Oliver Sylvester-Bradley: What do you do and how did you get to where you are now?

Cadwell Turnbull: I’m a science fiction and social fiction writer and a member of Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO).

CT: The writing thing started when I was a kid. I wrote essays for school, and stories and comics that I would share with friends. I got my Bachelors in professional writing from La Roche College in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Then I moved on to get a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing and a Masters in English with a linguistics concentration from North Carolina State University. My stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed and Nightmaremagazines and I have a science fiction novel coming out next spring.

My involvement in co-operativism came much later and rose out of my interest in utopian fiction and social systems. I always had a social justice bent to my writing but recently I’ve spent a lot of time envisioning alternative social systems. My upcoming short story in Asimov’s Science Fiction is about an imagined planet where the system of government is global panarchism and governments compete for people’s citizenship. The process is voluntary and people can change governments, be a citizen of multiple governments, or opt out of government altogether as long as they follow agreed-upon laws. It is an ambiguous utopia, since large international governments have the power to manipulate smaller local ones in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways.

O S-B: You use the term “social fiction” – can you explain that, and how you think it can be used to influence social development?

CT: Social science fiction isn’t new. My favourite authors all write speculative fiction with a focus on exploring social alternatives. Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a social science fiction novel, as are Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and John Kessel’s The Moon and the Other. There are a lot of books within this larger sub-genre of science fiction, and many novels that would fall into utopian fiction. But often these stories are set in the future, after a collapse or on a distant planet. They show the world after a new status quo has already been implemented.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge comes close to what I would consider to be social fiction. Though it is set in 2065, the novel builds realistically off of the world we have today, imagining a best case scenario for our current societal model, putting caps on income disparity and strong reform aimed towards a sustainable green society. Many of these reforms are done primarily through legal means (a revolution of lawyers and activists), while maintaining a recognisable social structure. Robinson’s later Mars trilogy explores similar themes with added science fictional elements.

When I talk about social fiction, however, I am talking about fiction that inhabits the middle space between the present and imagined futures status quos. How do we get there?

Science fiction has a history of star-spanning empires and intergalactic wars, but it is the practical application of ideas that have inspired scientific advancement: artificial intelligence, cloning, life extension, terraforming, the possibility of space travel, long distance wireless communication, global information networks. All of these things were imagined long before they were thought achievable, and we’ve been moulded by the long-standing echo chamber of science’s conversation with science fiction. They feed back into each other endlessly and our present is directly due to that conversation with what can be done and what can be imagined.

Some of the best science fiction deals with the ramifications of a great discovery. These stories ask: how does the world change if we discover human cloning? How does the world change if we’ve developed the ability to communicate through telepathic means? Fiction on the edge of change is extremely powerful.

This has led me to wonder: why don’t we have the equivalent in the form of social fiction? I haven’t read every book ever written, but I can count on my hand how many books explore how social inventions can influence the world as they are happening. I can’t even list one movie about co-operatives. I have no knowledge of any television shows dealing with the speculative future of the commons. Why is that? Imagine the feedback loop that could develop if we actively created these fictions.

Fiction on the edge of change is extremely powerful,” says Cadwell Turnbull

O S-B: Where do you stand on the “let’s try to fix what we have / “work within the present system” vs “… we’re going to need a revolution to get out of this mess …”debate?

CT: I don’t think these ideas have to fight against each other. I’m a fan of a diversity of tactics. We have to build the world we want to inhabit. And I don’t think we need anyone’s permission to do so. That’s a revolutionary act: to not ask permission. It rejects traditional notions of power. We can act as free people. Of course we have to be smart about it, and that’s where working within the system may sometimes come in. Sometimes. We have to use the tools at our disposal. Other times we can make brand new tools. In the end, we’ll need both to fix the mess we’ve made.

Revolutions are tricky. History has taught us that usually they end up being a passing of power to different hands, and often there are casualties of this transfer. Some people are more vulnerable than others and they suffer the most when revolutionaries don’t look where they are planting their feet. Revolutions should be creative, not destructive. It should have something to offer first, something for others to choose. That is what excites me about the solidarity movement – it is about creating something and it is about consent. For me, there is nothing more revolutionary.

O S-B: How could social fictions do more to develop a more co-operative culture?

CT: It is a mistake to underestimate how powerful narrative has been in the historical development of societies. It is our primary form of linguistic persuasion and the major way we transmit culture and meaning across generations. Beyond just the sharing of ideas, narrative allows the sharing of concepts through analogy, through contextualising ideas within a story.

A good test of the power of narrative is this thought experiment. What separates popular culture and academic knowledge? More specifically, what does one possess that the other typically lacks? And how do academics make their ideas popular? Narrative is the answer to all these questions.

The arts are a powerful form of culture creation and so often academic knowledge enters the popular culture through story, sometimes fiction and sometimes non-fiction, but always through being contextualised within a narrative.   

