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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, incomes, debts, our own, those of our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I hope that that has prepared me well to offer you these insights into what's been going on in our economy over the last week or two. I begin with a storyhorrible story in a way about the arrest and charging of five doctors in New York City for taking kickbacks from the producer of a medication that they were paid to prescribe rather more than they might otherwise have done. The reason this gets a lot of attention is because the medication in question is fentanyl, one of the most dangerous of the opioids that are currently accounting for overdose deaths in the many tens of thousands of across the United States each year. Arizona based Insys Therapeutics is the company and it markets something called Subsys, a spray form of the opioid Fentanyl. Effectively. What the New York Times reported last week was that the company paid doctors, quote, speaking fees. They called them a sham. The New York Times didspeaking fees which went up and were granted in proportion to the number of prescriptions that the doctors wrote. Of course, this is what you get with profit making companies in the medicine business. In order to make profit, the company needs to sell as much medicine as possible. Since this is a prescription medicine, it means it has to get the doctors to write the prescriptions. So suddenly doctors are whisked off to lovely resorts where they can speak to one another. All of this being paid for with or without fees by a company that makes it clear to the doctors what all of this is for. This is normal in the medical business, which it is a business and happens with lots of medications all the time. But. But when you're dealing with a killer of the sort of fentanyl, you can get in trouble. And that's what happened. Imagine with me, as we think about this, what it would be if we made medications, medicines not for profit, that is, we didn't have them be a business driven by the notion let's make more money, which is the guiding notion of capitalist business. We might then have medications produced by organizations that had on them doctors and medical professionals on the one hand, and the consuming public that takes the medications on the other, and that together they would make a decision about what medicines to use, what medicines to prescribe, based on the science and the need, without the intrusion of the profit. And let me drive the point home because medicine companies like to justify the enormous profits they earned, even enormous in relationship to other capitalist businesses. They justify it often by saying, well, we have to charge these high prices and make these big profits in order to pay for the research that produces medicines. Well, two things. One, often that research is, to be blunt, bogus. It's not research on a new medicine. It's often research on how you can make a medicine different enough from an existing powerhouse drug so that you can get a patent for it. It's a little bit different, and yet you can sell it as a competitor. This isn't developing a new medicine. This is developing a profit making strategy. Calling that research and development is an attempt to fool the public into thinking they have to pay these wild prices for medications in order to get medicines produced. Would be a far better and cheaper arrangement to let universities and research outfits have government or other kinds of funding to produce new medications for those diseases we need most, rather than letting the profit motive dictate. It's a wonderful example of what the costs of capitalism are. My next update has to do with a little statistic. Between 2009 and 2016, roughly the presidency of Obama, the federal government's deficits fell straight line down across those years. This is sort of interesting because Democrats are usually accused of being budget busting deficit creators, whereas Obama wasn't. It's doubly interesting because Obama was president at a time of enormous economic stress when you would think the government tries to help out and might legitimately be thought to run a deficit. But instead, Obama's government ran fewer and fewer deficits. Next point, with Mr. Trump, the deficits are going back up and they are predicted to go sharply up over the next several years. What's the significance of declining deficits with a Democrat and rising deficits with a Republican? Well, if you read the mass media, you get the idea. Oh, isn't it odd that the one party that's normally against deficits is, is now running them and the party that normally says it's okay is now cutting them? That would be to make a big mistake. That kind of analysis, because what it does is it takes seriously the debate about more or less deficits. The reasons the Republicans can smoothly and easily shift from one position to another and likewise the Democrats, is because it doesn't really matter all that much. That's not what these policies are about and that's not what these political parties are doing. What the job of both parties is, is to manage capitalism to make it run as smoothly as possible. The Difference between Republicans and Democrats is the Republicans want to run it bald facedly for the people who run the society, the richest, the most secure, and they really pander to them. The Democrats pander to the same folks, but they know the system is more secure if those at the top share at least a little with the rest of the population to avoid the whole game coming to a screeching halt. Neither of them deals with the capitalist system other than to support it, to encourage it, to preserve it and to keep it going. Which is why we don't have any solution to the problems of capitalism. The