- What's incredible about co-ops is that they exist
at all in America because they face so many
structural challenges. - We see what has happened
in the traditional workplace. We see what the gig economy
has done We see the precariousness
of jobs - Our work isn't trying
to one co-op by one co-op change the entire
economic system, but instead to be opening
people's imaginations to what's possible. - It's all coming up on
the Laura Flanders Show, the place where the people
who say it can't be done, take a back seat to the
people who are doing it. Welcome. (upbeat music) There is still an awful lot
of boarded up storefronts across this country. 164,000 of the businesses
on the platform Yelp closed during the first
six months of the epidemic. And 97,000 of those never
reopened according to Yelp. One kind of business though
fared much better than others, worker owned businesses
or co-ops by and large stayed open even if
they had to retool. And they're less likely to
experience the labor shortage many businesses are facing
now as the economy opens up. Today, I'm going to
speak with three guests who say none of that
is a coincidence. Journalist Jaisal Noor has
been reporting on co-ops throughout the pandemic. We're gonna play excerpts of
the video report he produced for The Real News. Also weighing in our Renee
Hatcher professor of law at the University of
Illinois, Chicago. She's the director of
the community enterprise and solidarity
economy clinic there. And Camille Kerr is
founder and principal at Upside Down
Consulting and co-founder of Shy Fresh Kitchen, a worker
cooperative food service owned and led primarily by
formerly incarcerated people in Chicago. Welcome everybody and
happy co-op month. Let's start with you, Jaisal. Let's play a little
bit of your piece on how co-ops
weathered the pandemic, produced for The Real
News, check it out. - [Newswoman] As a nationwide
worker shortage presses on - - [News Reporter] Businesses
are facing a worker shortage. - [Jaisal] Is there
a worker shortage or is there a shortage of jobs with fair pay and decent
working conditions in frontline industries? Worker owned and run
cooperatives offer a glimpse of what work can look like when businesses are
controlled democratically and employees get a
share of the profits. - We work as well
as own this company. And we designed this to
what would work for us, what would make it
not feel like a job when we come into
this environment versus actually being at
a job with somebody ruling and watching over you. - [Jaisal] Those clamoring over the so-called
worker shortage seemingly ignored that frontline
workers risk their lives to provide essential
services often for low wages while pandemic profiteers
saw their wealth skyrocket. - [Newswoman 2]
The combined wealth of the 657 billionaires
in the country grew more than $1.3 trillion, nearly 45% since
the pandemic began. - [Jaisal] And these
profits came at a high cost for frontline workers
who faced elevated risks of COVID-19 exposure. - Amazon reports, listen to
this, 19,000 of its US workers have tested positive for
COVID in the last six months. - [Jaisal] Workers rarely
get an adequate share of the wealth their
labor creates. In 2020, the median salary
at Amazon was under $30,000 while its founder, Jeff Bezos
made hundreds of times that, over $13 million every hour. Under the radar, the
small, but growing sector of worker run co-ops, part of the larger
cooperative ecosystem is demonstrating that
you don't need bosses. Workers can be successful if granted the necessary
power and resources. Co-ops are concentrated in
frontline and service sectors, which have been
hard hit by COVID-19 and are known for low pay and
hazardous working conditions. The vast majority of rich
corporations and CEOs built their fortunes on
inherited wealth and privilege, but co-ops have limited
access to capital, worker owners tend to be
women and people of color and from communities
that have been denied wealth-building opportunities. Despite these challenges,
worker co-ops have proved resilient in
weathering COVID-19. - So Jaisal, first
question to you. Why with so many urgent stories
as the pandemic is raging, did you decide to focus on
how cooperative businesses were making out? - Thanks for having me on Laura. So for the first several
months of the pandemic, I was reporting on what was
happening in Amazon warehouses, what was happening
at public schools? What was happening at
businesses across the country? Primarily you saw
frontline workers bearing the brunt
of the pandemic, where people like myself
were able to work from home. I could minimize contact, I
could protect family members, frontline workers
didn't have that luxury. If they didn't go to work,
they didn't get paid. If they didn't get paid, they
couldn't stay in their homes, they couldn't feed
their families. And so over the last, several years ago, I reported
on worker cooperatives in Baltimore. And there's a network
of worker cooperatives around the country. So I thought it was
really, really important when we're hearing
all these stories about places like Amazon that
are making billions of dollars during the pandemic and
exploiting their workers, forcing their workers
to pee in bottles and work under all these
horrific conditions, are democratic
workplaces any different during this fairly intense
period of economic uncertainty? How are these small
businesses, which, you know, many don't last a year, how are they coping
with the downturn? I know worker cooperative
generally don't have the same kind of
access to resources that other businesses do. They operate on small margins and they generally pay
their workers better. Can this type of model survive in the worst economic downturn
we've had in a century? - Professor Hatcher,
do you see in your work a similar picture to what
Jaisal's story reports? - Yeah, I think
it certainly does. So working here
