Economic Update: Worker Coops Rising

Summary

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Episode: Worker Coops Rising
Date: July 11, 2019

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Richard D. Wolff dives into two key themes: the dysfunctions of American capitalism—especially regulatory capture and deep inequality—and the rising movement for worker cooperatives as a viable alternative. In the second half, Wolff welcomes guest John Duda, Director of Communications at the Democracy Collaborative and co-founder of the worker-owned Red Emma’s in Baltimore. Together, they discuss real-world models of worker ownership in Italy and the United States, practical successes, challenges, and the growing momentum for democratic workplaces.

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Key Discussion Points

Regulatory Capture in U.S. Capitalism (00:10 - 10:42)

• Definition and Examples:

  • Regulatory capture: when businesses come to control the very agencies meant to regulate them, often through campaign donations or other means.
  • Striking contrasts: The European Union has banned/restricted 1,300 chemicals in cosmetics; the U.S. only 11.
  • Chemicals in food (dyes, preservatives) are far more tightly regulated in Europe than in the U.S.
  • The herbicide atrazine banned in Europe since 2003 but still widely used in the U.S.
  • Lead-based paint banned in Europe before WWII, but not in the U.S. until 1978.

• Implications:

  • "Once upon a time, liberals, socialists and others looked to the government as a way to...limit the damage that is done by enterprises for whom profit is the bottom line...[But] the government has been captured by those it is supposed to control." (03:41 – Richard Wolff)

The "Great Economy" Myth and Rising Inequality (10:43 - 15:45)

• IMF Assessment:
  • The IMF, contrary to U.S. political claims, finds that benefits from America’s economic expansion “have not been widely shared.”
  • Economic growth over the past decade mostly benefited the wealthy; median incomes barely rose.
  • U.S. life expectancy is falling compared to other developed nations, with rising suicides and drug overdoses impacting stats.
  • "The wealth of the bottom 40% is lower today than it was in 1983. That's not the report card of a great economy." (13:21 – Richard Wolff)
  • Social mobility has collapsed: young people today are less likely than their parents to exceed their parents’ standards of living.

Trump, Trade Wars, and the Specter of Recession (15:46 - 23:29)

• Administration Tactics:
  • The U.S. economy, typically unstable with downturns every 4-7 years, is now overdue for another recession.
  • Trump administration is pressuring the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates to delay a downturn until after the 2020 election.
  • Tariffs and trade wars (especially against China and Mexico) are used partly as leverage for this economic strategy.
  • "We are watching the Republican Party and Mr. Trump ready to destroy vast sectors of a global economy to get themselves reelected." (20:44 – Richard Wolff)
  • Christine Lagarde of the IMF estimates the U.S.-China trade war could cost $455 billion globally.

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Worker Cooperatives: Theory, Practice, and Growth

Introduction to John Duda (23:30 - 25:06)

• Who is John Duda?
  • Director of Communications at the Democracy Collaborative, a think tank focused on democratizing the economy.
  • 15 years' experience with Red Emma’s, a worker co-owned bookstore and café in Baltimore.

Emilia-Romagna: Italy’s Cooperative Ecosystem (25:07 - 30:04)

• Cooperative Density:

  • Emilia-Romagna, a region of about 4 million, has one-third of its GDP generated by co-ops—all types (worker, consumer, producer)—across industries.
  • "If you’re talking to somebody on the street, you have a 1 in 20 chance of meeting somebody who's a worker owner at a worker co op." (17:44 – John Duda)

• Success Factors:

  • Not a single large co-op, but an “ecosystem” with mutual support and cooperative finance.
  • Region is among Italy’s most prosperous due to this model.

• Role of Policy and State Support:

  • Supportive policies: co-ops set aside 3% of net profits to help new co-ops.
  • The Marcora Law enables unemployed workers to use unemployment benefits and cooperative financing to start co-ops from failed businesses.
  • Cooperative federations offer advocacy, technical, and financial support—analogous to business lobbies for capitalist firms.

