WORKER-OWNED

[spectre]

http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/worker-owned/

http://www.community-wealth.org/strategies/index.html

CO-OPERATIVES
http://www.garalperovitz.com/2011/12/worker-owners-of-the-world-unite/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/opinion/worker-owners-of-america-unite.html
by Gar Alperovitz / December 14, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether
they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an
astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of
Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and
other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than
ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system. But at another
level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades:
more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies
and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in
fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both
traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.
Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the
ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million
Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned
companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions. And
worker-owned companies make a difference. In Cleveland, for instance,
an integrated group of worker-owned companies, supported in part by
the purchasing power of large hospitals and universities, has taken
the lead in local solar-panel installation, “green” institutional
laundry services and a commercial hydroponic greenhouse capable of
producing more than three million heads of lettuce a year.

Local and state governments are likewise changing the nature of
American capitalism. Almost half the states manage venture capital
efforts, taking partial ownership in new businesses. Calpers,
California’s public pension authority, helps finance local development
projects; in Alaska, state oil revenues provide each resident with
dividends from public investment strategies as a matter of right; in
Alabama, public pension investing has long focused on state economic
development. Moreover, this year some 14 states began to consider
legislation to create public banks similar to the longstanding Bank of
North Dakota; 15 more began to consider some form of single-payer or
public-option health care plan. Some of these developments, like rural
co-ops and credit unions, have their origins in the New Deal era; some
go back even further, to the Grange movement of the 1880s. The most
widespread form of worker ownership stems from 1970s legislation that
provided tax benefits to owners of small businesses who sold to their
employees when they retired. Reagan-era domestic-spending cuts spurred
nonprofits to form social enterprises that used profits to help
finance their missions. Recently, growing economic pain has provided a
further catalyst. The Cleveland cooperatives are an answer to urban
decay that traditional job training, small-business and other
development strategies simply do not touch. They also build on a 30-
year history of Ohio employee-ownership experiments traceable to the
collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s.

Further policy changes are likely. In Indiana, the Republican state
treasurer, Richard Mourdock, is using state deposits to lower interest
costs to employee-owned companies, a precedent others states could
easily follow. Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, is developing
legislation to support worker-owned strategies like that of Cleveland
in other cities. And several policy analysts have proposed expanding
existing government “set aside” procurement programs for small
businesses to include co-ops and other democratized enterprises. If
such cooperative efforts continue to increase in number, scale and
sophistication, they may suggest the outlines, however tentative, of
something very different from both traditional, corporate-dominated
capitalism and traditional socialism. It’s easy to overestimate the
possibilities of a new system. These efforts are minor compared with
the power of Wall Street banks and the other giants of the American
economy. On the other hand, it is precisely these institutions that
have created enormous economic problems and fueled public anger.
During the populist and progressive eras, a decades-long buildup of
public anger led to major policy shifts, many of which simply took
existing ideas from local and state efforts to the national stage.
Furthermore, we have already seen how, in moments of crisis, the
nationalization of auto giants like General Motors and Chrysler can
suddenly become a reality. When the next financial breakdown occurs,
huge injections of public money may well lead to de facto takeovers of
major banks. And while the American public has long supported the
capitalist model, that, too, may be changing. In 2009 a Rasmussen poll
reported that Americans under 30 years old were “essentially evenly
divided” as to whether they preferred “capitalism” or “socialism.” A
long era of economic stagnation could well lead to a profound national
debate about an America that is dominated neither by giant
corporations nor by socialist bureaucrats. It would be a fitting next
direction for a troubled nation that has long styled itself as of, by
and for the people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqo-ZimcG0o

OWN IT
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/28/local/la-me-richmond-20111128
They're owning this cooperation
by Lee Romney / November 28, 2011

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% 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 plumber's 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% 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 more 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 healthcare.
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 Assn. 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's 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 last month, 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. But I'm
hopeful. We're all equals starting out — like soldiers."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO-n_cdrwYQ

TRANSCRIPT
http://www.garalperovitz.com/abc/
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/15/worker_owners_of_america_unite_will

