Madison cooperatives booming, both old and new
Posted: January 20, 2012 Filed under: Cooperatives, United States | Tags: CICOPA, Isthmus, John Kessler, Lisa Thoms, Madison, Mondragon, Rebecca Kemble, USFWC, Wisconsin, worker-owned 2 Comments »Madison is the state capital, seat of the University of Wisconsin, and home to several worker cooperatives that have been in business for over 30 years.
Cab driver Rebecca Kemble is board president of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and President of CICOPA North America.
Rebecca works at Union Cab, founded in 1979, which now boasts 228 worker members – drivers, mechanics, office staff, and dispatchers. Committed to environmental sustainability, they are replacing gas guzzling Crown Victorias with hybrid vehicles. And they designed their own computerized dispatch system to respond to calls for service with the nearest available vehicle, reducing mileage and improving service and efficiency.
Rebecca drove us around and pointed out other long standing Madison coops like Nature’s Bakery and Community Pharmacy. “Worker cooperatives are sustainable businesses, especially in hard times. They are more flexible with changes in the market and give the highest priority to people working in the business. In the U.S. few people are aware of worker cooperatives, but with the economic crisis we are finding lots of interest.”
Isthmus founder John Kessler
Inspired by Mondragón’s example, Isthmus Engineering was founded 25 years ago. The cooperative designs and builds state of the art automation systems for a broad range of industries. With 50 employees, the majority worker owners, Isthmus is highly project oriented. Self-directed teams of mechanical and controls engineers, plus highly skilled electricians and machinists, collaborate to design, build, and test equipment that meets their customers’ needs.
“The core principle is one worker one vote, not each dollar one vote,” says founder John Kessler. “We’re not giving up anything by being a worker cooperative. It’s an excellent way to run a business.”
Lisa Thoms
A proud workers coop, Isthmus holds weekly board meetings over a catered lunch, so members can more easily stay abreast of current projects. And finances are completely transparent, even how much each person is paid.
Engineer Lisa Thoms, Vice President of the cooperative, explained. “We vote on hourly pay rates every year, based on each member’s discipline, experience, and contributions. So we all have a say in deciding what our fellow worker/owners are paid. But no member is paid more than twice as much as anyone else.”
“We’re democratic with a small ‘d’,” says engineer Ole Olson, “Everyone can have input in a decision. It doesn’t always go your way, but you know how and why the decision is made and that’s different from a conventional company.” Ole, who sits on the Isthmus coop affairs committee, is active with the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and in MadWorCs, a budding network of Madison worker cooperatives that promotes support among coops in the area, and encourages creation of new coops.
Ole Olson
Inspired by the experience of Mondragón, where complex support networks among individual coops developed over 50 years, similar networks exist in Western Massachusetts. [Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives], the San Francisco Bay Area [Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives] and Austin TX [Cooperation Texas]. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland are being developed as part of a network from the outset.
Inspired by Mondragon, Chicago works to bring back world class manufacturing
Posted: January 13, 2012 Filed under: United States | Tags: Chicago, CMRC, Erica Swinney, jobs, manufacturing, Marquise Booker, Pablo Varela 1 Comment »Chicago once had many large and small industries that provided thousands of family wage jobs. But with the decline in US manufacturing, many of those industries and jobs have disappeared. . Now a coalition of business, labor, education, and public officials called the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council [CMRC] is determined to restore Chicago as a world center for advanced manufacturing.
Erica Swinney, of Austin Polytechnical Academy
Even in today’s depressed economy, thousands of high tech, highly paid manufacturing jobs in Chicago remain open, because companies cannot find qualified applicants to fill them. So the CMRC is focusing on education, and they’ve begun in the west side neighborhood called Austin.
“Austin Polytechnical Academy was designed to connect young people in Austin to careers in advanced manufacturing,” according to Erica Swinney, director of career and community programs at Austin. “It was inspired by the early technical school in Mondragón that was part of a regional economic development strategy that led to the Mondragón Cooperatives.” This small public high school works closely with the Austin community, where most of its students live, and it has attracted some very dedicated teachers.
Pablo Varela, left, with student Otis Johnson
According to machine shop teacher Pablo Varela, here working with student Otis Johnson, “The main goal is that a student gain the skill sets to be successful in both manufacturing and engineering, whatever they choose.”
CMRC companies advise the school about curricula, provide internships, and offer job shadowing opportunities where students learn what it would be like to work in a given job. Just five years after the school was founded, students are planning professional careers that once would have been out of reach. Junior Desiree Wordlaw is interested in biomedical engineering, and senior Torres Hughes plans to study law and engineering.
Marquise Booker
Recent graduate Marquise Booker: “Austin set up job shadowing, and I was interested in metal working so I chose Laystrom. I liked working there, and they offered me a summer job.” After Marquise graduated, Laystrom Manufacturing hired him, and now they are helping to pay for him to study mechanical engineering at Triton College.
Occupy Production: A Vision for Democracy at Work
Posted: December 6, 2011 Filed under: Occupy, United States | Tags: alternatives, economy, occupy, Richard. D. Wolff, Truthout Leave a comment »(by: Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed)
Photo: Bill Ruhsam / Flickr
As the Occupy movement keeps developing, it seeks solutions for the economic and political dysfunctions it exposes and opposes. For many, the capitalist economic system itself is the basic problem. They want change to another system, but not to the traditional socialist alternative (e.g. USSR or China). That system, too, seems to require basic change.