Social fictions not only give an opportunity to contextualize these ideas within narrative, they also can act as an avenue for these ideas to germinate within the popular culture. The Overton window of our current news infrastructure is very narrow, but social fictions can widen that window. If the leftist solidarity economics movement presented their own fictions, they could develop their own culture through aspirational story-telling as well as provide a point of access for a vast amount of the general population.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Think about how social fiction could be used as a form of funding for leftist education and research projects about solidarity economics. Think about how many new industries could be developed through solidarity media. Not only can it shine a light on solidarity movements, it would build alternative structures to support the solidarity movement: publishing co-ops, theatre co-ops, streaming platforms, co-operative representation agencies, co-op film and art festivals, co-op actors’ guilds, along with a broader co-op film and art industry.

The biggest contribution social fiction would bring is the opportunity for self-critique. Through narrative we can better locate the places in the movement that need work. We can show people grappling with shortcomings of the movement in the present and the future in a positive context. We can also imagine possible future problems so that the movement can be proactive about them.

But the biggest advantage social fiction brings is the opportunity to push already good ideas forward. Narrative doesn’t only help others access ideas. It provides a space for ideas to live and to grow and develop within context. This fits very well with co-operative ideals.

O S-B: If platform co-ops and the generative economy take hold, we could be living in a very different world in the future. Can you describe what you think this world might look like?

CT: I imagine vast open networks of individuals, co-operatives and commons, forming a strong web across the planet. These networks will be deeply political and rooted in their local politics as well as concerned with the state of the world.

Community councils will abound and decision-making will be focused on concrete problems within communities. The global network will invest in struggling communities by listening to their needs and sending them resources in solidarity. Basic necessities will be accessible to everyone and there will be a strong safety net for people who can’t work or choose different forms of community contribution. Work itself will be viewed differently and expanded to areas often labelled as hobbies or passion projects. Physical commons will be built within communities and intellectual commons will be a form of innovation. The specifics will of course be very diverse and only as standardised as necessary for communication across networks.

O S-B: I like this vision – it sounds like you are describing a state where we have managed to transition from a world of scarcity to one of abundance. What do you see as the main barriers for moving towards the vision you describe?

CT: The main barriers are cultural and ideological. People don’t believe that sort of world is possible – many haven’t even considered it as a possibility. The other issue is that so many are trapped in cycles of poverty and/or desperation. They can’t leave their awful jobs. They can’t raise the funds to start co-operatives. They don’t have the time to fully engage politically.

We could probably support each other more in order to build a future like this, go lean until the system is robust, but people need to know that it is possible, they need to see where and how it is being done.

O S-B: Do you think there is scope for the concept of ‘self, us and now’ to be developed into a more collaborative narrative, which could help galvanise action towards a sustainable world …?

CT: There are a few examples of shared worlds, where many writers contributed to one work of fiction, or a series. The Wild Cards series was a shared universe that has had more than 30 authors contribute to it, including George R.R. Martin. Thieves’ World was a fantasy shared world that was also created by multiple authors. There are examples of collaborative fiction. But there should be many more.

How could those projects feed back into communities? How could they function as a means of aspirational future-making? If creatives work closely with actual worker-owners, academics, and activists, there’s really no limit to what could be collectively imagined. It would provide the perfect excuse for global research and information networks, non-fiction and fiction working together in a way that raises both ships. How else has knowledge ever been transmitted? How else have we ever generated change?

The Wild Card Trust (the group of writers that wrote The Wild Cards series) coined the term mosaic novel. This kind of novel tells a whole story, but via a number of perspectives and narrative styles. It is a story about people within a larger context and it doesn’t centre on just one perspective.

Co-operative media could also take on mosaic narratives to tell larger stories. These stories would be filled with personal accounts, but there would also be accounts of groups and movements, featuring prominently the obstacles that we must collectively overcome.

The Wild Cards series is an example of collaborative fiction writing

I think people would want to experience these kinds of stories. We may not have to wait for movies or film. Multi-cast audio projects could provide the perfect middle ground for collaboration along with affordability.

Imagine a long-running podcast fiction series that has multiple contributors. A budget for that would be reasonable and could also provide the perfect opportunity for an expansive work exploring co-operativism.

I love the idea put forward in StarHawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing, in which she quotes Dion Fortune: “The ends don’t justify the means. The means shape the ends. You become what you do.”

“You become what you do.” Those words speak to a practice of revolution, not just the making of it. We have do things on a personal level to be the people we need to be to make the big changes. We start at the deed and we work our way out.

O S-B: What do you think about experimenting with new axioms to help unite the progressive / solidarity / peer to peer / commons / permaculture etc. movements into an effective force for change?

CT: I love the idea of new axioms to help unite the various movements. It is useful to focus on commonality in a diverse movement like this. So often we focus on what makes us different. Pinpointing where we agree can lead to mobilisation on those issues. I believe we would find a lot of places to work together.