fundamental instability of the system, its cycles, it's bouncing up and down, such as it did so, so catastrophically in 2008. And likewise, we have no resolution to the problem of the growing inequality that capitalism breeds. Of course both the Republicans and Democrats say they are for stability and they are for less inequality. But because they don't deal with the system, they both preside over worsening situations in both areas. So let's not worry about the details of up and down deficits. We have bigger fish to fry and bigger problems to solve. My next update has to do with what happens if you leave the control of harm caused by capitalist enterprises to them to solve. If you ask them to police themselves, to curb their excesses to prevent the harm, here's what you get. Ingenious solutions in quotation marks that have the peculiar problem of saving the profits of the company and not doing all that well on solving the problem. I'm going to give you the starkest cigarettes, right? I am assuming you all know, as the world does, that here in the United States we went through years and years of litigation and programs that demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that tobacco companies knew that their product was dangerous, causing lung cancer and so on. Emphysema, knew it, produced it anyway, advertised it anyway, and that the only way to deal with it was to really come down hard on them, punish them, fine them enormous amounts of money, require them to put warning labels on cigarette packs, not advertise, not, not be near a school. You get the idea. And the companies were told you should deal with this problem on top of it. But a large amount of discretion was left in those companies hands. So guess what? A recent article in the British newspaper the Guardian shows that around the world, not in the United States and not in a number of the countries that have done, like the United States, come down on the cigarette companies where they're in danger of being exposed for what I'm about to tell you. But in Countries where the government is weaker, where there hasn't been that kind of campaign, there is massive marketing of cigarettes, especially to children. And that's what the Guardian went around the world to document and did a really fine piece of work this last week. Here are some of the things the cigarette companies have done. And here, for example, is where their research and development is focused. Massive ads and store placements where children shop in or near candy stores. It's extraordinary, the research. There's a vast program of marketing single cigarettes because children don't have enough money to buy a pack. So it's a big expansion of the sale of cigarettes by the individual piece. Here's one that caught me unawares. Colorful branding, cigarette papers in various colors mimicking children themes. And here's the one that really knocked me. Multi flavored cigarettes. That's right, cigarettes that have been infused with chocolate and strawberry and. And vanilla. Every one of the major cigarette companies talks about their commitment for children and not advertising to them. But the reality exposed by the Guardian shows that if you leave the solution of the harm done by capitalist enterprises to them, they will avoid dealing with the problem while they protect their profits. Let me give you a second example, also drawn from the cigarette industry. One of the things it touts as its great step forward was the development of e cigarettes or vapor or vaping cigarettes. But a recent study released this last week at the Dartmouth College Norton Cotton Cancer center shows that the number of people weaned off of cigarettes and shifting to the vaping cigarettes is much, much smaller than the number, particularly of young people who are hooked onto cigarette smoking. By smoking those E cigarettes, those vapor cigarettes, the evidence suggests that the vapor cigarettes are less dangerous for you. That's a good step. But of course, by hooking large numbers of people on the E cigarette cigarette, you continue to sell the tobacco which is what the company makes its money on. What a bizarre notion. Leaving the control of the harm done by profit making capitalists in their hands to solve. Before moving on to the other updates for today, I want to remind you we maintain two websites. They are available 24 7. No charge whatsoever. We urge you to make use of them. The first one is rdwolff with 2f's.com and the other one is Democracy at work. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info. you can use either of these websites to communicate to us what you like and don't like and would like to see changed. On this program you can by a click of your mouse, follow us on Facebook Twitter and Instagram. You can see extra material that we load up there all the time. And if you are a listener to this program, but you would like to consider looking at it as a television program, since it is available in both forms, we urge you go to the following website where you can do that. Patreon.com P A T R E O N patreon.com Economic update for the TV version Let me repeat those two websites in case you didn't note them. Rdwolf with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info Our next economic update has to do with a huge case coming up before the U.S. court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. This has to do with the decision of the Federal Communications Commission to abolish net neutrality. The requirement that the Internet make available at the same rate to everybody the service, the access to the Internet that we all now require and use on a daily basis. This decision, if you like to get rid of net neutrality, has produced a tremendous battle between two groups of capitalists. Those who stand to make money by being able