  “The state has been supporting capitalism. All that the worker co ops would ask is...a level playing field of getting that kind of support for their alternative way of organizing business.” (19:49 – Richard Wolff)

Could It Happen in America? John Duda on Red Emma’s (30:05 - 37:20)

• Origins and Growth:

  • Red Emma’s began as a radical bookstore and coffee house, focused initially on paying rent and providing dignified work for a handful of founders.
  • Over time, the model proved viable: “The idea that we could create dignified work for the people who work there...was a little bit outside of the horizons...But what we found is that the model worked.” (23:57 – John Duda)
  • Red Emma’s now has about 30 worker-owners, up from 12 at the start.

• Decision-Making and Worker Ownership:

  • New staff don’t become owners immediately, but after a period of mutual fit, they can join as worker-owners voting on all major issues.

  • Pay disparities are strictly limited: a 2-to-1 max ratio between top and lowest paid, much lower in practice than typical U.S. businesses.

    “You really are...not in a regular business because you’re in the process of having decisions over what everybody gets paid.” (26:11 – Richard Wolff)

• American Landscape:

  • Since Red Emma’s founding, national momentum for worker co-ops has increased: there’s a national federation, better policy engagement, and grassroots financing networks.
  • “You see a tremendous movement...creating grassroots financing to help worker co ops help other worker co ops...all sorts of really interesting shifts in local economic development policy.” (22:45 – John Duda)

Worker Co-ops and the Zeitgeist

• Restoring a Sense of Control:

  • Duda connects the growth in worker co-ops with a broader desire among Americans for control over their economic lives—contrasting democratic work with nativist, reactionary responses to insecurity.

    “People feeling like they’re in free fall, people feeling like the bottom has fallen out of the American dream...And what worker co ops do...is give people a different sense of being in control, a sense that’s grounded in solidarity, that’s grounded in participation, that’s grounded, honestly, in community.” (26:56 – John Duda)

• Generational Appeal:

  • Interest in worker co-ops cuts across ages and ideologies; young people want to join, older business owners see it as a way to leave a legacy.
  • “You have a lot of young people who want to work at a worker co op. You have a lot of older people...thinking about their legacy...they see the same possibility.” (27:56 – John Duda)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Regulatory Capture:

  • “The government has been captured by those it is supposed to control...It won't work. That old plan of giving the power to the government, at least not until we have very different governments...” (05:39 – Richard Wolff)

• On Economic Inequality:

  • “The wealth of that bottom 40% is lower today than it was in 1983. That’s not the report card of a great economy.” (13:21 – Richard Wolff)

• On Worker Co-ops’ Practicality:

  • “You look at Emilia Romagna though, and you see an economy in which one third of the GDP...is generated out of cooperative business. This is really, really incredible.” (16:56 – John Duda)

• On Policy and State Support for Co-ops:

  • “You have to take 3% of your net profits as a co op and basically kick them down to the next generation of cooperative entrepreneurs.” (20:10 – John Duda)

• On Democratic Decision-Making in Co-ops:

  • “You really are...not in a regular business because you’re in the process of having decisions over what everybody gets paid.” (26:11 – Richard Wolff)

• On the Broader Appeal:

  • “People are really hungry for ways to feel that they are in control of their own economic life.” (27:34 – John Duda)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Regulatory capture & chemical bans – 00:10–05:39
• Inequality and economic assessment by the IMF – 10:43–14:56
• Trump, the Fed, and Trade Wars – 15:46–20:44
• IMF on trade war consequences – 20:45–23:29
• Introduction of John Duda – 23:30–25:06
• Emilia-Romagna's example – 25:07–30:04
• State support and policy for co-ops – 30:05–32:30
• Red Emma’s story – 32:31–35:20
• Democratic incentives in co-ops – 35:21–36:30
• Cultural, generational, and movement context – 36:31–38:36

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Memorable Moments

• Richard Wolff’s pithy summary of the last decade:

