Posted by:
Steve Dubb
Worker co-ops seen as way to build wealth in hard economic times
As a recent Christian Science Monitor article, authored by Melissa Hoover of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and Beadsie Woo of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, notes, worker cooperatives are gaining increasing mainstream attention as the current economic recession enters its third year. The relation between economic crisis and worker co-op revival is hardly a coincidence. As Hoover and Woo point out, “In hard times like these, the co-op model makes sense. After all, public confidence in corporations, banks, and the larger financial system is at low ebb, while unemployment is at its highest level in 25 years. Home-ownership, historically a reliable way to build equity, has been rocked by foreclosures. People are looking for other ways to do business and save money.”
The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives maintains a list of recent articles on worker cooperatives here. In addition to the Monitor, other not-so-usual suspects covering the rise of worker cooperatives in the United States include CNN-Money.com; the New York Time’s Economix blog, which also ran an a related blog entry focused on the recent partnership between the United Steelworkers union and the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a worker co-op based in the Basque Country of Spain that employs over 100,000 worldwide (also featured in our “In the News” section of our November 2009 e-newsletter); the Economist; and Time.com. The last two of these profile a co-op enterprise that the Democracy Collaborative (host of Community-Wealth.org helped develop in Cleveland, the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry.
According to Hoover and Woo, in addition to the above, two other factors that have helped heighten the visibility of worker cooperatives are:
• The designation by the United Nations of 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives.
• The release this past fall of Michael Moore’s film Capitalism, A Love Story, which profiled two worker cooperatives: Alvrado Street Bakery, based in Petaluma, California; and Isthmus Engineering, a machine manufacturer based in Madison, Wisconsin.
Hoover and Woo also suggest a few ways policy can promote co-op development. These include:
• Using U.S. Small Business Administration guarantee loans to support worker co-ops.
• Congressional funding for an urban co-op development initiative, modeled on a current grant program that supports the development of rural cooperatives.
• Creation of a U.S. Employee Ownership Bank.
Additional examples of worker co-ops featured in these articles include Pelham Auto Parts, an auto repair collective based in western Massachusetts; New York City-based Cooperative Home Care Associates with over 1,500 employee-owners; and San Francisco Bay Area-based network of green housecleaning cooperatives known as WAGES (Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security).