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A Bay Area City Looks to Co-ops as a Possible Path out of Poverty
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Dan Clore
Dec 1, 2011, 4:43:43 PM12/1/11
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/11/30/2291848/a-bay-area-city-looks-to-co-ops.html
Nov, 30, 2011
A Bay Area city looks to co-ops as a possible path out of poverty
By LEE ROMNEY / Los Angeles Times
RICHMOND, Calif. -- Where a hot dog stand now is the main lunchtime
option for city workers in this distressed Bay Area town, soon they'll
be able to choose from steel-cut oatmeal, goat cheese empanadas and
white bean and kale stew, prepared in a mobile cafe. Its owners will
share in the decision-making - and any profits.
Richmond Solar has trained needy residents to work as green-energy
installers and now aims to transform some into bosses by forming a
worker-owned cooperative.
The city's first bicycle shop has opened with similar dreams: Young men
who have volunteered to learn the repair trade soon may be elevated to
co-owners.
"I'm just gonna ride it out with everyone to get where we need to go,"
Mercedes Burnell, 19, said as he prepared to replace a crankshaft and
pedals at Richmond SPOKES.
The flurry of democratic enterprise has been guided by Mayor Gayle
McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher who visited Mondragon, Spain, and
recognized a possible path out of the poverty and unemployment that
plague her city.
The Basque hill town is dominated by Mondragon Corp., a web of
cooperatives that employ 83,000 workers and together represent Spain's
seventh-largest business. Co-op clusters based on Mondragon's model have
emerged in Cleveland and the Bronx, N.Y., among other cities.
Richmond, with a 16 percent unemployment rate, hopes to follow suit.
The city's industrial roots date back more than a century, when it was
home to the Santa Fe Railroad terminus and a Standard Oil refinery.
World War II shipyards swelled the population to nearly its current
103,000. But Richmond has struggled since and is regularly listed among
the nation's 25 most dangerous cities.
Since August, Bay Area co-op veteran Terry Baird - a burly man with a
gray beard and a penchant for South African freedom songs - has been on
the city payroll, helping to piece together cooperative ventures in
Richmond's economically barren pockets.
Mondragon Corp. was created in 1956 and fine-tuned over half a century,
McLaughlin said, "but you have to start somewhere. One of the
prerequisites of starting a co-op is need, and that is something that we
have in Richmond."
Demand matters too. Baird aims to start small, with food and service
co-ops such as a plumbers collective that won't require hefty upfront
investment. Then the city hopes to bring government and other big
employers on board, setting up ventures to meet their buying needs.
McLaughlin, a Green Party member who's been mayor since 2006, visited
Mondragon last year and was dazzled by the scale of the worker-driven
enterprises.
"My understanding of co-ops from the 1960s and 1970s was that they were
small and interesting," said McLaughlin, who was immediately sold on the
idea of replicating the formula in Richmond.
The Mondragon story began with a Catholic priest.
In 1943, Father Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta - who had narrowly escaped
death by firing squad during the Spanish Civil War - started a technical
school for working-class boys. By 1956, graduates had helped form the
first cooperative to make kerosene stoves. A cooperative bank followed
in 1959.
The corporation, which reported a $242 million profit last year, now
includes 255 industrial, retail and financial cooperatives, with others
focusing on education and research. Manufacturing co-ops churn out
metal-cutting tools, washing machines and bicycles. A retail co-op runs
Spain's third-largest grocery chain. A Mondragon construction venture
built Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum. About 85 percent of the corporation's
employees are co-op members.
But the original edict of one worker/one vote remains, through an
elected general assembly with representatives from each cooperative.
Recently, the assembly voted to cut everyone's pay rather than risk
layoffs at any one co-op. The compensation of the highest-paid worker is
capped at seven times that of the lowest. Some of the corporation's
overall profits go toward offsetting losses at any individual
enterprise. Workers also receive a share in the corporation, based on
their contributions, every year, with additional money flowing into
interest-bearing accounts disbursed at retirement.
The U.S. has a history of cooperative movements, beginning with
enterprises organized in the late 19th century by the Knights of Labor
and highlighted by the burst of food co-ops and consumer buying clubs of
the 1960s. Recent years have seen a resurgence.
"It's less counterculture utopian," said Melissa Hoover, executive
director of the San Francisco-based U.S. Federation of Worker Owned
Cooperatives, "and more engaged with people in the economy."
Some of the growth is sector-based: Green-cleaning ventures launched by
immigrant women, for example, are common. But philanthropists and
community developers increasingly have focused their attention on the
co-op model as a way to revitalize urban areas.
