in 1980 and morphed into a
worker-owned shop three years later. Ownership has since expanded to 28
"directors" who share democratic control, and this has helped company
ride out the recession, said John Kessler, an engineer and one of four
co-founders.
Isthmus laid off two paid-by-the-hour workers earlier this year, but it
still employs 20 non-owner assembly workers, he said. The directors have
avoided further layoffs by agreeing to accept a lighter profit, and by
juggling schedules between the machining, assembly and engineering
departments.
"As a worker-owned company, we can make the decisions to take work at a
lesser margin in order to keep people," said Kessler. "We have
reshuffled duties to keep the work that we do have from going out the
door, while also spreading out the pain as much as possible."
Mushkin Enhanced
When George Stathakis completed his purchase of Mushkin Enhanced in
2005, he converted the maker of computer components into a worker-owned
company. "He wanted to incentivize involvement," said marketing director
Wade Shiflett. "He wanted to make the workers feel that they had an
investment in the company."
About half the company's 50 workers have ownership in the Englewood,
Colo.-based maker of RAM modules. The owners are managers, salespeople
and technical staffers, while the non-owners are hourly employees.
Long-term staffers eventually get the option of becoming partial owners,
said Shiflett, and they become "intricately" involved in company
decisions and the bottom line.
The owners restructured and diversified Mushkin after the computer
component market "took a dramatic turn south in 2005," he said. "Because
of this, the company regrouped, reformulated and became much more
efficient with overhead and parts sourcing."
As a result, the company's profits grew this year, despite the
recession, and that bodes well for the owners, Shiflett said. "One of
the advantages is our profit sharing," he said.
Pelham Auto Parts
Back in 1978, Louis Hasbrouck co-owned an auto service shop in Amherst,
Massachusetts. He loved to tinker on foreign cars but hated the
management and the paperwork, so he and his partner David Mosher
converted the shop into Pelham Auto Parts, a mechanics' collective.
Now the business decisions are made by a half-dozen owner-mechanics, and
the administrative work is handled by Gayton Hebert, secretary,
bookkeeper, office manager and part-owner who joined in 1985.
Once the mechanics took ownership of the shop, they built an auto parts
store next door, providing fast access to German and Japanese parts to
speed up service. "You get the muffler in three minutes instead of 20,"
Hebert said.
Business has been brisk, and the recession has helped to boost profits
by 20% this year because "people are fixing their old cars instead of
buying new," he said.
The collective is planning to make three more mechanics into owners,
which means they'll have a role in setting their own schedules. Hebert
compared the owner-mechanics to "free range chickens" because they "come
and go on their own."
Ronin Tech Collective
Web developer Jason Mott didn't like the competitive nature of corporate
"hierarchy," so he co-founded the Ronin Tech Collective with two other
owners in Brattleboro, Vt. early this year. He named the collective
after the master-less samurai of feudal Japan.
"The whole idea of a samurai without a master became appropriate for a
worker-owned company," he said. Like wandering ronin, the three owners
are scattered far and wide, with another in North Hampton, Mass. and the
other in Austin, Texas.
Mott said the "remote workers" close the distance with weekly video
conferences and have helped him overcome "the shortage of skilled
technology talent" in Vermont.
Mott said the recession is "helping the worker-owner movement" because
the "model helps towns to rebuild and be self reliant."
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Dan Clore
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"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_