Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy
Rather than take their chances with a new landlord who could raise rents by around 10 percent every year, or even a developer who might find another use for the prime real estate across Bay Boulevard from the Embarcadero Resort, residents of Harbor Village mobile home and RV park formed a corporation, took out millions in bridge loans and bought the property.
Sharing income among a hundred people is a formidable challenge. At Twin Oaks Community, the combination of income-sharing and egalitarianism forms the core of community identity. About 90 adult members and over a dozen children live together on our rural farm in Virginia that is Twin Oaks. All of the money we make we share, not by dividing it up evenly, but rather by using our collective resources to meet the individual needs of all members.
The tribe had the corridor and created Morongo Transmission, LLC., to invest some $400 million or up to 50 percent of the project. That’s all been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The deal will be “hugely profitable” for the tribe but will not cost the utility’s ratepayers any more than it would have cost without the tribe’s involvement. Because of the way utilities are structured, the very right to invest in a project is valuable.
MASS-SPECC Cooperative Development Center is the oldest and largest cooperative federation in the Philippines. Since June 2018, MASS-SPECC has 319 affiliate primary cooperatives of which the majority (64%) are multi-purpose cooperatives, and 26% are savings and credit cooperatives. Among those, 16 are labor service cooperatives. These are cooperatives that provide jobs to its members by providing manpower services to companies in need.
The Brightly® franchise, approved in November 2018 by the New York State Attorney General’s office, is the first worker cooperative franchise in the US. The franchise has a non-profit mission dedicated to expanding business ownership for low-income domestic workers. Each individual Brightly® business is structured as a for-profit cleaning enterprise, owned by its worker-members.