If we see progressive movements as an interconnected emergent system, we’d realize that we’re all providing key roles in helping to build a diverse infrastructure of leftist change. Knowing that infrastructure, learning how to use it, would be valuable. No, we don’t always agree on approach or belief. But I think we can counterbalance each other. We tend to think of society as something that has to be standardised. We’ve never lived in a monoculture. We shouldn’t treat our movements as such.

If we could see a map of our movements, study their intersections and where they diverge, we might be able to strengthen the movement by filling in the gaps between different movements, creating cross-ideological approaches, balancing out the rougher edges.

Our media could be a good opportunity to do this. Find the problems. Write about them. Consider additional/alternative systems that help fix the areas where we’re weakest. We can unite while maintaining diversity of opinion. It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Our axioms can come out of the areas where we align.

Originally published by The News Coop.

The post Cadwell Turnbull on social fiction and the collaborative narrative appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Republished from Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO).

Nic Wistreich: Uberfication has become shorthand for many new concepts—from the sharing economy to any significantly disruptive digital business model. But what exactly did Uber do that was materially different to earlier disruptive digital businesses? In short:

• It created software…

• To replace existing industry-wide operational structures…

• That created huge cost and efficiency savings at the supply end (by removing human operators and taxi stands)…

• And created significant user-experience benefits at the delivery end (by providing an interface and fixed fee structure)…

• Which together has allowed the company to rapidly scale globally, threatening traditional taxi companies in every territory in which it operates.

Of course, the question remains, why is Uber not a coop? In principle, it would be the perfect model for a worker coop: a piece of software owned by drivers around the world that helped them do their work better with the costs and surplus or profits shared. In reality, it required the high-risk VC (Venture Capital) environment to finance and build such an innovative and disruptive piece of software. Public agencies, NGOs, social enterprises and coops do not have a strong track record building innovative technology. Even the great and successful collaboratively made pieces of technology—from within the open source community—are regularly criticised for not having a great user interface. Open source exceptions to this, such as WordPress, are run as private, profit-making companies.

The coop version of Uber will surely inevitably come, but at such a pace that when it does, Uber may have Facebook-levels of market saturation, and be midway through being hardwired into bus stops and taxi ranks the world over. Before looking at the cultural approaches that set successful digital businesses and services apart, it’s worth considering what exactly Uberfication could mean in the context of cooperatives, and why it’s of increasing social urgency that future Ubers are owned by the people who are governed by them —be that workers or consumers.

The digital boss

While computers have been used in management for decades, they have typically been one of two types: perhaps easiest categorised as either communication or alert. Communication-type machine management is where a manager creates a task on a system and assigns it, maybe on a space where people can leave comments. Perhaps there are a bunch of open tasks, such as on O-Desk or a Github bug list you can chose from, or perhaps you are assigned the task. Perhaps it tracks your time, calculates the cost, and takes a snapshot of your screen every ten seconds to make sure you’re not on Twitter – but in principle it’s just a machine streamlining the process of communicating (and recording) instructions. Alerts are similar but automated: for instance ‘the printer is out of paper’, or ‘the hydroelectric dam is about to collapse if you don’t open a sluice gate’. It’s communication, but the manager in this instance is a sensor of some sort, and it’s doing a job that a human probably can’t even do.

Interface machine management, as used by Uber, is a shade different because it acts as an interpreterbetween consumer and worker. The consumer creates a command, ‘I want a lift’, and the machine reinterprets that into instructions for workers, who compete to do the task. Finally, the consumer takes on the role of manager, writing the worker’s job assessment and inadvertently helping collectively decide how likely the driver is to stay in the job or not.

So humans are still vital. But the machine has become line manager, while the consumer has become empowered by the machine to have the final signoff, irrespective of their expertise. This fits within a ‘customer is always right’ sort of business, but less so in one full of drunk people arguing with taxi drivers about the quickest way home.

Putting aside such a disempowerment of the worker to the benefit of the consumer—we live under capitalism after all—the more concerning aspect is the massive empowerment of the machine in the process. Ultimately the software is answerable only to the management of Uber—not to the workers or even the consumers—i.e. the software is not answerable to any humans who are directly involved in each transaction.

It will always be part of the company’s legal obligations to their shareholders to keep maximising possible profit, regardless of the consequences to the humans involved. Although this is nothing new, traditionally that hard edge has been softened by the natural compassion of the people involved, capable of using judgement (“Your partner is in the hospital? Please take the rest of the evening off”). When the machine is our boss, and that machine is programmed solely to serve shareholder interests, there is less hope for compassion as that’s a programming cost with little economic benefit (so we’d get the review: “driver was quiet and moody, tried to tell me their life story, would NOT recommend”).

To conclude: The promised disintermediation of management structures – with web 2’s End of the Middleman potentially becoming Web 3’s End of the Middle Manager – will empower machines and software over the worker and consumer to unimaginable levels. Where those pieces of software are designed to serve solely a CEO’s corporate responsibility to maximise returns for shareholders, this empowerment offers considerable social, health and environmental risks, and at a speed of growth that will outpace lawmakers. However, if the software is answerable instead to the workers (and perhaps consumers) it manages and serves, then the considerable efficiencies, user-experience, and flexible working benefits that this shift could bring could be cause for a certain level of hope.

