Moderator: Cameron Ottello (CCCD)
Guest Speakers: Joaquin Jimenez (Rancho San Benito Farm/Half Moon Bay City Council), Liya Schwartzman (California FarmLink), Lucy O'Dae (Flying V Farm)This webinar will be presented simultaneously in both English and Spanish
The souring of the hippy dream as the idealistic 1960s gave way to the embittered ’70s is a familiar tale, but here is an absorbing co-operative variation on the theme, set among the warring factions of Minnesota’s grocery co-ops.
This hour-long documentary mixes archive footage with testimony from a charismatic cast of survivors, beautifully narrated by Peter Coyote – himself a veteran of the counterculture and a familiar voice from Ken Burns’ epic American histories.
Like many co-ops arriving on the market, the Drivers Cooperative is pitched as a more equitable antidote to the notoriously exploitative practices of its competitors, chiefly Uber and Lyft. The Drivers Cooperative’s members are paid a significantly larger commission on each ride, and any profits go straight to the drivers. With 2,500 drivers, the new co-op has already established itself as a force to be reckoned with.
The Graduate Workers Organizing Cooperative was formed by graduate-student workers at Colorado State University (CSU) in the early months of 2021 to address these mounting problems, not only with the return to in-person classes but also with the issues of student fees and cost of living adjustments.
This year, PACA will host seven groups to explore community ownership and cooperative enterprise through study over the course of six months.
For a variety of (very good) reasons this group opted not to express their form of worker ownership as a cooperative corporation or limited cooperative association, but rather as a public benefit corporation. This meant hybridizing the corporate structure to provide for one-worker, one-vote governance, and profit allocation based on patronage. We have designed and structured countless “hybrid” corporate and LLC entities to operate on a cooperative basis. This PBC in fact has more democratic governance and labor-based economics than many cooperatives we have seen.