locally in Chicago with a number of worker co-ops, we have had a lot of
experience with clients who have been having a hard
time, certainly in the pandemic, but one of the benefits
of the co-op model is essentially that workers
aren't being exploited. It's not about the
profit margin of a boss who typically has little to
no actually active involvement in the small
businesses operation. So what I have found is
that a number of our clients who are worker co-ops
found innovative solutions to make sure that they could
stay, keep their doors open, to ensure that they wouldn't
have to lay anyone off, or essentially all their
members would be able to continue to participate and
profit off of the business. And those are the types of
decisions that only can get made when you change the power
structure of businesses. When you actually give
workers a say and a vote as to how to
navigate hard times. And what I've seen
over and over again, people have been really
innovative, thoughtful, and also one of the
beautiful things I think that's come out of the pandemic. We saw a lot of worker
co-ops who were engaging in the broader community
to ensure that folks have what they need and also
engaging and participating in mutual aid networks. So certainly on the local level, I have seen certain
similar patterns and I think to what
we've seen in the data on the national level, for sure. - I can only imagine
Camille that a lot of people that you know and love and
live around and amongst were dealing with the pandemic's
onslaught in non co-ops. What gave you and your
colleagues the impetus to start a business
and start a cooperative during this crazy period? - We were planning to
launch the business anyway. And what actually happened
is that during the pandemic, we had gone through
an 18 month process of trying to figure out
really this core issue. Can we use worker cooperatives to build a libratory
work environment and
economic security for formerly incarcerated
and specifically black women who faced incredible
barriers coming out. Now with the pandemics happened. The members that we
were organizing with said a couple of
them lost their jobs, actually, multiple of
them lost their jobs. And a couple of them
didn't have access to unemployment for one
reason or another. So they said, can
we use this people that we've been
planning over this time to meet our needs right now? You said that this co-op
would meet our needs. Well, our needs just changed
because of the pandemic. Can we use it now? And so we kind of
on a Go-Fund Me and I put in a little investment
and we kind of just tried. We were like, all right,
let's buy some equipment. Let's try. And luckily through
partnerships and relationships that we have on the
ground here in Chicago, we got to not only
create economic security for our members during
this difficult time, but also meet the
needs of our community by providing emergency meals
to those affected by COVID and who either lost
their jobs or otherwise were facing food insecurity. - Renee, why don't
we throw this to you? What are the clear
distinctions between a company with shareholders, et
cetera, private shareholders, maybe far away, and
a worker owned co-op of the sort that we're
talking about here? - The main difference
between a traditional company and a worker co-op is
that a worker co-op is owned by the
workers themselves, meaning that they have
a stake in the company, they have equity in the company. But in addition to that, they
also are making decisions or have a voice in the
operations and governance of the business. And so it typically
abides by a certain model that includes things like
one worker, one vote. That means no one person's voice is more important
than another worker. They might have different
decisions to make around the conditions
of the workplace, but more importantly, they
actually own their labor. It's not, the benefits
of their labor are not going to some
CEO or shareholders that are also disconnected. We also find worker
co-op businesses tend to be more
connected to community. - What was the need that co-ops
were serving in Baltimore, which I think is
where you are Jaisal? - Yeah so worker
cooperatives in Baltimore, there's about two dozen
of them in the city. They're primarily in
the service sector. So one of the bigger
co-ops, Red Emma's, which is a radical coffee
shop and bookstore, they were able to pivot to,
first of all they shut down because before the
mandate even came down, because they're like, we want
to keep our workers safe. And then they pivoted
to helping mutual aid. All the food stocks
they had, they gave away to people that were in need. And then they transitioned
back to reopening, they're doing outdoor events and then doing home
delivery service. And a lot of the businesses, a lot of the co-ops in Baltimore had to pivot their business
models to delivery. We saw that with
Taharka Brothers, which is a ice cream
manufacturing company that is owned by
young people of color in east and west Baltimore. And they lost 70%
of their business and had to change their
business model to stay alive. And so it's yeah, mostly food,
mostly in the food service. We just had a new
worker co-op open that's a holistic massage place. So people need to eat good food and they need to take
care of themselves and co-ps in Baltimore
help people do that. - I want to come to
you to Camille on this because listening to both
Renee and Jaisal we hear, there are the
principles of co-ops like one person, one vote, and then there's
the actual practice, which, I mean, Jaisal just
described multiple decisions, multiple pivots
happening pretty quickly for a small business. Talk about that a little bit. What can co-ops do
in your experience that other businesses can't? - The way that we started
was like I mentioned to meet the economic needs and create a liberating work
