Practical Radicals

The Arizmendi Association is a federation of worker owned co-ops in the Bay area (CA). It is building a network of businesses to create an economy based on solidarity and cooperation.

L'Association Arizmendi est une fédération de coopératives de travailleurs dans le Baie de San Francisco (CA). Elle s'efforce de développer une économie locale basée sur la solidarité et la coopération.

Arizmendi, a Co-op of Co-ops (stfr) from Transition Bus on Vimeo.

Transcript

Bethany: The Cheeseboard Collective is a business of about 50 worker owners who collectively run a bakery, cheese shop and pizzeria.

Tim: So we approached Cheeseboard and we said we'd like to create more democratic jobs. We want to find a successful cooperative in the Bay Area that we could create new co-ops based on, would you be willing to support us in that? And they were very generous. And they said, "well, we would love to have other people have what we have." And so they would share their recipes. They helped train people. That's how it started.

Bethany: I like..I like everything all together. I like the fact that it's a cooperative. I like working with my hands and I like physical labor. Everybody's paid the same wage no matter how long you've been working at the Cheeseboard. Even though I've only..I'm one of the newest people there, I've only been there two years. I still have all of the rights, responsibilities and privileges as somebody who's been there for 30 or 40 years. Everybody is valued equally and we operate by consensus, but we all make decisions collectively. We're always trying to work together to make the decision work for everybody. So we reach unanimity on almost every decision.

The collective has also afforded itself really great benefits. All of our medical expenses and alternative medicine and dental is reimbursed. We earn paid vacation as well, or about five weeks of paid time off per year. People working together can gain more than if they were working alone or if they have no power over their situation.

Cheesboard Collective member: Don't show this to anybody in France. They'll say, "that is not how you roll a baguette. What are they doing?" [laughing]

Tim: The Arizmendi Association is one large co-operative made up of seven smaller cooperatives. So each of the bakeries is a separate co-operative. It's owned by the people who work there. And then there's my co-operative, which is a seventh, which is a technical assistance co-operative. So our job is to go create new cooperatives and support the existing ones. We do training and democratic decision making and conflict resolution. Bookkeeping is a lot of what we do for that. And they're all those co-operatives make up the Arizmendi Association.

And so the way that's run is that two representatives are elected from each of the bakeries as well the technical assistance co-operative. We make up the board of directors of the association and that's who decides where we're going to create new bakeries, when we're going to create new bakeries, what services to provide to the existing bakeries. When we start out a co-operative, we don't charge them anything. They don't have money to pay at that time because they're getting going. So our system is that once a co-op starts to make a profit, they pay 25% of that profit back into the association that pays for the ongoing services, but also creates a fund to create new cooperative jobs.

So the fact that I'm able to be paid is because the bakers are working at their bakeries and working very hard to do that, and also to contribute money to sharing that with other people. We've never taken any money from the government or from foundations, NGOs. All our money has actually come from cooperatives creating money that they reinvest in creating new jobs.

Bethany: I think that there are far happier people in this environment than in any other sort of workplace that's more conventional, that's hierarchical. It's just unfair and really dehumanizing that people work so hard and the profits of their labor are given to shareholders or bosses or executives. That the people who actually produce what's being sold or what has value are not the people who are actually profiting outside of, you know, whatever wage they have. And so often their wages are not adequate or just simply not fair. And I want a decent standard of living. I want to be comfortable. I want to feel free at work.

Tim: We, the people who started it, were very concerned about the direction of our economy and our society and what it was doing to the environment. And to us, it's important that we have a sustainable economy. And so when I learned about things in the Basque region, when I learned about things in Italy where they have whole regional economies, where they were producing their own goods and doing it in a cooperative way, I was very excited about that and wanted to see if we could do that here in the United States. And I would hope that worker cooperatives would be more embraced as a critical strategy for environmental sustainability.

There's a lot of messages coming from the existing economy, marketing messages saying, "the only way you can change society is as a consumer, you can consume this more responsible product, you can recycle." But if you're only looking at the consumption end, you're not really addressing the overall thing, which is that we have an economy that drives growth and drives consumption. So I think we need to do recycling. We need to do compost. Our businesses do those things. But we need to become producers ourselves and produce our own reality in a way instead of accept the reality they're trying to sell to us.

Capitalism, it's like a cancer. It grows for the sake of growth, and it will destroy the host body it's in, which is this planet. And I think the people who think that you're going to be able to regulate it and make capitalism not grow anymore, they are living in a dreamland. Capitalism is going to keep growing, it's its nature to grow. So we have to figure out ways to have a zero growth economy but create democratic jobs at the same time because you have to create businesses to support society's needs.