A cooperative rethink

As has been demonstrated by the Amazon workers sprinting around warehouses trying not to lose their jobs by meeting their numerical targets, machine-led human management feels like the harbinger of a dystopian sci-fi nightmare, somewhere between Terminator and Modern Times. A natural response might be : “such systems must be resisted, and the only answer must be to avoid them, boycott them or legislate against them”, a bit like some politicians’ understandable – if deluded – desire to outlaw any form of encryption.

But what if taxi software had been written with priorities other than maximising profits, growth and shareholder satisfaction—and instead a set of social values:

• Personal. Prioritising driver mental and physical health in a job that traditionally sees high levels of heart attacks because so much time is spent sitting down, while providing a secure level of income with flexible working hours.

• Social. By training drivers in basic first aid and intervention, to empower them to help, or get help, for vulnerable people on the street, and potentially act as first-movers to anyone in distress or needing a quick exit.

• Environmental. To reduce the number of cars on the road by a certain percent through car-pooling and lift sharing (experiments show reduced congestion by some 50%).

This fits into the model of win-win-win (W3?) enterprise where the personal, collective and planetary benefits each more than offset any social, individual or environmental costs. It also fits comfortably with the social values embedded within much of the cooperative world.

Cooperatives offer a further benefit unique to this culture shift of empowered machines. If software is to become the worker’s direct line-manager, then by letting the worker in turn be the machine’s line-manager a positive feedback loop can be created where bugs, injustices and problems within the software can be ironed out—in a humane, worker- and person-centric way.

But how does something like this get created without the VC support that backs startups and pushes them through rigorous development to be launch ready, then through rapid growth and into IPO? While there are countless open source projects proposing enviro-social benefits (from the Fairphone to Precious Plastic, many struggle to raise the capital and scale sufficiently to offer a convincing alternative to mainstream approaches.

So if there is one question to answer, it is not whether uberfication of the majority of industries is increasing (it seems to be), or whether worker- and user-owned coops can offer a more socially responsible and humane counter to this model (of course they do)… it’s how to finance and build software that can rival shareholder-owned, VC and IPO-driven alternatives.

Engineering better online cooperation

It would be over-ambitious in this article to offer a single proposal to solving that challenge. Indeed, the act of answering that question may need to take the form of some engaged form of doing, i.e. only in trying to build such coops may the pitfalls and perils be understood and resolved.

There’s a considerable and demonstrable demand for better digital tools to support traditional coops…

There’s a secondary issue: as well as creating a new environment and techno-legal structures to facilitate digital-cooperative-Ubers, YouTubes or Facebooks, there’s a considerable and demonstrable demand for better digital tools to support traditional coops with everything from fundraising, transparency, communication, management and decision making. While this is a much different set of needs, the spectrum of digital tools around coops needs to encompass that which can support the 100,000 member ‘legacy’ coop, the small vegetable shop that wants to integrate their checkout system with their membership system, and the new Uber that wants every account holder to be a shareholder.

Rather than trying to solve all these problems at once, a sensible approach might be to create the environment for multiple people and coops to start trying to solve different parts of these problems at the same time—collaborating and sharing code, costs, information or ideas where it is useful, and trusting that the outcomes will start to materialise when sufficient numbers of smart people are resourced and networked together to try and tackle some of these problems. In other words, for there to be an incubator, with a core set of requirements, a guiding vision and core projects and APIs, but sufficient room for a range of outcomes and approaches to emerge in parallel.

This approach may help cover some of the main cultural and structural questions:

• The agile and lean startup, typically driven by headstrong individuals with a small team, vs the democratic, board-accountable and sometimes bulky large coop or public body. Greater scale typically means a slower process and more inefficiency and greater democracy can increase those tendencies (or seem to).

• Full democratic open source, where anyone can submit code or fork, as in Linux, vs the (benevolent) dictatorship management model of Apple, where user-journey and experience is put ahead of any other considerations; the two extremes of software development practice as we currently know it

• Following from this, the choice between a platform that is focused, elegant and easy to use, vs one that can serve all the different needs many different coops might have.

• And, perhaps most key, whether to build on the work of those who have gone before or to start from scratch? In other words, CiviCRM has the advantage that it works across Drupal, Joomla and WordPress – it’s free, open source and has a large active community of developers and users and countless extensions for different needs from Direct Debit to HR Management. But it’s large, demanding, sometimes problematic, and if built from scratch today would have a much different and lighter architecture.

These four questions represent a version of the age old tension between the conservative and radical, the orthodox and innovative. It may be helpful to keep that tension (aka Woody vs Buzz Lightyear) as an operating condition rather than choosing one side, but to ensure that tension fuels serious, positive and responsible innovation, rather than keeping it forever trapped at committee stage or plunging into rapid innovation without considering the wider socio-enviro-personal impacts. Either way, it’s likely the solutions will be found in the doing.