to charge if net neutrality is indeed affirmed as gone, no longer there. That would mean that the court says that what the FCC did is legal. They can do that. They can get rid of the neutrality versus companies that are going to lose money. Let me give you an idea of the people who are pushing to to get rid of net neutrality because they want to charge. And guess who they want to charge. You and me here they are just a partial att, Verizon, T Mobile, Sprint, okay, Comcast, Charter, Cox and Altice. These are the Internet providers that are in the associations pushing to get rid of of net neutrality. On the other side, pushing to keep it so that we can't be charged this money are the attorneys general of 22 states in the United States. But notice that's a minority of the states in this country and a variety of consumer advocacy groups and a few big tech companies that understand like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix and others that making it more expensive for us to get at the Internet will mean we lose it and use it less. But here's what I want to drive home here we are the public for whom these institutions supposedly exist. The Internet so we can communicate with one another better, so that we can find out about important issues better. We are going to be faced with fees that are going to be fought out between two groups of contesting capitalists. Makes you wonder who runs this system? The people, the vast majority who need it to work for them, or the very small Number of people who profit off of how the system works. Well, the question answers itself. Capitalism is a system in which profit making enterprises are the dominant group. For the rest of us, we live with the consequences while we are excluded from participating in any meaningful way. On the one hand, huge corporations with vast resources to throw into this. On the other hand, consumer advocacy groups who are who go around having bake sales to collect a very small amount of money which can't compete since it's all going to be decided by one warring group of companies on one hand and another warring on the other. Extraordinary way to organize an economy, don't you think? Next, I want to turn to Germany for our update. The German city of Essen, E S S E N got into the news last week when a local food bank which serves 6,000 people per week in this modest sized German city, this food bank distributes leftover or discarded food from restaurants and grocery stores. It made the decision and that's why they got the publicity to stop giving food to, to non German citizens. In other words, your need didn't determine whether you got food, your nationality did. Whoa. What do you say about that? Not exactly your Christian values you might think, but we'll put that one aside. One critic of this decision, Sara Wagan Knesht of the Left Party in Germany asked, in a country as rich as Germany, are we arguing about who gets leftover groceries? And the answer yes, exactly. That's what you're arguing over. And why is this happening? Because there have been cuts in all kinds of social supports, social services, welfare programs. And why is that happening in the rich country of Germany? Well, the answer is the same as why it's happening in the rich countries of, of Scandinavia, of France, of Italy and for that matter Britain, United States and so on. Here's the basic story. Capitalism has abandoned those countries. There's more profit to be made by producing in China and India and Brazil where wages are much lower. And so the capitalists have picked up and gone over there and that means their interest in the United States or Britain or France or Germany and is much reduced. If they're going to have to pay taxes, they're going to pay them in the countries which are on the uptick, where they're making more money, where they see growth. They don't want to pay taxes in the country from which they are departing, so they don't pay taxes and they join movements and they pay for movements to cut back on taxes. So governments don't have enough money. And so the good people of Essen Germany have to exclude starving people who, who don't have a German citizenship. Nothing was more hypocrisy or more hypocritical, I should say, than Chancellor Merkel in Germany who said, quote, it wasn't good to make that decision. But she said the situation highlighted, quote, the pressure that nonprofits are facing, let's be honest, which she isn't. The pressure is as capitalism moves east, paying lower wages brings much more wealth to the people who own those businesses who remain Americans, British, Germans and so on. They're making more profits because they're paying lower wages in China than they used to pay in Germany. They don't want to give up any of the extra wages to deal with the consequences of moving. So they're going to take it out on the poorest of the poor, shifting the burden of capitalism's new direction by making those at the bottom pick up the cost. My next economic update also highlights something that we've talked about on this program before. It has to do with an element, an economics element, of the struggle between Donald Trump on the one hand and Stormy Daniels on the other. For those of you not familiar with Stormy Daniels, I am not going to discuss that since I can't imagine there are too many of you who don't know what I'm talking about. Stormy Daniels signed an agreement, apparently with agents of Mr. Trump, including his personal lawyer, not to discuss the details of a love affair she says she had with the president some years ago. Over the last week or two, Mr. Trump has in turn decided to sue stormy Daniels for 20 counts of damaging him by breaching such a non disclosure agreement. The press picked up that the tactic here is a familiar one. In American law, somebody sues you whether you're