AMY GOODMAN: Alperovitz finds that 130 million Americans are members
of some kind of cooperative, and 13 million Americans work in an
employee-owned company. He says the U.S. may be heading toward
something very different from both corporate-dominated capitalism and
from traditional socialism. Gar Alperovitz is a professor of political
economy at the University of Maryland. His op-ed is called "Worker-
Owners of America, Unite!" It’s out today in the New York Times. A new
edition of his book, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth,
Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, has also just been published. So,
what’s the evidence for this, Gar?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Well, it’s piling up right beneath the surface, that
the press, the normal press, hasn’t been covering. You know, 130
million people, that’s 40 percent of United States, involved in credit
unions, co-ops all over the country, that don’t get any publicity. And
roughly 13 million people, in one kind or another, have worker-owned
companies—again, five or six million more people than are involved in
labor unions. And several states are attempting to set up state banks,
like the existing Bank of North Dakota. A number of cities are trying
to set up city banks. San Francisco and Portland are the latest ones
on the list. So, if you look deeper, you find wonderful experiments
going on. One really interesting one in Cleveland, where there’s a
group of cooperatively owned businesses by—in the community that are
building a hydroponic land kind of greenhouse, producing three to five
million heads of lettuce a year, a gigantic laundry—all this worker-
owned. And again, the press hasn’t been covering it, but there—it
gives you a sense of what could happen if the Occupy movement gets
serious about simply building on what’s already out there.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But in terms of a critical mass for the economy, are we
talking about here cooperatives that have a significant share of the
economic activity in the country, or are we talking largely about very
small co-ops that, while they may involve a lot of people, don’t
really have that much impact on the overall economy of the country?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Well, that’s the interesting thing. Of course most of
this is still much smaller than the giant corporations—I mean, the
ones that got us into trouble and the ones that got nationalized, as
in GM and Chrysler and the big banks. And at some point, we’re going
to have to go to that level. But what’s happening, and I think because
of the pain levels, we’re seeing these things grow over time simply
because the pain is growing. And the ones I mentioned in Cleveland are
not small. We’ve got a laundry—an industrial-scale laundry going on
there, owned by the workers in that community, that’s probably the
most ecologically advanced in the country. This large greenhouse
that’s developing, three to five million heads of lettuce. These are
not your little corner stores. So I see a trend of expanding
possibility, building step by step on what’s already out there. We’ve
learned a lot in the last several decades. And I think it’s going to
grow over time because of the pain levels. That’s what the evidence
suggests.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about the banks and the credit unions, the
state banks that are developing.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Well, we’ve had, since the beginning part of the
century in North Dakota, a state-owned bank, highly successful. The
press doesn’t cover it. But it’s a bank that exists just like other
banks, but it doesn’t speculate. It doesn’t use money to do what the
Wall Street banks are doing. And as I say, there are about 14 states
that have introduced legislation to reproduce that, help finance small
business, on the one hand, but co-ops and worker-owned firms, and most
of this with a real green edge to it, ecologically developed. And in
these city banks, the same thing, trying to focus—for instance, in San
Francisco, there’s about $2 billion in state—in city money, that’s
taxpayer money. Instead of putting it in the Bank of America, the
proposal is put it in a city bank or a city credit union and then use
that to finance development in the city. And I think that direction,
using those public monies, and not simply to finance corporations or
speculation, but doing it in a way that builds up this already
developing knowledge and base of worker-owned companies, community-
owned developments, neighborhood developments, co-ops, that form of
development, the way to think about it is the—you know, the two to
three decades before the Progressive Era and the Populist Era really
made a big national impact. There was a developmental process, step by
step, at the state level. Take the women’s right to vote, the same
thing: step by step, state by state by state, building up over three
to four to five decades. But I think the pain level is so high, it’s
going to be quicker this time. So I take this local development
process very seriously. And I think it can lead to national change, as
the New Deal did at one point when the pain levels really struck. You
know, at the other—

JUAN GONZALEZ: You also talk—
GAR ALPEROVITZ: At the other—go ahead.

JUAN GONZALEZ: If I can, you also talk about the changing attitudes,
especially among young Americans, toward concepts like capitalism and
socialism. Could you talk about that, as well?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Yeah, there was a Rasmussen poll—now, we’re talking
about a fairly conservative polling group—in 2009. People under 30,
they found, were equally disposed as to whether capitalism or
socialism was a better system. And now that’s a big change. We’re past
the time in the Cold War when anyone who mentioned anything like a
worker-owned company or cooperative or public-owned enterprise was
written out of court. Lots of younger people are looking at what will
work in the midst of a failing economy, where the large corporations
are falling day by day and the speculators on Wall Street are
speculating away the money. I think we’re seeing a change in attitude,
both increasing doubts about what’s now going on in the economy, deep
doubts, very deep doubts—thanks to Occupation, it’s crystallized—but
this other trend of saying, "What do you want? Where are we going?" in
some ways to democratize the economy in a very American way, something
very—you can explain to your neighbors, this is—this makes sense, in
these cities that I’ve been talking about. You get a whole larger
coalition of people understanding there’s a hell of a lot of pain
here, we can develop something here that moves us in a direction of
democratizing local economies and beyond.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Gar Alperovitz, the name of your book, America
Beyond Capitalism. Do you think that’s possible in this country?
GAR ALPEROVITZ: Well, I’m a—you know, I’m a historian and a political
economist. Changes of major kinds, if you look at decade-by-decade
development, fundamental systemic change is as common as grass in
world history. A lot of pain. But I think an America beyond capitalism
is a real possibility. Again, if you stand back, the way the civil
rights folks did—my heroes are the civil rights leaders in the 1930s
and '40s, the ones who laid the basis for the big change that came in
the ’60s, and I think that's the way to understand what’s going on at
the grassroots level and the sort of things that Occupation has been
teaching us. Get in there now and begin to develop that base and that
foundation for the transformation.