No city experiment has made more of a splash than Cleveland's. With
support from universities and medical centers that border the downtown
area targeted for development, the Cleveland Foundation - a donor-based
organization dedicated to bettering the city - has channeled millions of
dollars into the Mondragon-inspired Evergreen Cooperatives.
A solar panel installation-and-weatherization company and a green
commercial laundry are up and running with a combined 50 worker-owners,
said Lillian Kuri, program director of the Cleveland Foundation. An
urban farming co-op is scheduled to open in the spring.
In addition to providing financing for co-op ventures, Evergreen
Cooperatives makes services such as child care available to the workers
and provides no-cost health care.
Ted Howard, an architect of Cleveland's experiment and founder of the
University of Maryland's Democracy Collaborative, said worker-ownership
is supplanting other forms of inner-city revival.
"When you're hiring people even in a decent job that pays a living wage
- if they ... have no retirement account, no rainy day savings - a job
alone is not enough," Howard said.
In addition to offering the chance to share in profits, worker-owned
companies are rooted in the community and won't "pack up and move," he said.
The co-op model has found interest among government officials in
Washington, D.C.; Amarillo, Texas; and Atlanta, Howard said, but
Richmond stands alone in hiring a coordinator. "I don't know any city in
America that's done that," he said.
Enter Baird, a Richmond resident who in 1997 helped found the
worker-owned Arizmendi Bakery cooperative in Oakland. The Arizmendi
Association of Cooperatives now includes six Bay Area bakeries. All
workers earn the same pay rate. Profits are distributed at year's end in
proportion to hours worked.
Though he may be a co-op evangelist, Baird knows the model won't work
without a product or service consumers will pay for, a decent location
and a group of people who are able to work together.
During a recent tour of Richmond, Baird pointed out candidates for
cooperative ventures: A vacant 5,000-square-foot building is under
consideration for a handyman cooperative. A faded onetime coin laundry
near a city park could become a bakery or restaurant.
Then there's the weedy lot that one woman hopes to transform into a
cooperative garden and farm stand.
In the heart of the old downtown sits Richmond SPOKES.
Brian Drayton, once a junior zookeeper in Baltimore, spent years
developing youth programs for a range of nonprofits, stressing art and
environmental sustainability.
When he opened the community space and "bike lounge" as a nonprofit in
October, young men from the neighborhood poured in to find out what he
was doing. Then they rolled up their sleeves and helped lay gleaming
wood flooring.
As a local artist covered the walls in vivid murals, they stuck around
to learn the bike trade. Baird has been meeting with a group of five or
so men to discuss a worker-owned collective.
Richmond Solar Executive Director Michelle McGeoy has secured funds for
her co-op from, among others, Chevron (formerly Standard Oil and now the
city's largest employer) and the California Endowment - a private
foundation that seeks to promote healthy communities. The company has
set an initial target of having 10 worker-owners by next spring.
Then there's the Liberty Ship Cafe, whose seven owners were drawn
together while taking a class on developing cooperatives at the Richmond
library. The California Endowment has helped fund this project as well.
On Dec. 1, the collective will start selling its breakfast and lunch
fare at a farmers market near the civic center. The plan is to begin
deliveries to government office workers soon after.
Julio Chavez, 40, studied communications in his native Guatemala before
coming to the U.S. and working as an electrician.
In recent months, he has joined the other Liberty Ship Cafe partners in
testing recipes for sancocho - a traditional Latin American soup - and
other delicacies in a rented church kitchen.
"It's a difficult time, so one has to do different things, to search for
options," Chavez said.
Challenges remain.
While Mondragon is united by its Basque culture, Baird noted, Richmond
is fragmented by race and class and shadowed by chronic violence.
On top of the usual cost of business, cooperatives require training -
not just in job-specific skills but on how to manage a business and make
sure everyone's voice is heard.
"The real thing that can take a (cooperative) business down," Hoover
said, "is a group that's not prepared to make decisions together."
On a recent rainy day, the Liberty Ship Cafe workers met to discuss just
that.
Concetta Abraham, a 76-year-old native of Italy, provides much of the
group's cooking magic. While tasting her savory pozole, the collective
determined how long each member should be allowed to speak on agenda
items and discussed the importance of not interrupting one another.
"We're from different countries, different cultures and are different
ages," said 68-year-old Carlos Ruiller, who was born in Peru.