guilty or not to be determined. But the way you defeat them is by countersuing, because then you got two kinds of cases and the winner tends to be the one who can afford the best and the largest law firm to do the work to win the case. In other words, it ceases being about facts and justice and becomes about who's got more money, a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, or the President of the United States. You guessed the outcome. It's kind of a reminder of what the O.J. simpson case kind of showed us too. Money plays an inordinate role. If you allow a capitalist system to produce gross inequality, it's naive to imagine that, that that inequality will not find its way into the legal system and make the outcomes reflect the money and not the justice of what's going on. According to The Guardian newspaper, particularly of March 16, there's a new law in the United Kingdom and Britain that mandates the reporting of the pay that is given to men versus women and to different layers of the society, particularly top executives. We don't have that law in the United States, at least not yet. And the results are really interesting and I wanted to present them to you first for Great Britain. And these are the numbers for the year 2015 and 2016. So it's very recent. Listen to these numbers. As to the gender difference in those years, 618,000 men in Britain earned over $140,000 a year. Let me do that again. Roughly 600,000 men earned over 140,000. How many women earned over 140,000? 179,000. You understand? Three times the number of men earned those high salaries than the number of women. Let's go even higher. How many men and women in England earned over £1,000,000? That's the British currency per year. That would be over $1.4 million a year. 17,000 men in Britain earn that much. 2,000 women do. In other words, all the discussion of gender equalization, all the discussion of ending gender and sex discrimination has not gone very far in capitalist Britain. And sadly, this is all too typical. I'm bringing you the British numbers not because they're worse than anybody else or better, but because they're typical and we know them. Other countries, we don't have them quite yet. On average, women in Britain get 25% a quarter less than men. Finally, on this same point, the Guardian did a calculation based as best it could on, on the available statistics on how men and women do when it comes to sharing or facing, let's call it, their income situations. The United States ranks 13th. In other words, there are 12 other countries where the ratio of men and women is closer to equal than the United States. Britain is slightly worse than the United States, but roughly the same. I thought you might be interested in the 12 countries that do better, that pay women closer to what they pay men. Less inequality. Here's the list of those 12 countries, starting in the most equal and then down getting closer to the U.S. here we go. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Slovenia, Denmark, Finland, Canada, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Poland and Belgium all pay people more equally for their work. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. Please stay with us for the important and interesting interview that is to follow. And please remember that after a short break, we will be right back. Welcome, friends, to the interview portion of our program. Economic Update. You know, we've talked often on this program about the transition from capitalist enterprises with their hierarchies of owners and boards of directors and then the mass of people doing the work, the transition from that kind of system and structure that we're familiar with to an alternative. Sometimes we call that the democratization of enterprise, sometimes we call it worker co ops. There's a lot of words for it. And we've been talking about what the pros and cons are, what's happening in that area, why that's a important part of our history. So it's with enormous pleasure that I offer you and all of us today a chance to talk with somebody going through that process, trying to figure out as he and his cohorts do this, how to do it, how to solve the problems that arrive, and to do that in the process of what is really a historic movement of change. So my guest today is Ken Byrne. He's the academic director and one of the co directors of the Conway school, a small 10 month graduate program in sustainable planning and design located in Western Massachusetts. He had been a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he worked with the economic geographer and a colleague of mine, Julie Graham, and the Community Economics Economies, excuse me, Community Economies Collective, to research and write about alternative economic practices in the Pioneer Valley of the state of Massachusetts. So it is with enormous satisfaction and pleasure that I want to now welcome Ken Burn to this discussion. Thanks for coming, Ken.
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B
Thanks for having me, Rick.
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A
Okay, so there's a school. And by the way, the school is particularly interesting for me because while we have talked about worker co ops in manufacturing and service industries, we get quite a bit of mail here from people who work in various kinds of nonprofits and government agencies and in schools at all levels, from nursery school on up through the university, and asking whether this interesting conversation about worker co ops is applicable to them too. So I think for that part of the audience, it'll be particularly interesting to hear you tell us a little bit about why you and your colleagues made the decision, what you're after, what the motivation is to go through this kind of transition. So tell us a little bit about it.
