John Curl's history of the Bay Area Cooperative movement is eye-opening.  It leaves you amazed that this country is so rich in cooperativism yet we only learn of it through John's heroic efforts.  It brings to mind the saying: You need to know where you've been to know where you're going.  My hope is that this history further opens up and extends our vision and our work.  Many thanks to John Curl for his work.   

Download Curl's History of the Bay Area Cooperative Movement here. 

GEO will also post his fabulous history of the Pittsburgh area and the Pennsylvania history written for the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy in a booklet in 2009.

Permanent link to this article: http://geo.coop/node/411

By Len Krimerman, GEO

I went to the Green Union Coop Development Initiative workshop at the "Democracy at Work" Conference in New Orleans (June, 2008) with very high hopes. Somehow, the Conference organizers had managed to bring together, in a large and over-filled room, committed and inventive practitioners from the labor union, cooperative, and green economy movements. The speakers spoke with clarity and passion about:

Both Hands in the Soil

There is an ethical imperative to shift the balance of economic power away from corporate Capitalism and toward economies that benefit us all. Beginning with this assumption, I will explain how it is possible for unions and worker cooperatives to collaborate strategically to take market share away from absentee-owned and wage labor capitalist enterprises and place control of resources and production in the hands of communities of working people.

Just over a year after the Boston Workers Alliance (BWA) was founded at a convergence of "jobless workers" from Boston's Dorchester, and Roxbury neighborhoods, members of their job creation committee were in New York City at the second national conference of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives discussing plans to establish a temp agency cooperative in the Greater Boston area.