"There's a period where we'll have to suffer and adapt," he said. "But
I'm hopeful. We're all equals starting out - like soldiers."
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"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_
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/11/30/2291848/a-bay-area-city-looks-to-co-ops.html
Nov, 30, 2011
A Bay Area city looks to co-ops as a possible path out of poverty
By LEE ROMNEY / Los Angeles Times
RICHMOND, Calif. -- Where a hot dog stand now is the main lunchtime
option for city workers in this distressed Bay Area town, soon they'll
be able to choose from steel-cut oatmeal, goat cheese empanadas and
white bean and kale stew, prepared in a mobile cafe. Its owners will
share in the decision-making - and any profits.
Richmond Solar has trained needy residents to work as green-energy
installers and now aims to transform some into bosses by forming a
worker-owned cooperative.
The city's first bicycle shop has opened with similar dreams: Young men
who have volunteered to learn the repair trade soon may be elevated to
co-owners.
"I'm just gonna ride it out with everyone to get where we need to go,"
Mercedes Burnell, 19, said as he prepared to replace a crankshaft and
pedals at Richmond SPOKES.
The flurry of democratic enterprise has been guided by Mayor Gayle
McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher who visited Mondragon, Spain, and
recognized a possible path out of the poverty and unemployment that
plague her city.
The Basque hill town is dominated by Mondragon Corp., a web of
cooperatives that employ 83,000 workers and together represent Spain's
seventh-largest business. Co-op clusters based on Mondragon's model have
emerged in Cleveland and the Bronx, N.Y., among other cities.
Richmond, with a 16 percent unemployment rate, hopes to follow suit.
The city's industrial roots date back more than a century, when it was
home to the Santa Fe Railroad terminus and a Standard Oil refinery.
World War II shipyards swelled the population to nearly its current
103,000. But Richmond has struggled since and is regularly listed among
the nation's 25 most dangerous cities.
Since August, Bay Area co-op veteran Terry Baird - a burly man with a
gray beard and a penchant for South African freedom songs - has been on
the city payroll, helping to piece together cooperative ventures in
Richmond's economically barren pockets.
Mondragon Corp. was created in 1956 and fine-tuned over half a century,
McLaughlin said, "but you have to start somewhere. One of the
prerequisites of starting a co-op is need, and that is something that we
have in Richmond."
Demand matters too. Baird aims to start small, with food and service
co-ops such as a plumbers collective that won't require hefty upfront
investment. Then the city hopes to bring government and other big
employers on board, setting up ventures to meet their buying needs.
McLaughlin, a Green Party member who's been mayor since 2006, visited
Mondragon last year and was dazzled by the scale of the worker-driven
enterprises.
"My understanding of co-ops from the 1960s and 1970s was that they were
small and interesting," said McLaughlin, who was immediately sold on the
idea of replicating the formula in Richmond.
The Mondragon story began with a Catholic priest.
In 1943, Father Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta - who had narrowly escaped
death by firing squad during the Spanish Civil War - started a technical
school for working-class boys. By 1956, graduates had helped form the
first cooperative to make kerosene stoves. A cooperative bank followed
in 1959.
The corporation, which reported a $242 million profit last year, now
includes 255 industrial, retail and financial cooperatives, with others
focusing on education and research. Manufacturing co-ops churn out
metal-cutting tools, washing machines and bicycles. A retail co-op runs
Spain's third-largest grocery chain. A Mondragon construction venture
built Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum. About 85 percent of the corporation's
employees are co-op members.
But the original edict of one worker/one vote remains, through an
elected general assembly with representatives from each cooperative.
Recently, the assembly voted to cut everyone's pay rather than risk
layoffs at any one co-op. The compensation of the highest-paid worker is
capped at seven times that of the lowest. Some of the corporation's
overall profits go toward offsetting losses at any individual
enterprise. Workers also receive a share in the corporation, based on
their contributions, every year, with additional money flowing into
interest-bearing accounts disbursed at retirement.
The U.S. has a history of cooperative movements, beginning with
enterprises organized in the late 19th century by the Knights of Labor
and highlighted by the burst of food co-ops and consumer buying clubs of
the 1960s. Recent years have seen a resurgence.
"It's less counterculture utopian," said Melissa Hoover, executive
director of the San Francisco-based U.S. Federation of Worker Owned
Cooperatives, "and more engaged with people in the economy."
Some of the growth is sector-based: Green-cleaning ventures launched by
immigrant women, for example, are common. But philanthropists and
community developers increasingly have focused their attention on the
co-op model as a way to revitalize urban areas.