  “The rich got richer and the poor got nothing. That's what happened over the last 10 years.” (12:06)

• John Duda on the thriving Italian cooperative model:

  “…one third of the economy is generated out of cooperative business. This is really, really incredible.” (16:56)

• The transformative potential for the US:

  “I certainly think we've seen tremendous, tremendous growth and excitement in worker cooperative models.” (22:36 – John Duda)

• On the deeper meaning of the movement:

  “What worker co ops do...is give people a different sense of being in control, a sense that's grounded in solidarity, that's grounded in participation, that's grounded, honestly, in community.” (26:56 – John Duda)

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Conclusion

This episode provides a sharp critique of the American economic and political status quo—especially corporate power over regulators and persistent inequality—while offering the concrete, hopeful example of worker cooperatives. Through both practical stories and international models, Wolff and Duda demonstrate that democratic workplaces are not only possible but are growing, adaptable, and potentially transformative for American society. The conversation closes with a sense that worker ownership could be a key force for empowering individuals, building solidarity, and renewing economic democracy.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today with a problem of the American capitalist system. It is the capture by business of the government agencies that are supposed to regulate them. The term in economics is called regulatory capture. When an industry or an enterprise that's supposed to be supervised and controlled by the government, usually because of past bad behavior by that industry or enterprise, instead, what happens is the company either bribes or donates to the campaign of or finds a way to capture and control the very regulation that was supposed to control it. It's a serious problem in the United States, bad or worse than in most other advanced industrial capitalist economies. And I want to give you some dimensions of this problem because it is becoming more, not less, severe under the Trump administration. I'm gonna begin with random examples. The cosmetics industry, because cosmetics are something that people put on their body, on their skin, and do so literally every day. It is something that in Europe, in the European Union, has been very concerned about what those chemicals that are in those products can do. And therefore, over recent years in the European Union, they have banned or restricted 1,300 chemicals in the cosmetics industry. By contrast, the United States, over the same period of time, has outlawed or curbed 11. That's right, 1,300 chemicals limited in Europe, 11 limited here. Think about it. Well, it led a Connecticut state senator last year to think about it. He's a doctor, but he also serves in the state Senate of that state. His name is Alex Bergstein, and he proposed a law in Connecticut that the United States, or at least the state of Connecticut, would use the same standards in banning chemicals that are in existence in Europe. Just catch up with the Europeans. When asked about his law, he said given the power of the chemical industry and the power of the cosmetics industry, he didn't think his bill would likely pass. But I thought it was an interesting piece of information. Here's another place where dyes that are basically chemicals are used in the production of cheese, chocolates, and juice. There in Europe, a lot of the chemicals are banned again, because they have been found, particularly the chemicals in artificial colors and preservatives, to hyperactivity. They are linked to hyperactivity in children, and for that reason, they were banned, but not in the United States. The most widely used herbicide, plant killer, in the United States, is called altrazine. It has been banned in Europe since 2003 because it pollutes water supplies. Lead based paints. You know about them, Lead based paints, they were banned in much of Europe before the Second World War, but it took the United States until 1978 to ban lead based paints in this country. Why do I talk about this? Well, once upon a time, liberals, socialists and others looked to the government as a way to control, to limit the damage that is done by enterprises for whom profit is the bottom line and who don't care therefore about these other consequences. But the problem is you can't go that way anymore because the government has been captured by those it is supposed to control. It won't work. That old plan of giving the power to the government, at least not until we have very different governments from those that we have had and more and more of which we have had in recent decades. I want to turn next to the notion that the United States currently has a quote, unquote great economy, something that President Trump repeats and that a great many others seem to acknowledge. Well, no less an authority than the International Monetary Fund, of which the United States is a member, gave a kind of report card, an assessment of where the American economy is and they concluded it was not in great shape. In the understatement for which the IMF is famous, quote, the benefits from the decade long expansion of the American economy have not