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B
So the Conway School is, as you said, very small. And at a certain point about two and a half years ago, I think we had reached the point where we felt that that traditional school structure of the board of trustees, the executive director, that structure wasn't quite serving our needs as employees. And we felt that maybe it wasn't serving the best interests of the school as well, there were voices that weren't being included in that decision making process. There wasn't a lot of communication between the employees and the board. And so there was a change in leadership. And initially I think the board felt, well, of course, now we do a national search for a new executive director, a CEO type, a charismatic leader who's going to come in and be able to run the school and for the employees. We knew each other, we knew what we were capable of. A great bunch of people who knew the school really well. And the idea of bringing in a total stranger didn't make sense to us. So we proposed to the board, let us run the school. We, at that moment, actually in the day to day running the school, we were doing it, we were looking at the.
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A
Because the prior person was gone. Correct?
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B
Okay, yeah, yeah. So at that moment, a board of trustees of a school, and it's a volunteer board, they're not paid, they're not compensated, they all have other jobs and their job really shouldn't be to get involved in the day to day running of a school. It should be oversight and seeing fiduciary responsibility, making sure the budgets are working and the school's on course. But the day to day running of a school shouldn't be done by the board. And we knew what to do. So there were, we needed to hire instructors, we needed to set compensation levels, we need to, we needed to make sure we had books in the library, all the things that you have to do day to day, make sure the electric bill is paid and really get into the budget, which is a big part of what we were doing. And so we were the ones who could do that. And so we did do that. And over time we were able to work with the board to make that an actual structure. Given that we would say let's try it for six months and we'll make adjustments as we go and we'll formally evaluate it at 6 months and 12 months and actually vote and see if we want to continue doing this. And that's how it evolved.
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A
So tell me, in your judgment, say after the first six months or 12 months, is it your judgment that you were able to do this? In other words, you were able to make in effect the transition from the top down hierarchical to the more democratic collective running of the school?
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B
Yes, absolutely. We were able to balance the budget, we were able to make all kinds of decisions that we didn't have to rely on someone else to make for us. We knew, for example, we had a tornado hit the school, a freak Tornado hit the school we ran in February. Climate change is real. And so all kinds of decisions had to be made very quickly about clearing the road and getting insurance companies contacted, things like that. We were able to do it. There was a lot of collaboration among people who actually knew how things operated, what was important. So the person in charge of facilities could say, this is the insurance company. We need to make this decision. If we had to figure out other phone calls to make, we could do that. That's just one example. And all along the way, we've been doing participatory budgeting, which is kind of also something that just evolved because of our level of collaboration and understanding each other's work, which is very important. And the budget is where it all comes together. And so you get together 20 employees in a room, you project a budget in an Excel spreadsheet, and you just start playing around with the numbers. You say, well, what about our health care costs? We just found out they went up 20%. How are we going to do that? We're halfway through the school year. What do we reduce? Understanding it all, as if you push one thing up, something else has to go down. And being a part of that was a wonderful, dynamic experience. And it really made clear to all of us that this is something we can do, because not everyone was sure that we could. There were doubts. There were doubts certainly on the part of some of the board members, but to be fair to them, they had never seen anything like this either. And some of them said, how can you do that? You need somebody to tell you what to do. You need a leader. I said, well, maybe, maybe not. We've been doing it for a few months now and it's working. So I think small success bred more confidence in it, better transparency and communication of information between all the employees and the board. We reached out to alums and shared with them what we were experimenting with and got their advice. And past employees, we met with them. We had a number of listening sessions with trustee members. And so part of it was just building up that understanding among ourselves that, yes, we can do this. And with the board.
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A
Let me interrupt, just technical questions. How many people are on the group of you that do this together?
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B
So it's somewhat like Russian doll or circles within circles. So on the board side we have maybe between 12 and 16 board members. On the employee side, we have roughly five, six full time staff members. That includes faculty and administrative staff. And most of us wear multiple hats. Then we have another 14 part time to very part time employees. So we have about a total of 20 employees. So how do you manage these different circles?
