In a victory for new economy advocates, the
New York City Council
passed a budget last
month that will create a $1.2 million fund for the growth of
worker-owned cooperative businesses. The investment is the largest a
municipal
government in the U.S. has ever made in the sector, breaking new ground for the cooperative development movement.
Melissa Hoover, executive director of the
U.S. Federation of Worker
Cooperatives and the Democracy at Work Institute, hails the New
York City Council’s
move as “historic.” “We have seen
bits and pieces here and there, but
New York City is the first place to make an investment at that level,”
she says.
New York’s cooperative
development fund was the brainchild of a
coalition of community groups—including the
Federation of Protestant
Welfare Agencies, the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, the
Democracy at Work Institute, Make the
Road New York and others—that came together to
stage a series of public
forums and advocacy days to secure widespread support for the
initiative on the City Council. Over the next year, the fund will
provide financial and technical assistance in the planned launch of
28
new cooperatives and the continued growth of
20 existing cooperatives,
supporting the creation of 234 jobs in total.
While this may just be a drop in the bucket when it comes to the
city’s $75 billion total budget, cooperative advocates are hoping New
York’s example can help turn the tide in favor of alternative strategies
for urban development.
“We’d like to get to a tipping point where [cooperatives] really have
a measurable impact on the local economy,” says
Hilary Abell, a San Francisco-based
co-op development consultant who co-founded the group Project Equity.
She notes that while interest in cooperatives has surged, there are
still fewer than 5,000 “worker-owners” nationwide. Nevertheless, the
model of worker-owned cooperatives has captured the imaginations of many
low-income communities of color hit hardest by the Great Recession, she
says, creating “a window of opportunity to take this to the next
level.”
Last month, Abell released a report called “
Worker Cooperatives:
Pathways to Scale,” which outlines a set of strategies to grow the
cooperative movement nationwide. While there are several promising
federal
policy
initiatives underway—Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for example, has
introduced a bill that would create an Office of Employee Ownership and
Participation within the U.S.
Department of Labor,
as well as another that
would establish a U.S. Employee Ownership
Bank—Abell believes that “advocacy for cooperatives may have the
greatest
momentum at the state and municipal levels.”
Across the country,
similar local economic justice coalitions have
been seeking to persuade municipal governments and local institutions to
throw their resources behind the development of worker-owned co-ops.
It’s those resources, many advocates believe, that could take co-ops
from a niche movement to a broad-based strategy for creating living-wage
jobs and putting economic power in the hands of workers.
To that end, Abell hopes to see more cities follow in New York’s footsteps. In the Bay Area, she tells
Working In These Times,
local organizers are currently reaching out to local officials for
support in scaling up worker-owned cooperatives to the point that they
constitute
five to 10 percent of the local economy. The coalition is
particularly focused on
creating jobs for workers of color in the
low-income areas of the East Bay , as past experiences have shown that
worker-owned co-ops can be particularly effective in redressing racial
inequities in the job market. For example, Women’s Action to Gain
Economic Security (WAGES), a network of nearly 100 worker-owned cleaning
cooperatives in Oakland, has increased members’ incomes by more than 50
percent.
Other hotbeds of co-op development
include
Richmond, California, where the city has hired its own cooperative
developer and is launching a
loan fund under the leadership of Green
Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. In Cleveland, Ohio, the city’s economic
development department has worked closely with the
Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of worker-owned green cleaning, farming and
construction businesses;
local hospitals and universities have also thrown their purchasing power behind worker-owned businesses. And as
In These Times has
reported previously,
several unions have made a foray into the co-op business, combining
place-based growth with a focus on leveraging changes across industries
such as homecare.
Instead of simply appealing to local leaders for support, some activists have sought to build both
political
and economic power by building electoral campaigns around the issue of
cooperative development. No city had secured greater local support for
co-ops than
Jackson, Miss., a majority African-American municipality
where human rights attorney and longtime black radical activist
Chokwe
Lumumba was elected mayor last year on a platform that included the use
of
public spending to
promote
cooperative enterprises. But following Lumumba’s sudden death in
February, the movement that brought him to office has been left
struggling to implement the vision it had forged.
Local activists say
new Mayor Tony Yarber has
been tepid in his support for the cooperative development plan
developed by Lumumba’s administration, leaving them uncertain as to
whether they can count, for example, on city contracts being awarded to
local worker-owned businesses. According to Brandon King, a member of
the group Cooperation Jackson who also worked on the Lumumba campaign,
access to such contracts would have been a huge boon for nascent
construction and waste-management cooperatives, as Lumumba’s campaign
had
estimated that
the city would need to spend $1.2 billion over the next 10 to 15 years
on infrastructural upgrades and repairs. What often happens, says King,
is that contracts go to companies located in wealthier and
majority-white suburbs outside of Jackson, with the result that “people
in Jackson aren’t really engaged in building their own city.”
Despite the change of course in city
government,
King says
Cooperation Jackson “is still working on building co-ops that are
large-scale, and getting as many people engaged in economic democracy as
possible.” The movement has a history of
black community participation
in cooperative enterprises to draw from, King notes. Meanwhile, adds
Cooperation Jackson memberIya'Falola Omobola, while the group works to
get childcare and urban farming cooperatives off the ground, with or
without city support, “We’re going to be ready to mobilize around an
appropriate candidate in the next [mayoral] election.”
Noting the particular conditions that have helped secure local
support for cooperatives in New York City and Jackson, the Democracy at
Work Institute’s Hoover acknowledges that activists are still exploring
how these can be replicated elsewhere. But if these cities are
successful in retaining long-term support for cooperative growth, they
can serve as a jumping-off point for other areas. “Our hope is that
these won’t be one-off examples,” Hoover says. “What we need ultimately
is a shift among those doing local development: from, ‘Quick, let’s get a
Home Depot to come in and create jobs, but they’re low-wage and
low-skilled,’ to a deeper and more patient strategy. These places could
really start that shift.”
from companies that haul cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach start a two-day strike to protest alleged labor violations in
front of Long Beach Container terminal in Long Beach, California April
28, 2014. On Monday a similar strike began, the fourth of its kind in
the past year.