So the Arizmendi Association is an effort to do that. And so we allow the individual bakeries to stay small and only grow to the needs of their community and then stop. And we create a larger network that then also creates democratic jobs and gives some of the benefits of being part of a larger association. To me, sustainability is also about communities and having human relationships and human ways of production and relating to each other that are sustainable. If you're not thinking about worker cooperatives and housing cooperatives and how people work sustainably together, then that's losing a big part of the system.

Bethany: I like laughing with my coworkers. So even when I have to get up at four in the morning, people are still in a good mood and joking around and just making it a really nice place to work. Everybody contributes something really great.

Tim: Our bakeries are made up of people who live in those communities and they reflect those communities. So when they're making decisions about what they should do in terms of reach out to the community and put on a music program or give donations or other things, they're actually from that community and reflecting the values of that community, they're not owned by someone outside. And also from an environmental point of view, if you own a business and you're local, you're not going to be dumping your garbage, your pollution into the river. If someone owns it who's very far away, they're going to do that. The workers aren't going to do that. You know, the jobs are rooted in the local economy. If the workers own the business, they're not going to ship their jobs off to someplace with lower environmental standards. So it's, I think, a much more environmentally sustainable model.

Bethany: I always enjoy my interactions with the customers, even when they're grumpy and unfriendly. Or you can tell that they've just been treated with so much privilege their entire life that they don't really know how to treat people very well. But even they're kind of funny and most of the customers are really sweet and we have nice little interactions.

Tim: I think we're also more resilient because everyone is invested in the business. They learn all the aspects of the business. It's not dependent on 1 or 2 people. If, you know, if a capitalist business collapse, you know, because of a financial thing, the manager runs off, the owners run off. Maybe they don't know how to run their business or it takes them a long time. Here, it's an opportunity. It's a continuing learning environment. So we have a much stronger kind of organic system to run our businesses and much more knowledgeable. The rest of the economy fell down because of speculation about housing bubbles and things like that. We would still know how to make bread. We would still go in and still make bread. We would probably create a local currency to trade. We wouldn't just stop. So I think that's what has to happen. I think we're going to see more and more collapses on an economic level, on a global scale, on a national scale. And we need to be able to produce our own bread and what have you. Without depending on that speculative kind of economy.

Bethany: I love tasting a fresh wheel of cheese. Being the first to taste a wheel of cheese that has just been cut into. That's the best. There are other ways we can organize ourselves. Other ways we can create wealth in the world. I like that. I'm making things that make money. And then that money is being reinvested into the local economy and it's, you know, cycles all over again. Yeah, I'm one part of that.

Tim: So our larger mission is not just to create 1 or 2 bakeries. We're actually trying to create a regional economy of cooperatives. So we talk about, well, what's the next kind of business? And one kind of discussion is, well, let's do other things that are related to our bakeries so that we have a supply chain of organic, environmentally responsible local products. So let's start making our own cheese. Let's start to have a dairy. Let's do goat farming. Let's do these kind of things. Part of our larger vision is to have a whole bioshed of cooperatives that are in all aspects of our production.

But there's other things. Well, where is it that we can create the most jobs? Maybe goat farming is not the way to create the most jobs immediately. So we look at other things, or we look at particular needs like schooling. There are cooperative schools and maybe we could do cooperative schools. So we have so many things that we want to do, but one of our larger visions is to have a whole regional economy that produces everything in a local area.

Also, I think we need to build the skills for running a sustainable society. Our citizentry, we don't have much skills in democracy. We're asked to go to the polls maybe every two years, every four years. And that's what's considered to be democracy. But if you live democracy on an everyday basis, if you're controlling your schools, if you're controlling your businesses, you develop the skills that can then be the basis for a larger democracy.

Bethany: I feel like if I want to pursue something, if I have an idea, then there are real means to pursue those ideas. Of course, everybody else would have to agree.

Tim: I definitely see people take a lot more confidence and grow their skills when they come to our co-ops. It's the first time in their lives in some cases where people really want to know what their opinion is, care, and where they're not in a position where they're just taking orders. There's kind of a strange bargain in our society where most people, they have no power, so they have no responsibility. And I think that changes people's mentality over time. It's like, oh no, I have to take responsibility. I have to be part of the solution. And I think that's the mentality that we need in our larger society. And people aren't going to get that unless they work or live on a day to day basis in some more democratic community.

Bethany: And I firmly believe cooperatives are one of the solutions.