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A
Particularly how the decisions I was about to ask you, is it a one person, one vote kind of thing? If you have disagreements or budget decision, how do you work that?
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B
And we're waiting for the big disagreement where we're going to actually have to have a vote. So pretty much to this point we've been able to work it out with consensus or with talking it through and having a general sense of the room. And even if some people are expressing some disagreement or some discomfort with a decision, we'll keep working it through until they get to a level where we say, well, we'll check in in three months and decide if we want to continue doing it this way or things like that. So you mentioned we have three co directors. That's Bruce Stedman, Priscilla Novit and myself. And on some level we function in that formal executive director role. Administration, finance, academics. We're co equal and technically we're hired by the board and we serve at their. They can get rid of us at any time. And then the three of us serve on a coordinating committee or council with three other the full time employees. So that's Kim Erslev, Kate Tzolakis and Dave Weber. So we have that six core people who are there every day. And we meet formally once a week to discuss everything from how are the students doing? Do we need to adjust anything in the budget for this week? Who are we going to get as a graduation speaker? And the interesting thing is at what point do any decisions need to go to the larger group of employees or the larger group of the employees and all the trustees together? And we're kind of doing that on the C of our pants. There's many times where we'll say is this a co director decision or is this a coordinating group or is this an employee decision or a whole school decision? The co directors also are on the executive committee, non voting members of the executive committee meeting which meets every couple of weeks. So a small group of trustees, the co directors are kind of that. I often think of it as that joint part in a universal axle where this thing is spinning, this thing is spinning. And there's one thing that has to coordinate the two spinnings and that's the three co directors. But we're totally answerable to the coordinating council of six and the larger employee group as well. We would never say should we raise tuition or lower financial aid, we have to do one or the other. For example, we would never just make that decision on the fly and say, we've made a decision. Our job is to research, think about, talk through the issues, coordinate with the trustees about their concerns, and then go back to the larger group and say, our job is to present the issues to you. This is what we think the scenarios might be. In our judgment, we think this is what should happen. But there's a disagreement. We're not sure. What do you think? And pretty much for two and a half years now, we've been able to run the school. Some pretty major decisions. We had two campuses, we sold one. So all of those decisions that are involved with that, we've put a down payment on a second one and we're moving out of our current one. I mean, those are all. Each one is a huge decision and were made with relative ease.
- [40:06]
A
All right, let me push it now. How was all of this change in the organization, this institution, how was this received by your students? How did they see it? How did they experience it? What reactions did you get?
- [40:23]
B
Well, what's interesting, we're a very quirky school, as you mentioned or indicated, and our admissions material, our process is quite different. We have a one or two hour interview with every potential applicant and spend a lot of time reading their different kinds of essays. And what's interesting to me is over the last, coinciding with this, there's been a big increase in the number of students who said they've worked in worker cooperatives, they're interested in cooperative economies, their reading lists have shifted. And our school is a school of ecological design and planning. So everyone comes in already with the sustainable ecological perspective. And more and more we're seeing the economic sustainable grafted onto that or complementing that. So when I see that or it comes up in the conversation with a prospective student, because I interview all of the prospective students and I'm forthright, I say, you know, I'm one of three co directors, six coordinators, 20 employees, and I explain what we're doing. And it's been overwhelming, positive. It seems that it's something they're very interested in. They ask a lot of questions with our current students. What's interesting, when we have an upcoming board meeting, we take 30 minutes to talk to the students about the upcoming board meeting. We say, these are the issues that are coming up in the board meeting. This is what we think is going to happen. There's something, you know, there's some disagreement about how to go forward on this or that.
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A
And.
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B
And invariably, Monday morning after the board meeting, three or four students will say, hey, how did the board meeting go? What did they decide about this or that? And I can't imagine another school. Maybe there are other schools that do that, but it seems like a pretty unique.
- [42:11]
A
So not only are they receptive, but you're suggesting that they're being drawn also into a role in the decision making process over time, which would be, one might even dare say, revolutionary in the notion that students would be able to play a decision making role in how their education goes.
