The Company We Keep

Crafting A Business Owned By Its Workers

During the past year I have been in correspondence and conversation with a number of people who are transitioning their companies to employee ownership, starting worker co-ops, or thinking in new ways about worker ownership and cooperative business.

Among them:

• Rick Dubrow and Cindy Landreth at A-1 Builders in Bellingham, WA, who are working on an employee buyout of the business they bought in 1976 from the original owner who started it in 1955
• Jamie Odegaard who, with four friends, is starting a worker owned building company in Western Massachusetts
• James Kosacz, the president of Autoworks in Kittery, ME, who is considering selling to his employees
• Mark Skimson, in Terrace, BC, who is leading an effort to make a co-op purchase of a small ski area called Shames Mountain (following the path blazed by Mad River Glen in Vermont)
•  Jeffrey Hollender and Gregor Barnum, formerly of Seventh Generation in Vermont (Jeffrey was the founder of 7th Gen) who are developing a major new—and very exciting—co-operative enterprise.

And the list goes on.

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CO-OPS ON THE RISE

I’m still excited about the budding alliance between the United Steelworkers (USW) and the Mondragon Cooperatives – and the general awakening consciousness about worker co-operatives and co-operative business in general that I wrote about last month.

And there’s more.

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AN HISTORIC ALLIANCE

My friend David Smathers of the TeamWorks Cooperative Network in California writes:

“The Mondragon cooperatives and the United Steelworkers have announced an historic partnership through which they will buy or start manufacturing businesses in the U.S. and Canada that will combine Mondragon’s democratic structure of ownership and governance with collective bargaining.

It will take many years to implement.  But particularly in the face of the economic crisis that has exposed Wall Street’s failure to provide responsible stewardship of the economy, this is a very heartening development.  Together, these two institutions have the resources, technical expertise, and vision to demonstrate to the public that it is possible to structure and run large corporations in entirely different ways than what we have become accustomed to.”

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Are We Different Enough??

At the recent conference of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC) in Burlington, VEOC board president Paul Millman asked an important question to the attendees, who represented some of the many remarkably progressive companies in the Green Mountain State. “Are we different enough?” he wondered.

Good question.  I wonder about that often when I think about South Mountain.  Are we promoting a system that would, if widespread, create fundamental change in our broken economic system?  Or are we just avoiding one avalanche chute by traversing to another with a slightly more gradual incline?

Hard to say.

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