Photo by timlewisnm

The post Can Cooperatives Build Better Online Tools to Disrupt the Disrupters? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

10 Cities Investing in Healthy, Sustainable & Equitable Growth

City governments are shaping up as key actors accelerating worker co-op development. It started in 2009 when the City of Cleveland accessed a federal guaranteed loan to help finance the Evergreen Cooperatives. Since then, nine more city governments have moved to promote worker cooperatives through municipal projects, initiatives, or policies because they want to reach people and communities often left out of mainstream economic development. Other city governments including Philadelphia are considering it now.

Getting worker cooperatives to the scale of being a real market alternative will take time, energy, and the sort of experimentation we are seeing from these ten cities. A recent Imagined Economy Project report, Cities Developing Worker Co-ops: Efforts in Ten Cities, explores how city governments are thinking about their strengths in making worker co-ops structural features of local markets.

Traditional economic development, said Madison, Wisconsin’s Ruth Rohlich in the report, “isn’t helpful in creating really healthy communities, financially strong communities, in an equitable way.” Worker ownership may be a way forward, and city experiences right now will help municipalities decide how worker co-ops may become long-term features of their economic development agendas. To commit to worker cooperative development long term, the cities will need to see modest growth in jobs and business ventures resulting from their current efforts and may benefit from input and insights from worker cooperatives as they continue to adjust their sense of best practices.

Cleveland and New York Leading the Way through Distinct Approaches to Worker Co-op Development

The City of Cleveland ventured into worker co-op development in response to a Cleveland Foundation initiative to set up a network of worker cooperatives connected under a corporate umbrella that planned to supply needed goods or services to hospitals, universities, or other anchor institutions. “I heard about it just in passing,” said Cleveland’s Economic Development Director Tracey Nichols quoted in the report, and the word of mouth led to the first instance of a city getting involved in worker cooperatives in a big way.

The main way the City of Cleveland assisted the initiative was by accessing millions of dollars in federal guaranteed loans and some federal grant funds as startup capital for the Evergreen Cooperatives. In so doing, the city produced the contours of one municipal approach to worker co-op development, termed the anchor approach in the report, whereby the city government role is mainly to finance startups and resolve underwriting risks in what are considered unconventional projects. In Cleveland, Nichols used tax increment financing and set aside the non-school portion of payments in lieu of taxes as a debt reserve for loan repayment to minimize risks to the city.

New York City is the nation’s second large scale municipal effort to bolster worker cooperative development locally. Instead of helping build worker cooperatives as part of anchor institution supply chains, New York is one of five cities taking an ecosystem development approach in the vein of the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI). A worker cooperative ecosystem, according to a Democracy At Work Institute and Project Equity report, is a series of interacting elements including but not limited to cultural/entrepreneurial familiarity with worker co-ops, supportive laws, customers, capital, technical assistance, and professional service providers that help worker cooperatives emerge and survive.  As part of its Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative, New York committed to funding a collaborative of cooperatives — there were eleven funded in 2015 and fourteen in 2016 — to spread general awareness of the worker cooperative business form, incubate new or converted worker co-ops, and support existing worker co-ops with matters like drafting by-laws, accounting, Board development, and employee participation strategies. The City itself also became part of the ecosystem when it began offering a “10 Steps to Starting a Worker Cooperative” course through its Small Business Services Solution Centers.

The separate approaches have produced modest results, with the three Evergreen Cooperatives for-profit startups employing 113 people (38% member-owners) over several years and New York’s initiative leading to 21 new worker cooperatives involving 141 worker- owners in its first year. While the wage and earnings statistics specific to the co-ops developed through these municipal efforts are unavailable, a Sustainable Economy Research Project report found that worker co-ops in New York pay an average of $25.00/hour but apparently offer less than full time opportunities; the average annual income earned in New York’s worker cooperatives is $18,000.00 according to that report, mostly involving women of color. Current wages and earnings in the Evergreen Cooperatives are also unknown, but 98% of those employed by the three ventures are Clevelanders, 100% are racial or ethnic minorities, and 47% are returning citizens, Evergreen Cooperatives’ CEO John McMicken offered in an email.

Both municipal approaches have been inspirational to other cities. Rochester, New York and Richmond, Virginia are at various stages of planning for municipally-supported anchor-linked worker cooperative projects as part of broader poverty-reduction efforts, while Richmond, California, Madison, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Austin, Texas are working to bolster and expand worker co-op ecosystems in their cities.

Spread to New Cities Leads to Evolution in the Approaches

The ten city governments are attracted to worker cooperatives as sources of quality jobs, as well as ways to build wealth for individuals and divested communities. Accomplishing those goals will be a matter of “adaptive management,” assessed Berkeley’s Brandi Campbell, as they know they have much to learn. Ultimately, cities want sustained growth of individual co-op businesses as well as multiplier effects in the local economy to result from their investments in worker co-op development. These may be tall orders for geographically-dispersed cities with very different experiences with worker cooperative or broader social enterprise cultures, and the city governments are aware that they will need to readjust their approaches and planning as they learn how to develop worker co-ops by doing it.