- [42:32]
B
And I should say our students are everywhere from their early 20s to their 50s and some of them are planning their post graduation life and are thinking about what kind of work environment they want to work in, what kind of responsibility do they want to have, what kind of collaborative environment do they want to have? So they ask questions about that too. Well, how do you manage this decision? Or what happens if you have to hire someone new and it doesn't work out and you don't have just one person who can just fire them, those kinds of things.
- [43:03]
A
So they're not just learning sustainable planning and design, they're also learning the cooperative way of organizing the work process in any workplace. So you are educating sort of multiple directions at the same time. Okay, tell me how the board, which used to run it in the more typical way, how have they responded to what has happened with the initiative and the power that the working part of this institution has now taken?
- [43:38]
B
Well, I think initially some, as I said, were surprised by it or seemed very novel. Some said, well, we're already flaky enough. Why do we have to have this flaky thing, you know? Well, it's not really that flaky, to be honest. It works really well. And so there was some questioning and resistance and some, I mean, totally, their concern was totally understandable. But some said, well, if we don't have a single CEO, no one will donate, our fundraising will go down because people, if they're going to donate, they want to know they're talking to the person at the top. And so we haven't had that kind of falling off with our system. And we haven't noticed any concern about people not donating because of the structure of decision making at the school. It's an understandable concern.
- [44:29]
A
Yes, of course, but let me interrupt. So don't donors when they were told, well, we don't have a CEO anymore, we have this three member, as you've explained it to us, this collective that didn't turn off the donations. So who meets with them if they can't meet with a CEO? You don't have one.
- [44:49]
B
Well, so I'm a co director with an area of responsibility for academics. And again, all of these overlap. So I also have to know about finance and et cetera. Bruce Stedman, his area of responsibility includes fundraising and development. We have a development committee that includes staff members and trustees and alums. So it's a shared responsibility. If somebody needs to make a phone call, it might be a trustee, it might be Bruce, it might be someone else on the staff. And so far I don't think we've missed out on having that charismatic CEO who's going to storm into ruin.
- [45:21]
A
You know, it reminds me, if I could interject at the moment, that when I go around the country talking about worker co ops and setting them up, I get very often the question, yeah, well, no bank would lend to you because you don't have the customary signature of a CEO or CFO or whatever it is. And they're always amazed when I explain to them that worker co ops are not new. They've existed for thousands of years, even hundreds of years in the United States. And guess what? All kinds of co ops have gone to all kinds of banks and they've worked that out. It's not some insurmountable impossibility. It's just lodged in some folks minds as if it were insurmountable. And in a sense, nothing shows it better than having the concrete experience. Okay, how have the teachers, people like you and your colleagues, how have they changed? In other words, they're changing the organization of work. But how has the changed organization of work reacted back and changed them? Do you have any thoughts about the impact? And if you don't want to speak about others, just about yourself. What do you think about what you've done?
- [46:40]
B
Maybe I'll take the first question first. What we've all observed is the capacity for growth in each other. So that people who said, I never thought I would be able to understand this complicated spreadsheet and the difference between restricted donation and unrestricted donation and depreciation. But just through a process of sitting down and talking through it with people on the board and on the staff who do understand it. It's actually really helpful that they all know that. But also it's great to see everyone has this capacity to learn something new and that everyone takes on tasks because they have been a part of the discussion of other people who know how to do that and they see the importance of it. And everyone has learned something new by doing, including myself, many things.
- [47:36]
A
So it would be fair to say it develops New capacities. And then there's a nice feedback because if someone who didn't understand the finances, say now, does that person's ability to weigh into decision making will in a sense be improved because he or she knows the financial dimensions of the issue, which before they might have not felt comfortable about. So in a way, the collectivization develops the skill which then improves the collectivization. They feed each other.
- [48:08]
B
And there's. I mean, I think we've all worked in situations where the institution is oppressing you. There's no paper towels in the bathroom. And you can say, blame the institution in the abstract. For us, we are it. So if we have a problem, we have to figure it out and sort it out, and we have to understand how all those pieces fit together.
- [48:32]
A
So bellyaching about the institution drops off the list because it's really not possible anymore. Right?