environment for our members. So who otherwise have been, have faced incredible
barriers to economic security and job access. And so on one side
folks who otherwise might be able to get
a job, but not a job where they get to
define their role, where they get to work in
the conditions with dignity that they co-create, but also that they get
to share in those profits at the end of the year. So on one side, it addresses
the deep inequities that these folks have
experienced over the years. Society has failed them
over and over again, and traditional
businesses don't fix that on multiple lenses. And then on the other
side of our impact, we've been able to not
only get food out to folks who, if we had a shareholder that said you can't be
prioritizing community in this moment. You need to be
prioritizing profits. We got to pivot to work, to
address the community needs, which was food insecurity and do so by supporting
local urban farms. And so we would purchase
from local farms, use that fresh
nutrient dense produce to make food for folks who
are facing food insecurity at the time while creating jobs for folks who have been
cut out of the economy. And I don't see how
traditional businesses can meet all of those
needs simultaneously, the way that we've
been able to do it. - Let alone be as
flexible as you've been. Let's play a little bit
more of Jaisal's video. The bit that talks
about and that shows Shy Fresh worker owners at work. - Got good stuff today, we got collard greens
with smoked turkey meat, as well as fried chicken,
macaroni and cheese, broccoli. And our chef's specialty pizza. It's a vegetarian pizza
that everybody loves. And before I was in
a transitional home, and when COVID-19
hit it was a struggle to get any type of meal because we wasn't
allowed to go outside. And the stuff that they
was bringing was horrible. So, you know, when
this opportunity, it just all clicked in
together for my life journey to be able to do this
at a time like that. - Camille, that looks
incredibly delicious. I'm terribly hungry now. Tell us a little bit about
who's a member of Shy Fresh, how many people are
we talking about and how many people is the
co-op serving at this point in terms of receiving food? - Yeah Shy Fresh Kitchen
has five worker owners, all formerly incarcerated, and one person who's member
track at the business right now. And we're looking
to grow from there. We've done 80,000 meals
since we got started. Our first meal went
out on May 11, 2020. So right in the midst
of the pandemic, and we've been able
to serve folks at, we've partnered
with organizations that have a deep relationship
to their communities and know those needs. So we've worked with local
schools and community groups to get those meals out. - So Renee to you, I mean, there
may be people watching this that say, well, that
sounds very nice, but five people is a
tiny drop in a bucket. So why should we pay
attention to this model? - The worker co-op
model is transformative in the sense that it
gives workers power over their workplace and they can enjoy the
spoils of the profits. But beyond that, whenever we
talk about the scale question, I think there is
certainly scalability. They're scaling right now
in the worker co-op sector. It's just horizontal scale. We see a number of worker
co-ops that are emerging, that have been
around for a while, and now are kind of firmly
establishing themselves even under the really harsh
economic conditions right now. And I think there's actually
something really important about having smaller
enterprises as worker co-ops, because really it's
about the relationships that people build, the type
of trust that is needed to be able to not only run
a business with someone or run a business
democratically and in a way that doesn't further harm
I think the experiences that they've had in
the mainstream economy. So, the scale question
I think is one that worker co-ops
have answered. There are also really
wonderful examples about scaling horizontally or about networking
worker co-ops, there's a really wonderful
example out of Baltimore, in terms of thinking
about larger corporations and how do you provide
more work opportunities. But again, I think
worker co-ops,
especially in this moment are so important because
we see what has happened in the traditional workplace. We see what the gig
economy has does, we see the
precariousness of jobs and specifically
service jobs, which are, make up the bulk of the
worker co-op sector. - Did you draw any
conclusions Jaisal, as you did this
reporting about the role of worker co-ops in our economy? Are they just a nice parallel or something that could upset
the capitalist applecart? - What's incredible about co-ops is that they exist
at all in America because they face so many
structural challenges. The workers are the owners, that means they have to bring
the capital to the table, which they don't have, because historically they
come from communities that have never had
access to wealth. You look at millionaires
in this country. The myth of a
self-made millionaire is a joke because they
inherited their wealth and, like Donald Trump, right? You know,
all the fraud he committed et cetera, et cetera. But I think it's
incredible they exist. It's incredible
what they have done with the limited resources, the structural
barriers they face. And just during the pandemic you had the Drivers
Cooperative launch, which is an alternative to
Uber and Lyft in New York City. And it is already now,
it launched in May. It is already the largest worker
cooperative in the country. It has 3,500 drivers
and it's, you know, and so it doesn't have a CEO that's making $100
million dollars a year. It doesn't have to give profits, dividends to stockholders
and to venture capitalists. So it can actually pay
more to its drivers and give a better
fare to the riders. And then any profits are
given back to the workers. And so yeah, they're
