Cooperatives

From the publisher: After carving up the once lovingly cared-for downtowns of Small Town America, Wal-Mart launched a frontal assault on mom-and-pop businesses all over the globe. With 1.5 million employees operating more than 3, 500 stores, Wal-Mart is now the world’s largest private employer. In this third edition of How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America (and the World), intrepid Texas newspaperman Bill Quinn continues the fight. Featuring detailed accounts of Wal-Mart’s questionable business practices and the latest information on Wal-Mart lawsuits, vendor issues, and efforts to stop expansion, Quinn shows why Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is arguably the most feared and despised corporation in the world.

From the publisher: National drug chains squeeze local pharmacies out of business, while corporate downsizing ships jobs overseas. All across America, communities large and small are losing control of their economies to outside interests. Going Local shows how some cities and towns are fighting back. Refusing to be overcome by Wal-Marts and layoffs, they are taking over abandoned factories, switching to local produce and manufactured goods, and pushing banks to loan money to local citizens. Shuman details how dozens of communities are recapturing their own economies with these new strategies, investing not in outsiders but in locally owned businesses.

If you happen to go up Guadalupe right now, on the outside wall of a bike shop on the Drag near MLK there's a big sign for Orbea bikes.

I was a little startled to see this. I've heard that they're good bikes, but I'm surprised to see a big banner for them in a major part of Austin. Why? Orbea isn't just a bike maker. It's a company in the Mondragon cooperative chain from the Basque country of Spain. This means it's a worker cooperative, owned by its workers and managed through democratic assembly. Mondragon is one of the greatest living experiments that testifies to the strength of the cooperative model. Tens of thousands of workers in hundreds of companies confederated together produce an array of products and services, have their own bank and technical school, etc.

Authors: Frank T. Adams and Gary B. Hansen

Thorough guide to starting and maintaining worker cooperatives, with clear discussion of all the steps. We keep an in-store only copy behind the front desk for patrons and community members to use as a resource. We also try and keep a copy on the shelves for purchase, but this book is out of print so we can't always acquire a used copy to sell. Despite this, it's a great resource, and anyone is welcome to peruse the store copy.

From the publisher: Integrating some of the best of New Left thought with more contemporary populist and Green perspectives, Benello’s essays—and the commentaries of Harry Boyte, Steve Chase, Walda Katz-Fishman, Jane Mansbridge, Dmitri Roussopoulos and Chuck Turner—offer important insights for today’s new generation of practical utopians.

Directory of American worker cooperatives, democratic ESOPs, sustainable enterprises, support organizations and resources.

From the publisher: Socially responsible investments have grown exceptionally in the same year that "moral values" determined a presidential election. So why has business been so slow to catch on? In a new book, The Company We Keep, small business owner and entrepreneur John Abrams makes a case for a return to workplace values, and shows how we can ultimately profit by them.

The Company we Keep is more than the success story of a revolutionary company. It sets down a framework for a model of employee ownership and community involvement that has piqued the interest of entrepreneurs around the country. In the words of Abrams, "This is a book about a different way of doing business in today's world-a way based on workplace democracy, shared ownership, staying small, building community, commitment to a place, and long term thinking."

From the author:
* The top 5% of Americans own just under 70% of all financial wealth.
* The top 1% of Americans now claim more income per year than the bottom 100 million Americans taken together.
* The top 2/10th of 1% makes more on the sale of stocks and bonds in one year than everyone else combined.

The distribution of wealth ownership in America is truly feudal--and deeply corrosive of our democracy. Is the growing concentration of wealth inevitable, or are there innovative models and policies that begin to point the way toward more equitable ownership of wealth by individuals, workers, communities?

The coming November election could become a truly fundamental turning point for Democrats and progressives.

The main link refers to an article from the Eugene Weekly about the Hoedads. This cooperative is no longer operational, though it had a good run, solid enough for any independent business. I'm giving it a link because the story is close to my own heart, since I worked in an Americorps forestry organization for a little while.

The Hoedads were a worker coop devoted to reforestation, and combined participatory democracy with sound business management and a commitment to ecological principles. I'm including several links about them.

Video clips from a Hoedads reunion

"Mudshark for Hire"

From a review in Social Anarchism:
"When Workers Decide: Workplace Democracy Takes Root in North America, edited by Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld.
308 pp. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992. $16.95 paper.
Corporate capitalism is interested in one thing and one thing alone: profits. The end result is high unemployment, frequent recessions, devastated land- scapes, environmental degradation, and abandoned communities. How can workers take back control of their workplaces and thereby take back control of their lives?