From J.J.Noire

"The economic collapse has effected millions of people in the critical areas of housing and jobs. It's no longer a secret that many are rediscovering the tried and true tradition of democratic worker cooperatives. "Democracy 24/7 : Living & Working Coop" talks to some great people who are members of both worker and housing cooperatives; housing and jobs that are owned and democratically run by the people who live/work there."

"What does it mean to be an owner? In We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream, employee owners from New Belgium Brewing, Namasté Solar and DPR Construction answer this important question. Successfully thriving in the global economy of the 21st century and beyond will require new business models and strategies to enable the American Dream of opportunity and economic prosperity. One model that is an alternative is the employee-ownership model (e.g. ESOP, stock/stock options, cooperatives). We the Owners captures stories from the founders and employees from New Belgium Brewing, Namasté Solar, and DPR Construction, sharing the worker's perspectives on shared ownership structures, highly empowering corporate cultures, linked reward and risk incentives, and human-capital innovation models. The film follows as decisions are made on founding the company, expansion, succession, recruitment, and layoffs."

The recent International Summit of Cooperatives in Quebec has posted a gallery of videos from the event. Here are a few (multilingual) samples.

What advantages do cooperatives offer in the present socio-economic context?

What advantages do cooperatives offer in the present socio-economic context?

How cooperatives can do business differently?

Mike Leung, chief organizer of the proposed Worker Cooperative Federal Credit Union and Abolish Human Rentals discusses worker cooperatives and financing issues.

From Jai Jai Noire

From Janelle Cornwell. Her paper is unfortunately captive in the the ivory tower fortunately freely available to read! (Thanks for the correction, Janelle.)

 

Materials from the 2011 Business Succession and Employee Ownership Conference in Quebec City.

 

Issues and Challenges of Business Transfers

Roy Messing, Ohio Employee Ownership Center

Video

 

Worker Co-op Conversion: Tools Available and the Resources in Place

Roy Messing, Ohio Employee Ownership Center 

Video | Powerpoint

 

U.S. Case Study - Select Machine

Roy Messing

Powerpoint

 

ESOP:  a U.S. Model for Employee Buy-outs

Don Jamison, Vermont Employee Ownership Center

Powerpoint

 

Partnership with trade unions in the conversion to worker co-ops

Greg O'Neill, Western Labour Co-op Council

Powerpoint

 

Issues and Challenges of Business Transfers

Peter Hough, Canadian Worker Co-opertive Federation

Video

 

Canadian Case Study - Careforce

Peter Hough

Powerpoint

 

Argentinian Case Study - Envases Flexibles Mataderos

Jose Orbaiceta, Worker Co-op Federation of Argentina,

Pdf

 

Business Succession Strategies to Employee Ownership in Argentina

Jose Orbaiceta, Worker Co-op Federation of Argentina,

Powerpoint

 

Business Succession Strategies to Employee Ownership in Italy

Alberto Zevi, Legacoop

Video: part one, part two |Powerpoint

 

Financing to Convert a Business into a Worker Co-operative in Italy

Alberto Zevi, Legacoop

Video | Powerpoint | Word

 

Italian Case Study – D & C

Alberto Zevi, Legacoop

Video | Powerpoint

 

Financing to Convert a Business into a Worker Co-operative

Marty Frost, Devco Development Co-op

Video | Powerpoint

 

Closing Plenary/Analysis of Results

Hazel Corcoran, Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation

Video | Word

Via Shift Change (previously)

 

Very soon we'll be notifying hundreds of supporters about the new 6 minute preview for Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work, about worker owned enterprises in North America and in Mondragon, Spain. But before that happens, we'd like to invite you to be among the first to see the new preview.  It's our way of saying thanks for helping to make this project possible with your valuable ideas.   Please take a look at the preview by clicking the thumbnail below or by visiting our page on Vimeo. We welcome your comments and feedback.

 

At a time when many are disillusioned with big banks, big business, and growing inequity in our country, employee ownership offers a real solution for workers and communities.  Shift Change will help publicize these efforts--and encourage more--during the United Nation's-declared International Year of the Cooperative, 2012.  Already, people are contacting us, eager to screen Shift Change in their cities! 

 

P.S. Stay tuned for announcement of our Kickstarter campaign, which will launch soon to raise much-needed funds for the film's completion and distribution. We hope you'll forward that notice to interested friends and to organizational newsletters and websites.

 

Shift Change - Putting Democracy to Work - new preview from Mark Dworkin on Vimeo.

Marty Frost, of British Columbia's Devco Development Co-op speaks at the North American Worker Co-operative Conference, October 2011, Quebec City.  (Audio is a bit quiet.)

Via the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation (see their YouTube channel)

A video from FSRN's The Real News on the Restaurant Opportunities Center and Colors Restaurant.