The common solution these activists propose is to change both systems’ production arrangements from the ground up. Every enterprise should be democratized. Workers should occupy their enterprise by collectively functioning as its board of directors. That would abolish the capitalist exploitative system (employer versus employee) much as our historical predecessors abolished the parallel exploitative systems of slavery (master versus slave) and feudalism (lord versus serf)…
EQUAL EXCHANGE – A Profitable, Mission Driven Company
Posted: November 12, 2011 Filed under: Cooperatives, United States | Tags: chocolate, coffee, Equal Exchange, Fair Trade, Massachusetts Leave a comment »
Equal Exchange is one of the largest roasters of fair trade coffee in the world, and they are 100% owned and operated by their workers. Their headquarters in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts is a great place to film, especially if you like chocolate and coffee.
A new employee who wishes to join the coop works for a probationary period, and then existing coop worker owners vote to decide if the new person should become a member. If she/he is approved, the new member will begin to buy in to the company. All members have an equal say in setting company policy. The 120 member staff is divided into teams with managers in each department.
Each member can choose to spend 4 hours of the work week to participate in meetings, trainings, and other member development activities. At staff meetings and broad policy discussions, the member owners take an active part in setting company policy, a role that is taken very seriously. In one group discussion on innovation and risk, Daniel Fireside cautions, “A lot of folks look to us as a role model. If we take a risk and we fail totally, not only are the livelihoods of our members at stake, but so is the model of a successful worker coop.”
EE imports fair traded coffee, chocolate, tea, sugar, olive oil, and bananas. When new worker owners are voted in, the company pays their way to Latin America or Africa for a first hand experience with some of the small coffee and cacao farmers who provide raw materials for Equal Exchange products.
Customers include specialty food stores, coops and faith based groups who appreciate the company’s social mission, ”to build long-term trade partnerships that are economically just and environmentally sound, to foster mutually beneficial relationships between farmers and consumers and to demonstrate…the contribution of worker co-operatives and Fair Trade to a more equitable, democratic and sustainable world.”
Cooperative Home Care Associates gets high reviews from members
Posted: November 2, 2011 Filed under: Cooperatives, United States | Tags: Bronx, Christina Taylor, Cooperative Home Health Care Associates, Gail Porter, healthcare, SEIU 1 Comment »
“Do you want to nominate somebody for the company board of directors? Someone who is a hard worker? Someone you respect? You can even nominate yourself!” It’s payday at Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, and some of the 1700 worker/owners are gathering for an information fair about retirement, health care plans and continuing education. Board member Christina Taylor greets them at the door and reminds them that this is their company and it is up to them to set policy, hire and fire the management.
Founded 25 years ago, CHCA is 100% owned by its workers who are also members of the Service Employees International Union. The cooperative has set new quality standards for home health care in the New York region while improving wages and working conditions for the women who typically provide these services. The coop’s clients are almost always low income people who qualify for Medicaid. And since Medicaid reimbursement rates are very low, so is the pay for home care aides. So CHCA lobbies for higher Medicaid pay scales.
For new home health workers, the coop provides five weeks of classroom and hands on training, and a guaranteed minimum number of hours of work each week. Office staff members sign up new clients, match home care aides to client needs, and provide telephone backup for aides who run into a problem on the job and need advice or assistance.
Gail Porter
Gail Porter told us, “I’m a home health aide and three time board member. I’ve been on the finance and policy action committees. When I needed a job in 1995, I came here for training, and I’ve been here almost 17 years. I love the work I do.”
Now Filming at the Mondragon Coops in Basque Country
Posted: October 11, 2011 Filed under: Basque Country | Tags: Fagor Cooperatives, Jose Maria Ormaetxea, Mondragon, Orbea, Spain, worker-owned 2 Comments »
“We started with nothing, and everything we have achieved was because of our own hard work and dedication,” explains Jose Maria Ormaetxea, one of the five founding members of the Mondragon coops in 1956.
We have to interrupt our reports on worker owned companies in the U.S., because we are now visiting the Mondragon coops in the Basque region of northern Spain. Our days are long and intense as we film in numerous factories, universities, research centers, the coop bank and social service agency. We’ve been given complete access to coop managers, regular workers and others in the region to report on what these remarkable cooperatives have achieved and the complex ways they work together to benefit their worker owners and the economy of the entire region.
People here are feeling the effects of the economic crisis, of course, but unemployment in the Basque country is half what it is in the rest of Spain. The cooperatives take a variety of measures to prevent layoffs of members. They can vote to reduce their own hours or pay, or workers may be transferred temporarily to other cooperatives that are not as affected by the downturn. These worker owned coops employ 85,000 people and had revenues of about 25 billion dollars in 2010.
Worker-owned Orbea builds some of the finest bicycles in the world. The Orbea sponsored mountain bike team now holds the world and Olympic championships.
We look forward to sharing more stories, both from here and from North America, in the coming weeks, as we wrap up our Mondragon filming and begin editing the documentary, Shift Change. Stay tuned.
