are not easy to promote. But, if people are
pissed off enough at the employment
situation, they will grasp this, and will be
lucky if they do.
In the very near future, the multi-national
companies that sell us everything we need to
live, from tomatoes to underwear , will discover
that they cannot make enough money to pay
their CEO his million buck bonus and will
leave the market.
If you're in a midwestern town that Walmart
already descimated, you have no store, no
tomatoes, and no underwear.
So, what do you do? a workers cooperative.
It will never become a limited company, it
should never over-extend itself with debt and
can carry on giving money back to the real
important people, the workers.
Read 'em: Yes
Occupy
Sandy Funds Growth of Worker-Owned Co-Ops
Could
the seaside neighborhoods struck by Hurricane Sandy be the next big incubator
for worker-owned companies?
by
Peter Rugh
posted
Apr 05, 2013
This
article originally appeared on wagingnonviolence.org
Rockaway
Meeting
Community members in Far Rockaway gather
for one of the early meetings about cooperatives. Photo by WNV / Peter Rugh.
Three
and a half months ago, the walls upstairs at the Church of the Prophecy in Far
Rockaway, a low-income coastal neighborhood of New York City, were covered with
maps of where help was most needed. The church was a hub for the Occupy Sandy
relief effort after Hurricane Sandy. Now, nearly five months after the
hurricane struck, the maps have been replaced by posters extolling the virtues
of collective struggle and art made by neighborhood children enrolled in Occupy
Sandy’s twice-weekly after-school program.
Worker-run enterprises have a history of
flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval.
“The
kids missed a month and a half of school,” explained Luis Casco, a member of
the church’s congregation who pulled strings to help move Occupy into Far
Rockaway. The after-school program was, in part, his brainchild. “We figured
we’d start helping the kids and we could win over their parents. Then we could
actually start bigger projects,” he said.
One
of those bigger projects is a worker-run cooperative initiative, organized by
Occupy Sandy and supported by the Working World, an organization that specializes
in incubating collectively owned businesses.
The
initiative is well suited to Far Rockaway because worker-run enterprises have a
history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political
upheaval. In 2001, when Argentina defaulted on its international loans and the
country’s ownership class fled, Argentines took over abandoned factories and
established networks of producers and distributors. In Venezuela, worker-run
cooperatives were at the heart of the vision for 21st-century socialism, and
Hugo Chavez’s administration helped create tens of thousands of collectively
owned businesses over the last 14 years. Most notably, Spanish workers in the
Basque region created the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest federation
of cooperatives, during the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. Today more than
250 enterprises operate under the Mondragon banner, and the federation, which
spans 77 countries and employs 83,000 workers, has been widely praised.
“Collective
approach pays big dividends,” read a headline about Mondragon in The Financial
Times last year, while The New York Times noted the “use of workers’ share
capital and loans” has enabled the federation to remain stable through
vacillations in global markets, including the ongoing financial crisis.
Starting
from scratch
While
Mondragon shows what is possible down the line, Far Rockaway residents are at
the very beginning of the process. At one of the crowded early meetings of the
cooperative initiative, children and adults buzzed about with disposable plates
of food in their hands, fraternizing as extra folding chairs were arranged.
Several parents whose children attended the after-school program arrived,
bringing their friends and neighbors along. Most were Spanish-speaking
immigrants who, having spent their lives working for someone else, were eager
to learn more about cooperatives.
Many
in Far Rockaway lost their jobs when Hurricane Sandy rendered commutes
impossible for flooded local businesses. For those without U.S. work papers,
finding new employment has been difficult.
“It’s
really hard to find a new job when you don’t have papers,” Casco explained.
“Their homes were destroyed, they don’t have the resources to go to welfare and
FEMA ain’t helping them.” Others, such as Olga Lezama, managed to keep their
jobs after the storm, but the prospect of holding on to the profits of their
labor has piqued their interest. Lezama currently works as an upholsterer for a
high-end furniture company. By her calculations, her boss makes approximately $500
every hour off the furniture that she and her co-workers upholster, while she
earns roughly $100 a day.
“It
hurts my feelings and my pockets,” she said. “My job and my efforts and my
everything goes to them.”
Luis
Casco portrait
Luis Casco, a resident of Far Rockaway, has
been one of the main organizers of community initiatives after Hurricane Sandy.
Photo by WNV / Peter Rugh.
By
her side was her husband, Carlos Lezama, a carpenter who specializes in
cabinets. The pair hope to work with others in the community to form a
home-design cooperative, a service in high demand after the storm, which ruined
the ground floors of most of the region’s low-lying bungalows.