Related

• Colors: Building a Cooperative Restaurant

Related

• A Brief History of Cooperative Home Care Associates

A short video introduces the opening of Ohio Cooperative Solar, one of the network of Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland Ohio.  The cooperative has begun to install photovoltaicpanels on the three anchor institutions that are part of Cleveland's economic empowerment zone: Case Western University, University Hospitals, and the Cleveland Clinic. 

 

The  cooperative will install, own, and maintain the panels that they install and sell the generated power to the host institutions.  As a for profit business they are entitled to government solar incentives that non-profit universities and hospitals cannot receive.  Because solar installation is not a year-round business in the Ohio, the cooperative diversified with a weatherization program for the colder months in order to create full-time jobs.   

 

CEO Steve Kiel, who says he is like an employee of the cooperative's 20 worker-owners, explains his goals include structured wealth creation for the workers' long term economic security.  A share of the company's surplus is allocated to the workers but retained in the company, capitalizing the business while creating long-term individual savings. 

 

Via the Cooperative Development Center at Kent State University

As a tangental nod to the emergence of the Occupy protests and their spontaneous democratic structures, here's Peter Watkins' epic (5 hour) docudrama, popular education ensemble theater, and anachronistic media critique, La Commune, Paris 1871.   The worker cooperatives begin to organize late in hour 3, though of course the excerpt is more meaningful if you've been following the tale for a while.    

Here 's a taste, where "CommuneTV" interviews Parisians behind the barricades to find out what their demands are.

"La Commune is the name given to the French revolutionary government established by the people of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). On March 17 and 18, Parisians led an uprising against the national government, which fled the capital and re-established itself in Versailles. The radicals established a proletarian government in Paris, called the Central Committee of the National Guard, and set March 26 as the date for the election of a municipal council. This council became known as the Commune of 1871, and its members as Communards. Most Communards were followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, a revolutionary held prisoner in Versailles by the head of the National Assembly, Adolphe Thiers. Other Communards supported the school of socialism expounded by the French philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon and members of the International Workingmen's Association, of which Karl Marx was then a corresponding secretary.

 

For the film LA COMMUNE we travel back in time to 1871. A journalist for Versailles Television broadcasts a soothing and official view of events while a Commune television is set up to provide the perspectives of the Paris rebels. On a stage-like set, more than 200 actors interpret characters of the Commune, especially the Popincourt neighborhood in the XIth arrondissement. They voice their own thoughts and feelings concerning the social and political reforms. The telling of this story rests primarily on depicting the people of the Commune, and those who suppressed them.

 

Deliberately, this film is an attempt to challenge existing notions of documentary film, as well as the notions of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity' so beloved by the mass media today. The film is not intended as an apologia on behalf of the Paris Commune. But at the same time, it attempts to show that the Paris Commune, for all its human frailty, its internal conflicts and its blundering, was an event of major importance, not least because of the way in which its leading reformers tried to work with social process, by a direct involvement with the community and its needs."

Arizmendi Bakery in Emeryville gets the spotlight on NBC Sports Sunday's Late Night Snack segment.

Richard Wolff,  Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, spoke on Democracy Now:

 

JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to ask you—2012 was declared recently by the United Nations to be the year of co-operatives. Can you speak to alternative democratic models that might be brought into play and might have some impact on where the economies of the U.S. and Europe are heading?

 

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah. I think that we’re going to see a lot of interest, because of the U.N., but for many other reasons. This is a system that isn’t working, the traditional enterprise that we have in the United States. Shareholders, usually a few that own the bulk of the shares, select a board of directors, 15 to 20 people who make all the decisions. They’ve made those decisions—where to invest, how to invest, what to do with the profits. And here we are with the results: high unemployment, economies in collapse, bailouts needed almost on a regular basis. I think more and more people are beginning to recognize we need fundamental change.

 

And one of the models of an alternative would be a different way to organize a store, an office, a factory. And instead of a top-down, conventional, shareholder-driven entity, why not bring, as we say—and in your program, in particular, it would be appropriate—why not bring some democracy to the enterprise? Why not try to let the people in each enterprise make these decisions democratically and collectively, both within their enterprise and with the communities that are interdependent with these enterprises? Let’s start from that.

 

And, you know, think a minute with me. If the workers themselves made the decision, would they move the factory out of the country as quickly as we see capitalist enterprises do? I don’t think so. Would they use dangerous technologies that are toxic? Not likely, because they live with it, and so do their children, right there. The decision isn’t made by a board of directors thousands of miles away. And would they use the profits in a more socially useful way that benefits everybody? Well, they are everybody. That’s what democracy means. And I think we would see a lot less speculation, a lot less of the problems that have gotten us to the impasse now, if we were open enough as a society to look at alternative ways of organizing our business and make our commitment to democracy mean something, not just in the communities where we live, but in the workplaces where we spend most of our adult lives.

 

 

Previously

• Economics Professor Richard Wolff Speaks on Workplace Democracy