proving that our economy doesn't have to be
highly exploitative. And, it's proving that we
don't have to live in a society that's so focused on
profits at all costs. - The Democracy at Work
Institute in this period, I think produced a
pretty fascinating report about how wages, average
wages for worker owners are higher than in
similar businesses, the amount of assets they
accrue by the time they retire are greater and there's
more job retention. People stay at
their jobs longer. All of that could be enough
to sell you on the whole idea, but Camille, you also have
at Shy Fresh and many co-ops a justice agenda. Can you talk about that? - When we focus on folks
who have been most failed, most marginalized by our
current economic system, we demonstrate what's
possible for all of us. And I think that one
of the questions, you asked about scale earlier is part of our work isn't
trying to one co-op by one co-op change the entire
economic system, but instead to be opening
people's imaginations to what's possible if we
all decided collectively to shift our priorities
towards the human values that we have, and away
from the current paradigm of competition and greed. And so it's not about
putting numbers on the board, it's about shifting the
narrative about what's possible in our economic system
and in our society. - Renee, I can see you agreeing,
you want to add anything? - The majority of worker
co-ops that I get to work with absolutely have a
larger justice agenda. And that can be many things. Some are looking to disrupt
exploitative industries and draw attention to that. I think some are delivering
goods or services in a neighborhood that
never would have had access. But the one thing that I
think they all have in common is that they're also changing
the culture of work, right? Because capitalism is not
just an economic system. It also, it becomes a way
in which we now are relating to each other in the workplace. And so the worker
co-op structure allows, I think people to really
build deeper relationships, but to do both personal and
interpersonal transformation that actually just allows
us to look at each other as human beings and think
about what our needs are, as opposed to how much money
can you make this business. - Coming back to you Jaisal, anything else on your radar that people should know
about that could help? - If cities, states and
the federal government see this issue as an issue
of justice for workers, as an issue of
uplifting society, Biden's whole agenda
is build back better, how to build more
resilient businesses. We just experienced a pandemic. We're probably gonna have more
and more frequent pandemics. We're gonna have to deal
with climate change. If you acknowledge these
businesses are doing more good for their communities, then
they should be prioritized when receiving contracts
from the government and other agencies. You see places like Spain
and Italy and Europe, the government invests
in worker cooperatives on a large scale and
that's helped create these large scale
industrial co-ops. You see in much of
the rest of the world. - Final thought
from you, Camille, how can people learn more,
get more information, can people just start
their own co-op? - The operative
development is difficult, just like business
development is, starting a business
is difficult. Our system requires a lot of
different types of capacity to start a business. And it kind of requires you
to be completely overwhelmed. I mean, it's just, most people
don't start a new business, most people work
for somebody else. So we're not only starting a
new business, which is hard, but also doing it
in a way with skills that we haven't learned, skills of joint
decision-making, of cooperation that we weren't raised
with, but it's worth it. And that's the point, it's
worth it to take the risks, to build the economy
that we all want to see. - We have a lot more on co-ops, what it takes to stop them, things to think about if
you're thinking of starting one in our archives. So that's there for
anybody that's interested. I want to thank all of you,
Camille, Renee, Jaisal, it's a pleasure to have you, thank you for your
work all of you. I'll be back in just a moment
with some closing thoughts. (gentle music) Chicago. Workers at one of the
country's most famous tortilla factories in that town. Are right now in a
protest over wages and working conditions. At the end of last month,
they staged a one day walkout, after which they found
themselves locked out. They didn't want to go
on strike, they said They didn't want to go
on strike, they said The production demands
keep rising, but the wages are stuck
at rock bottom. They get treated more like
machines than men and women, they Say When the pandemic hit,
they were forbidden from wearing masks. Eighty five of them got sick
and five died. Eighty five of them got sick
and five died. also in Chicago. Workers there, years ago
were also in a dispute with management. Instead of getting locked out,
they locked the owners out. Instead of getting locked out,
they locked the owners out. I checked in with them recently
and they're doing great. New Era has more orders
than it can handle. Wages are up. New Era has more orders
than it can handle. The workforce has doubled. They look set to make a
profit this year and they never lost anyone
to Covid. That's the difference,
said Armando Robles, who's been with the project
from the start At a worker co-op, he said,
worker owners sow the seeds and get to harvest the fruits
of their work. I wonder what would happen
if the workers at El Milagro paid a visit to New Era? paid a visit to New Era? Till the next time. Stay kind.
Stay curious. And thanks for joining us. For more on this episode and
other forward thinking content and to tune into our podcast, visit our website
at lauraflanders.org and follow us on social
media @TheLFShow. (upbeat music)