“We
go to stores and buy cheap furniture, cabinets and stuff, and we’re wasting our
money,” Lezama said. “In two months, the cabinet is no good. So we have go buy
it again. Our people deserve good stuff.”
Workers
in control
Occupy
Sandy has allocated $60,000 of the
$900,000 it raised in the initial flood of generosity following the storm
toward the formation of cooperatives, an initiative they hope will spread
across storm-affected areas if it proves successful in Far Rockaway. The
Working World, an organization that provides zero-debt micro-finance loans to
new cooperatives, has offered to provide monetary support, but for now the
organization is mostly lending advice and training.
At
one of the early meetings, Brandon Martin, the Working World’s founder, showed
the crowd a slideshow of other projects the organization has helped launch.
Images of a beekeepers’ cooperative in the countryside of Nicaragua and a shoe
factory in Buenos Aires glowed on the wall behind Martin as he outlined the
benefits of workers sharing resources and making decisions democratically.
Are there limits to what these businesses
can achieve while embedded in a broader economic framework of competition?
“A
cooperative is workers controlling capital, instead of capital controlling
workers,” said Martin. “It’s about reorganizing the economy around who’s really
in control.”
The
Working World finances itself by collecting a small percentage of the profits
that member collectives generate, money that the organization reinvests in
establishing new enterprises. Martin explained that the idea originated in
ancient Sumeria, where the word for "interest" was the same as the
word for "calf."
“If
the cow I lent you has babies,” explained Martin, “I loaned you my cow, so I
can have some of the babies. That would be the interest.”
But
if the cow was sterile, the Sumerians didn’t collect interest. The same works
for Working World’s loans today. The organization only collects once a
cooperative generates a steady profit, a model that avoids forcing people into
debt if their business fails.
Interest
grows
The
Sumerians, for their part, eventually altered their lending practices such that
they collected interest regardless of the outcome. The legacy of that shift is
still with us today; few in Far Rockaway can call their surroundings their own.
Walk through the neighborhood in the middle of a business day and you’ll see
iron gratings pulled down over storefronts and plywood covering the windows of
large shopping complexes. Those stores that are open often bear the insignias
of chain outlets that carry money out of the neighborhood and into the coffers
of large corporations. Worker-run cooperatives, in contrast, could offer a way
for community members to sell the products of their labor without selling their
labor itself—a shift that would keep capital within the community and cash in
the pockets of workers.
Cooperative
Takeover6 Ways to Fuel the Cooperative Takeover
Co-ops
need customers, money, and training. How do we shift from business as usual to
the work of cooperation?
There
is obvious enthusiasm in the neighborhood for worker-run enterprises. But are
there limits to what these businesses can achieve while embedded in a broader
economic framework of competition and exploitation? And does the focus on
cooperatives represent a shift in direction for Occupy, one that veers away
from a direct fight for systemic transformation?
At
the following cooperative meeting a week later, the crowd had grown. People
discussed plans for a scrap metal business and a cleaning-workers’ collective.
One man pulled a citizens’ band radio out of his winter coat, explaining that
drivers in the taxi cooperative he hoped to form could use it to communicate.
He’d been doing research; nine other drivers were needed to secure an operating
license from the city.
“We
can’t fight the city,” one Occupy Sandy organizer confided. “But we can build
co-ops.”
Building
an alternative
Richard
Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and author of Democracy at
Work, a study of cooperative businesses, argues that forming cooperatives can
be the first step in enacting a sweeping social and economic shift. Wolff
envisions a transformation, similar to the social shift from feudalism to
capitalism, in which cooperatives replace corporations and goods are
distributed through a democratically planned economy.
The
cooperatives that Wolff talks about, and the ones that Occupy Sandy is aiming
to establish, are more accurately known as worker self-directed enterprises:
businesses that organize democratically collective ownership at the point of
production.
“When
the workers get together and decide how to distribute the income in such an
enterprise, would they give the CEO $25 million in stock bonuses while
everybody else can barely get by?” Wolff asks rhetorically.
He
stresses the difference between the productive and distributive side of economies,
explaining that worker-run cooperatives are the often-overlooked prerequisite
for achieving an egalitarian distribution of wealth and resources. “There is
the question of what exactly an alternative to capitalism is,” he explains.
“I’ve stressed worker-self-directed enterprises as a different way of
organizing production.”
On
the other hand are markets, which distribute the fruits of production. Wolff
believes that the mistake of many 20th-century
socialists was to imagine that the elimination of markets would create social
egalitarianism, even though production had not yet been reorganized into a
democratic model.
