“At the beginning, the co-ops were a response to marginality and crisis,” she says. “Often it was because they weren’t provided with the kind of burial they wanted for their families, or they couldn’t get access to quality food, healthcare or banking. So they created their own businesses.
In Milan, Italy, as soon as the outbreak hit the city, “solidarity brigades” were established. In the course of two months almost 1,000 people joined the brigades to support others and almost fourteen brigades started operating in the city. These brigades helped elderly people who were advised not to leave the house with their grocery shopping and medicines and supplied people who lost their jobs with food. And another brigade was established to provide psychological support to anyone struggling emotionally during this time of isolation and hardships.
In Brazil’s most densely populated favela, Paraisopolis, Sao Paulo , the situation has been compounded by what a local community leader, Gilson Rodrigues, says has been a total lack of support from the municipal government.
In a community as socially active as our Medvil Cooperative, Covid-19 has changed our way of interacting. Our club houses are closed to groups larger than 10 people and the mail houses are limited to one person at a time. Our famous summer fish-fries haven’t happened and our social committee, which plans nearly 30 community events per year, has been forced to cancel month after month of events.
Long ago, Andre Gorz, a social philosopher living in France, drew a distinction between ameliorative measures that buttress existing relations of property and power versus those that open tiny cracks in the structure of inequality, slowly accumulating over time to offer an ideological and political challenge to the status quo. He called the first “reformist reform” and the second “non-reformist reform.”[1]
A new initiative aims to show that an alternative path for food delivery is possible, that the exploitation of workers is not the only way, that nickel-and-diming is not the necessary condition to stay on the market, but that instead, it’s possible to pay riders a dignified wage and at the same time create a home delivery service that would be able to keep an entire community together.
A campaign to save Thunder Bay’s Finnish labour temple, including the famous Hoito restaurant, has taken a major step forward.
A community group organizing to purchase the building formally incorporated earlier this week as the Finlandia Co-operative of Thunder Bay...
The co-operative will soon begin offering memberships to the public, as well as businesses and non-profits – a chance to support and have a voice in the movement to keep the building in community hands.
When Christine Hernandez saw an ad for something called the “Radical Real Estate Law School” in Oakland, she was intrigued.
“I thought, radical? That’s me,” she said. “Real estate? I’m interested. Law school? Never thought of it.”
Nancy Perez, a 45-year-old resident of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, contracted COVID-19 in March. She stayed quarantined in her room for a month to isolate from her two sons and grandson.
For the past five years, the media industry has been on a unionizing spree. This wave of worker empowerment—combined with the industry’s regular waves of layoffs, folding publications, and management shenanigans—have led many people to pine for the next evolution: Worker-owned media co-ops. Easier said than done.
PG&E provides natural gas and electricity to most of the northern two-thirds of California and last year had revenues in excess of $17bn. This year the company’s fortunes have dramatically reversed due to them having to pay liabilities following a devastating wildfire in 2019 that they were deemed responsible for igniting.