Part of learning by doing involves learning from each other. The city governments are motivated to apply lessons from other city experiences as well as from the broader cooperative or co-op developer community. Most of the ten cities active in worker cooperatives are connected with expert consultancies that are playing key roles in helping inform municipal efforts and also bringing insights from other local projects or initiatives with them as they help additional city governments develop their desired approaches to worker co-op development. Certainly, ideas about how municipalities can be most effective in worker co-op development are cross-pollinating, and this has resulted in some evolution of what can be called the Cleveland and New York models of worker co-op development as additional city governments work through the place-based opportunities and challenges related to emulation in their own local areas.

Evolution in the Anchor Approach — from Cleveland to Rochester

The city role in the anchor-linked approach to worker co-op development started in Cleveland as primarily financial, but the newer cities are taking on expanded roles. In both Richmond, Virginia and Rochester, city governments have initiated anchor-linked worker co-op projects from City Hall, so their roles have evolved to include finance but also conceptualization, planning, and active participation in setting performance targets.

Rochester is further along than Richmond in its planning, already having completed a feasibility study in consultation with the Democracy Collaborative or the main architect of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives. Working with the Democracy Collaborative, Rochester has been able to build upon the lessons from the Cleveland experience. Certain alterations have been built into Rochester’s anchor approach that, ultimately, may help minimize financial risk and potentially allow for quicker growth of the supportive infrastructure built through the corporate umbrella.

First, the City of Rochester is acting to influence the business mix. Said Henry Fitts, Director of Innovation for the City of Rochester, “A lesson learned from the Evergreen experience has been that high-capital startup businesses are a lot more difficult to accomplish through this model.” Rochester is interested in focusing more of its business starts on lower-capital, service-based businesses. For instance, only one of Rochester’s five potential worker cooperatives is a multi-million dollar venture, compared to all three of the Evergreen Cooperatives startups, according to a 2016 planning document released by the Democracy Collaborative. Additionally, the worker co-ops proposed in Rochester are planned to satisfy unmet consumer or anchor institution demands, instead of entering markets already served by existing vendors. Fitts believes this will minimize risk, as well as prevent duplication and competition within the local supply chain.

Second, the anchor approach in Rochester is conceived to build alliances with independently-forming worker cooperatives or conversions as a way of accelerating growth in the cooperative sector. Rochester’s planned nonprofit umbrella corporation — the equivalent of the Evergreen Cooperatives Corporation — plans to offer business services and back office support to other cooperatives. Potentially, this will facilitate profit pooling across a wider universe of co-ops that can be used to finance additional worker co-op starts. Speedy growth in the number and size of anchor-linked worker cooperatives is the best way to benefit worker co-op members, while also lighting a spark in the divested communities where they locate. The concept in Rochester builds a new avenue for growth into the approach.

The Ecosystem Approach in Motion in Madison and Richmond, California

New York’s effort to promote worker cooperative development happened by a collaborative of nonprofit co-op developers that provide technical assistance. As more cities have emulated New York, the ecosystem approach has shaped up, as cities think about the DAWI-inspired ecosystem concept in the context of the particular resources, strengths, and challenges in their cities. In New York, the collaborative of co-op developers organized itself, but this has not been the experience in every city. How to activate a community of worker co-ops or co-op developers is a challenge to overcome in certain places, and trajectories in two cities lead to different answers.

Richmond, California had a difficult experience getting worker cooperatives established through an education-focused program it funded for one year in 2011/12, finding that cooperative entrepreneurs needed more business and social supports than were available. Learning from those challenges, City Councilperson Gayle McLaughlin is helping the nonprofit Richmond Worker Cooperative Revolving Loan Fund, spun off from her time as Mayor, establish a worker cooperative incubator. The planning is funded by the California Endowment and, if established, will provide heavier business supports than the initial City of Richmond endeavor. Incubators have not figured prominently in municipal understandings of how to promote worker cooperatives, but it may be useful in areas like Richmond without much local worker cooperative experience arising organically.

The path forward in Madison is different. Madison enjoys a comparatively rich cooperative history and business culture, but worker co-op development organizations did not join together to lobby for municipal funding as they did in New York. Instead, the Mayor initiated the plan to fund cooperative development through personal interest and more casual interactions with some of the city’s cooperatives. In the absence of a co-op developer collaborative like New York’s, the City of Madison is setting out to organize one itself. After approving budget allocations of $600,000 for each of the next five years, Madison has been encouraging a variety of existing local cooperatives, organizations, and lending institutions to come together to discuss how they can proceed in setting up worker co-op development capacity as well as loan funds.

