Last month I conducted a series of workshops at a brace cooperative houses in Austin TX. While there I got into an interesting conversation with folks about the pros and cons of open membership (where anyone can join if their rent check clears). I want to share the highlights of that exchange.
Matthias Scheiblehner on why his Seattle construction firm Metis converted into a worker co-op.
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The best system does not help if we can’t do it in our groups. How can we keep our teams on track?
I assume that we’re talking about a scenario where the group has been trained on process. As colleague Jerry Koch-Gonzalez says: sociocracy depends more on good followers than on good facilitators. Culture training does not change overnight, and none of us have grown up in non-coercive systems. It takes practice and more practice to replace our internalized coercive patterns by non-coercive, truly collaborative ones.
2018 has been a year of growth and growing pains for Cooperation Jackson. We’ve experienced some significant advances and some setbacks. Over the last four years of our organization, we have learned a lot that we aim to build upon to improve our practice and advance our work in 2019 and beyond.
Lei Company Co-op founder Tiffany Rose Naputi Lacsado chats with Matt Cropp about the origins of their worker co-op and the current capital campaign aimed at funding their growth into the school graduation Lei market in California.
“I am an owner and a worker,” said Daisy Salvador, an immigrant from Honduras and one of the founding members of the Healthy Planet Cleaning Cooperative, in Spanish. “As an owner of a cooperative, I am excited to have the opportunity to build a better life for myself and my family.”
There is time to organize resistance. Perhaps that resistance can take the form of a militant demand that these facilities should be condemned by government authority and turned over to the workers whose labor created the wealth and profits that General Motors’ shareholders enjoy. They could then, with government assistance, be retooled and placed under the ownership and control of their workers, organized into democratic cooperatives for that purpose.
What does it take for cooperatives to take hold in the economy? Principle six of the seven international cooperative principles is “cooperation among cooperatives,” but this can be easier said than done. In this show, we hear from Howard Brodsky, co-CEO and founder of CCA Global Partners, a large purchasing cooperative, and founder of Cooperatives for a Better World.
