Paying below-market salaries for leadership has a surface appeal—I agree that CEO salaries at failing enterprises like Gannett are obscene—but take a closer look. Who can afford to accept a below-market top role, making much less than they could elsewhere to perform similar tasks? Mostly people with established wealth, or high-earning life partners.
Two years into the bitter struggle, Torres was fired from Sakuma Brothers. He tried to eke out a living working on other farms in the area while spending countless hours strategizing with the Sakuma workers. Then, in 2015, he made another unlikely choice; he became the lead organizer of the first farmworker-based farming cooperative in the Pacific Northwest.
In the world of tech startups and venture capital, the pursuit of success – particularly with a website – often relies on external funding. But even with co-op friendly funders and grantmakers, the pursuit and maintenance of those investors takes precious attention away from our core goals of helping artisans.
What if we could chart a different path—one that empowers us to shape our own destiny and build a sustainable foundation by rallying together?
For many small-scale cashew, coffee and cocoa farmers, learning about proper pruning, organic composting, post-harvest processing and storage, will be the first kind of formal education they’ve had access to. Co-ops serve as a hub for us to invest in training and resources, - affording farmers access to information, inputs, credit, and markets. Through a train-the-trainer model and year-round support, farmers are able produce more and better quality through the power of the collective. They become role-models or agents in the community, leading other farmers by example.
I’ve decided to start publishing The Cooperative Man: Arizmendiarrieta’s Thought, by Joxe Azurmendi. There’s been enough encouragement to keep me working on it, but little hope of publishing it through conventional channels, so I’ll be doing it myself. In practice, that will take the form of putting out 10,000 words a month, give or take a few words. On letter-sized paper, that’s 20+ pages. That length of text does not lend itself to an email or even a webpage, so I will use PDF, plus ODT, .epub, and the original markdown.
Are you a worker owner looking to build up your skills, or network with cooperators? As we continue to support local events this year, the USFWC is proud to share a new program to invest in worker co-op leadership: the Principle 5 Scholarship Program.
Artisans Cooperative is crafting a “better” online handmade marketplace, run as a values-aligned, member-owned cooperative. In other words, a co-op alternative to Etsy. Membership in the Co-op is open, and our marketplace will launch in three phases: July for fundraising items, August for member-owned shops, and September for non-member shops, all leading toward a “grand-opening” event in October 2023. We just graduated from the Start.coop accelerator and can answer any questions about what a cooperative is, too!
Best quick intro:
Slow Bloom is the culmination of a years-long struggle by former employees of Augie’s Coffee, a beloved Inland Empire chain that shut down in the summer of 2020. Father-and-son owners Andy and Austin Amento blamed the COVID-19 pandemic, but workers claimed the closure happened because they had formed a union.
With the arrival of the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), there has been a lot of focus on the importance of the “first mile”. In other words, the smallholders or commodity farmers responsible for arguably the most important piece of the puzzle – “the source”.