No city experiment has made more of a splash than Cleveland's. With
support from universities and medical centers that border the downtown
area targeted for development, the Cleveland Foundation - a donor-based
organization dedicated to bettering the city - has channeled millions of
dollars into the Mondragon-inspired Evergreen Cooperatives.
A solar panel installation-and-weatherization company and a green
commercial laundry are up and running with a combined 50 worker-owners,
said Lillian Kuri, program director of the Cleveland Foundation. An
urban farming co-op is scheduled to open in the spring.
In addition to providing financing for co-op ventures, Evergreen
Cooperatives makes services such as child care available to the workers
and provides no-cost health care.
Ted Howard, an architect of Cleveland's experiment and founder of the
University of Maryland's Democracy Collaborative, said worker-ownership
is supplanting other forms of inner-city revival.
"When you're hiring people even in a decent job that pays a living wage
- if they ... have no retirement account, no rainy day savings - a job
alone is not enough," Howard said.
In addition to offering the chance to share in profits, worker-owned
companies are rooted in the community and won't "pack up and move," he said.
The co-op model has found interest among government officials in
Washington, D.C.; Amarillo, Texas; and Atlanta, Howard said, but
Richmond stands alone in hiring a coordinator. "I don't know any city in
America that's done that," he said.
Enter Baird, a Richmond resident who in 1997 helped found the
worker-owned Arizmendi Bakery cooperative in Oakland. The Arizmendi
Association of Cooperatives now includes six Bay Area bakeries. All
workers earn the same pay rate. Profits are distributed at year's end in
proportion to hours worked.
Though he may be a co-op evangelist, Baird knows the model won't work
without a product or service consumers will pay for, a decent location
and a group of people who are able to work together.
During a recent tour of Richmond, Baird pointed out candidates for
cooperative ventures: A vacant 5,000-square-foot building is under
consideration for a handyman cooperative. A faded onetime coin laundry
near a city park could become a bakery or restaurant.
Then there's the weedy lot that one woman hopes to transform into a
cooperative garden and farm stand.
In the heart of the old downtown sits Richmond SPOKES.
Brian Drayton, once a junior zookeeper in Baltimore, spent years
developing youth programs for a range of nonprofits, stressing art and
environmental sustainability.
When he opened the community space and "bike lounge" as a nonprofit in
October, young men from the neighborhood poured in to find out what he
was doing. Then they rolled up their sleeves and helped lay gleaming
wood flooring.
As a local artist covered the walls in vivid murals, they stuck around
to learn the bike trade. Baird has been meeting with a group of five or
so men to discuss a worker-owned collective.
Richmond Solar Executive Director Michelle McGeoy has secured funds for
her co-op from, among others, Chevron (formerly Standard Oil and now the
city's largest employer) and the California Endowment - a private
foundation that seeks to promote healthy communities. The company has
set an initial target of having 10 worker-owners by next spring.
Then there's the Liberty Ship Cafe, whose seven owners were drawn
together while taking a class on developing cooperatives at the Richmond
library. The California Endowment has helped fund this project as well.
On Dec. 1, the collective will start selling its breakfast and lunch
fare at a farmers market near the civic center. The plan is to begin
deliveries to government office workers soon after.
Julio Chavez, 40, studied communications in his native Guatemala before
coming to the U.S. and working as an electrician.
In recent months, he has joined the other Liberty Ship Cafe partners in
testing recipes for sancocho - a traditional Latin American soup - and
other delicacies in a rented church kitchen.
"It's a difficult time, so one has to do different things, to search for
options," Chavez said.
Challenges remain.
While Mondragon is united by its Basque culture, Baird noted, Richmond
is fragmented by race and class and shadowed by chronic violence.
On top of the usual cost of business, cooperatives require training -
not just in job-specific skills but on how to manage a business and make
sure everyone's voice is heard.
"The real thing that can take a (cooperative) business down," Hoover
said, "is a group that's not prepared to make decisions together."
On a recent rainy day, the Liberty Ship Cafe workers met to discuss just
that.
Concetta Abraham, a 76-year-old native of Italy, provides much of the
group's cooking magic. While tasting her savory pozole, the collective
determined how long each member should be allowed to speak on agenda
items and discussed the importance of not interrupting one another.
"We're from different countries, different cultures and are different
ages," said 68-year-old Carlos Ruiller, who was born in Peru.
"There's a period where we'll have to suffer and adapt," he said. "But
I'm hopeful. We're all equals starting out - like soldiers."
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"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_
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