The city is convening the local organizations, cooperatives, and lenders to decide together how best to divide responsibilities and, said Madison’s Ruth Rohlich in an interview, the group “may have to create new organizations to manage the program as opposed to just adding it to already existing programming.” While the participants have leeway in imagining how they can best make use of Madison’s investment in worker cooperatives, the city government has used its Request for Proposal to place some parameters on the planning process. For instance, Madison expects any organizations contracted for this initiative to work with University of Wisconsin’s Center for Cooperatives (a university-based research center), Shared Capital Cooperative (a cooperative lender), and to include labor unions in planning and implementation processes. Like New York, it will also require reporting so that the city can help troubleshoot if necessary.

Another element introduced in Madison is to make finance capacity an explicit focus for ecosystem building. Madison is devoting half of the funding allocated, or $300,000 per year for five years, for the development of a worker cooperative loan fund. The City of Madison expects whatever fund managers it contracts to be capable of growing the loan fund beyond the city’s contribution, mainly through fundraising plans, matching dollar requirements, or getting financial institutions to set aside percentages of loan capital.

Berkeley and Oakland Join the Wave with a Third Approach to Worker Co-op Development

A third approach aimed at incentivizing worker cooperatives through preference bidding is taking shape in Oakland and Berkeley in consultation with the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Both cities passed resolutions to establish bidding preferences earlier in 2016 for implementation in the coming months or year. Oakland just sent a follow-up ordinance for City Council consideration in October 2016.

While the details are still being worked out for eventual implementation, the resolutions or planned ordinances in Berkeley and Oakland involve worker co-op certification protocols intended to make sure preferences go to truly worker-owned and managed businesses; informational materials to be displayed by the city to incentivize worker co-op starts; and discounts or points for worker cooperatives competing for city bids. Additionally, Berkeley’s ordinance includes some tax and registration exemptions or reductions, as well as expedited land use review.

As preference bidding proceeds, city governments are likely to adjust their approaches. Said Oakland Councilperson Annie Campbell Washington in an interview, “There will be a limited number of worker cooperatives right now who will be able to take advantage of (bidding preferences).” Getting worker co-ops to form in the areas of city purchasing and contracting may prove to be the main puzzle to be solved in growing the worker co-op sector through bid preferences and, ultimately, a focus for experimentation as the approach unfolds over time.

Making Worker Cooperatives a Permanent Urban Economic Development Focus?

In her book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs. Private Sector Myths, Mariana Mazzucato made the case that government spending is often implicated in cases of transformative innovation, such as that motivating the advocates of worker cooperatives as engines of market change. The spreading municipal commitment to worker cooperatives is notable, not only for the resources city governments bring but also for the connections they can make between worker cooperatives and business, financial, and nonprofit communities as well as other scales of government. Institutionalization or making the city commitment long term or permanent could help produce the sort of sustained attention, effort, and patience needed to scale-up worker co-op sectors.

At this time, the ten city governments have not taken steps to make support of worker cooperatives routine. Rochester’s Fitts expressed in the report a sentiment common among the cities. In Rochester, ongoing municipal commitment will depend on showing, he said, “that this is a feasible and effective method of capturing some of the economic energy, that it can be replicated, and that it can continue to grow businesses of this kind.” New York City has decided to fund year by year, although it could decide to make multi-year commitments in the future.

Worker cooperatives may have additional ideas for measuring and enhancing performance of these municipal cooperative development efforts, as well as deciding collaboratively how city governments can improve their support. But, assuming worker cooperatives perform as desired, city governments cited additional challenges to asses before deciding whether or how worker cooperatives will fit into their economic development plans. First is duplication or displacement of existing small businesses. Oakland’s Campbell Washington relayed a sense that city officials like herself are to “advocate for local independent businesses at the same time I am advocating for worker cooperatives.” Displacement of existing local businesses and the jobs they support are risks in all types of economic development, but innovative cities want to see net growth of opportunity, especially for people at the bottom of the wage hierarchy. Advocates of worker cooperatives can allay some of this challenge by focusing on growing or emerging market sectors when possible, or in areas of unmet demand.

A second challenge to routinizing city commitments to worker development concerns resources. City governments cannot always count on slack budgets and reported needing to make hard choices at times between competing projects. Cities have been important allies to worker cooperatives, but the federal government role could be bolstered, helping cities access an adequate resource base from which to co-create innovations with community.

Finally, some cities are curious to see how well worker cooperatives balance social and business purposes. There is possible tension between getting to social inclusion and remaining competitive in the market, noted Minneapolis’ Daniel Bonilla. Cities want to see outcomes in both areas and, if both can be accommodated, worker cooperatives may become more permanent features of city economic or small business development planning.

[Editor’s note: attempts were made by the author to elicit feedback on the various policies discussed in this article from co-op worker-owners, but none have so far responded.  However, as our mission at GEO is to amplify the voices of worker-owners specifically, we are asking again for feedback from practicioners on these municipal policies. It would be especially helpful to hear from worker-owners in the cities discused about their experience of the programs so far.  We encourage everyone, but especially worker-owners, to respond in the comments section.]