- [48:39]
B
You can't say, well, I didn't get a raise this year, and you are full of resentment. You can actually see, well, we gave more financial aid this year and that was a good thing that we all agreed to. And that's why we didn't take a raise this year or we put more into our endowment or our reserves or to buy our new campus or whatever those things might be. I think some people looking from the outside may have feared if you put the employees in charge, they'll just vote themselves a raise. And that's the furthest thing from what's happened because you have to understand it.
- [49:17]
A
All.
- [49:20]
B
As a functioning system.
- [49:22]
A
And the truth of it is, as all trade unions learned years ago, that workers are much more concerned about the security of their job and would never pay themselves a large amount of money when they have all these other needs to take care of with their funds. It would be a short term boom, but it would undermine their security, which in the end is always the bigger thing.
- [49:44]
B
All right, can I mention one more thing? Please, please, Bruce, who, who's one of the coordinating group, he mentioned just at our, I think it was our all school meeting a few weeks ago, he has been an executive director in that unitary CEO position for a couple of nonprofits and organizations. And we were talking about this experience of our work, and he said, I've been that executive director, one person in charge of making a lot of decisions. He says it is so much better to be in this situation. I don't have that burden. I don't have to be the one who has to always know everything and make all those decisions myself. And he's enjoying it tremendously. And Everyone, even the person who only works one day a week, one term a year, is invested and feels, at least from my reading, the amount of time they will speak up with their opinion about something important to the school. They speak up. There doesn't seem to be that quiet in the room that no one wants to say anything.
- [50:46]
A
You know, I learned this lesson myself once years ago, when I was part of a group of economists called in to do a report for some executive in a company. And it was crystal clear in the conversation that the executive had already made the decision. And we were just for window dressing, which we got paid very well, so we dressed the window. But at the end I took him aside and I said what I just said. I said, you know, it was clear that you had already made the decision, what was this for? And he answered with what you just told me. He said, I'm the guy who's accountable. I can't afford this situation. It drives me crazy, keeps me up at night. It's always a guess, it's always a gambler. And one of the ways that executives protect themselves, he was teaching me, is we get a report, we know what we want to do, but we need a report from some outside independent so that when we make a mistake, which is inevitable, we can blame the report. We can say, don't fire me. I had these experts come in. It's pure window dressing, has nothing to do with an independent, but a good lesson for me. Tell me what. Because we're getting close towards our time. What would you say is the lesson of your experience for others, for people in schools around the world, people in all kinds of institutions, not just ones that produce a commodity for sale, but do all kinds of other. What have you learned that they might take some benefit from? Share it with them.
- [52:27]
B
Well, on the one hand, I wouldn't want to underestimate the importance of the particulars. So our particular circumstance and the particular people in that circumstance produce this particular form which also is evolving. So on the one hand, it depends. It depends on a lot of things. And that ability to look at your own situation and assess the people around you and the situation and the questions and the circumstances that you're facing, rather than reverting to a pre written script about how things should be, that I think that particular is the universal takeaway, I think, for me. And that.
- [53:09]
A
But it's possible you did it absolutely.
- [53:12]
B
The confidence to say we can do it. We have been doing it actually in so many different ways. And just to acknowledge that and say, yes, this is possible we can do this.
- [53:23]
A
It's extremely powerful, you see, precisely because it's very particular, as it will be in each situation. That's the universal that in this particularity, as in many others, it's doable with the trepidation, the fear, the unknown, the skepticism. All appropriate. You did it. And I want to congratulate you.
- [53:45]
B
Thank you for your guidance.
- [53:46]
A
Thank you very much, Ken, for coming. Folks, before I close, I'm moved by this. I'm moved as I am by every worker co op I have encountered, those that are highly developed and going a long time, those that are just beginning, those that are struggling in all the different fields. Something momentous is going on as people become able to look critically at the status quo of capitalist economic organization and search for something better. It's the best thing about human beings. They look at their institutions, if they're not too frightened, and they figure out how they can do better. That's called progress, and it applies to economic institutions as well. Thank you all for listening. I want you to be, as I always ask you to be, partners of this program. Get these messages out, share it with us. I want to share with our partner, truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis which we also thank for every Friday making it possible for many of you to also access this program in that way. Thanks again for your attention and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam. Sa.