Photo by smata2

The post How Urban Governments Are Promoting Worker Co-ops appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I was fortunate enough to get to attend the 2016 Worker Cooperative National Conference held in Austin, TX at the end of July.  A few issues came up over the course of the weekend that piqued my interest, largely because I hadn’t heard them discussed before in the context of worker cooperatives.  Specifically, I was (pleasantly) surprised to hear a nuanced discussion of Universal Basic Income (UBI) during Sunday’s panel discussion with Ed Whitfield, Douglas Rushkoff, and Esteban Kelly.  I was also intrigued to hear of the USFWC’s plans for creating a joint 401(k) retirement plan for worker co-ops.  Since there was, unfortunately, very little time during the conference for conversations around these issues, I thought I’d share my thoughts in a couple of blog posts.

Universal Basic Income is an old idea, but one that’s been getting a good deal of renewed attention lately.  The essence of UBI is that every citizen receives a monthly income from the state, regardless of work or income status.  The justification for such a program is to ensure everyone a minimal standard of living without the bureaucratic hassle and social-shaming indicative of means-based welfare programs.  Recently, UBI has been forwarded as a possible response to the increasing displacement of workers by robots and computers.  Silicon Valley “disrupters” have been among the most vocal UBI proponents. Douglas Rushkoff brought up UBI during the Sunday panel discussion and presented the idea in a positive light.  Ed Whitfield pushed back against that notion, however, by noting that providing a UBI is not in anyway transformative, so long as that income is being spent to buy things from traditional, capitalist businesses.  A basic income could very well serve as an excuse to not address the underlying problems with our economy, such as absentee ownership, low wages and exploitative working conditions.

I have been a sometime advocate of UBI, on the basis that any policy or program that relieves some financial hardship for us low-income folks is to be supported.  However, Ed’s critique is not one to be taken lightly.  A remedy that merely alleviates the symptoms may serve to hide the underlying disease and make addressing the fundamental sickness more, not less, difficult.  However, there is another policy proposal which, I think, has the potential to both improve the financial stability of the un- and under-employed, while also avoiding the pitfalls that Ed drew attention to in his critique.  That policy is generally referred to as a Job Guarantee.  My particular preference is for a Job Guarantee combined with a public budgeting process that would empower both individuals, by providing them with a guaranteed job, and communities, by letting them decide what work needs doing in their area.

Unlike a UBI, a Job Guarantee (JG) is not an untested policy in our country.  The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Work Projects Administration (WPA), and similar programs put in place during the Great Depression had the intent of providing useful jobs for the many people who had been left unemployed by financial and ecological collapse, and for whom the capitalist economy proved unable to provide either employment or income.  The idea of paying un- and under-employed people to do socially useful work at government expense would, therefore, likely be an easier sell for most people than a UBI.*

My particular version works like this: communities (or perhaps neighborhoods in large urban areas) would engage in a participatory budgeting process to determine what work needs to be done in the community.  Unemployment offices (which would now be employment offices) would then have the task of matching people to the tasks that the community has agreed upon.  Jobs could range from tutoring/mentoring young people or home visits and assistance for older folks, to building parks, playgrounds and other types of communal space.  A JG policy along these lines would not only provide much needed income for the many people left out in the cold by the current economy, but also give communities a way to guide the program to avoid the inevitable problems of centralized, “from-on-high” decision making.  And the psychological benefits of performing useful work for your neighbors and community should not be overlooked.  Whereas a UBI might lead to a sense of dependence and helplessness among those who depend on it, a well-implemented JG would provide not only money but a sense of purpose and the pride that comes with knowing that you are a valuable member of your community.**

A JG program isn’t something that you’ll hear much about in political discussions nowadays, but I think it’s high time we try to change that.  There’s plenty of work that needs doing in this country, and plenty of people with the time, skills and passion to do it.  As cooperators, I think a Job Guarantee is a policy we can all get behind.

In my next post, I’ll dive into some of my thoughts around 401(k) retirement plans for worker co-ops, and how we might be able to do retirement better than the traditional economy (it would be hard to do it worse).

* The common argument against both UBI and JG programs is the need to fund them through taxes or borrowing.  This is, however, a specious argument when the Federal Government is the one footing the bill.  The Federal Reserve regularly creates new currency when it purchases securities from banks, as it did to the tune of $2+ Trillion during the financial crisis of 2008.  The requirement to offset Federal spending through taxes and borrowing is a legal, not a technical, constraint.  There is nothing apart from a lack of political will that keeps Federal programs from being directly funded, without regard to effects on the (misleadingly named) Federal budget deficit.  For an in-depth explanation of the economics involved, see the University of Missouri-Kansas City econ department blog, New Economic Perspectives.

** A third benefit would be to create a de-facto minimum wage at whatever rate JG wages are set.  We would expect that private employers would have to pay at least as much as JG jobs in order to attract workers.  Whereas a UBI might allow employers to reduce wages (since they know their employees all have a minimal financial cushion), a JG would stop employers from offering lower wages and benefits to workers, since everyone would have, as it were, a standing job offer.

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