been widely shared. Okay, plain English, the rich got richer and the poor got nothing. That's what happened over the last 10 years. And it by the way, gives the lie to the old argument again of liberal people that somehow if you grow the economic pie, if we have economic growth, then everybody will benefit. No, the last 10 years show us if at the same time that you grow the pie, cause indeed it grew, you decrease the slice that's given to working people. They're not better off. And the reality is that even though the economic output of goods and services grew very, very substantially in the last 10 years, the real incomes of average Americans barely budged at all. All of the gain went to the rich at the top. Here's a list of what the IMF says are signs that the economic performance in the United States is not good. I'm just going to read you some of their the impact of rising suicides and drug overdoses on falling life expectancy. The United States has now a lower life expectancy than almost any of the other countries in the G7 or the list of major industrial capitalist countries. That's not a sign of economic well being. The actual adjustment in the median income of the United States over the last decade or so has beenactually for the last 20 years has been 2.2% median income rise in real terms over that time, the gross output of goods and services rose 23%. So somebody's getting all that extra output. But the median, the average American isn't among the 40% poorest, 40% of the population. The wealth of that bottom 40% is lower today than it was in 1983. That's not the report card of a great economy. 45 million Americans live in poverty. By the statistics on poverty kept by the United States government, social mobility has collapsed in the United states. Back in 40 years ago, half of the young people at the same age as their parents were living better than those parents did. Today, half of today's young Americans earn less than their parents did at a similar age. I mean, it's a real collapse. And finally, we have some of the worst outcomes of our educational system of any advanced industrial economy. So whatever else you think about, if you look in anything like a balanced way at our economy, if you don't cherry pick the statistics that make things look good and carefully avoid looking at those that don't, if you don't do that kind of lopsided behavior, you get much closer to the IMF's assessment than to Mr. Trump's self serving effort at re election next year. The next item I want to turn to is the ongoing crazy theater of the tariff and trade WARS Propelled by Mr. Trump and the Republicans around the world, most notably against China and Mexico, but also against Europe and many other parts of the world. I want to explain what that is about and how it relates, if you like, to another blustery, bullying behavior of the same president and the same Republican Party, namely the effort to get the Federal Reserve in the United States to lower interest rates. What's the connection? Well, here's the problem. Everyone who follows capitalism knows it's a highly unstable system. On average, every four to seven years, capitalism has a downturn. People lose their jobs, businesses go out of business, production is cut back, the government raises less taxes, a catastrophe. Sometimes it's short and shallow, other times it's long and deep. The one after 2008 has been long and, and deep. So it's very present in everyone's mind. Well, if the average recovery is four to seven years, and we note that we're now nine to 10 years since the crash happened in 2008 and 09, everybody who pays any attention knows we're due for another one. And it could happen either later this year, 2019 or even worse for Mr. Trump next year, running up to the election in November of 2020. He doesn't want that to happen because he assumes, in my judgment, correctly, that if a big depression hits next year, he can kiss reelection goodbye. So what is he going to do? And the answer is he's going to cut interest rates. He's going to put pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates so that businesses will borrow more money, hopefully, and people will borrow more money, hopefully, and they will buy things, and he can at least push that recession, which everyone knows is coming, so it happens late enough in 2020 that it will not destroy his reelection. He tried to get Mr. Powell, his own appointee as the head of the Federal Reserve, to cut interest rates, but Mr. Powell doesn't want to do it because we've pumped so much money into this economy that if things really get going, there's a risk of an inflation, which is what he's supposed to do. So he said no. So Mr. Trump got angry and yelled at him. He did that again repeatedly. But he can't get anywhere. So he has a second plan. He is going to make it look like the world economy is going to crash. He's actually going to propel the notion of a disaster and hope that the incoming disaster will convince the Federal Reserve to stave that off by lowering interest rates, because nothing else will work. So he has to hype the aggressive attitude towards China. He has to hype the aggressive attitude towards Mexico that involved slapping tariffs on them. While he was over there pretending he was a king and queen with those folks in England. The American business community didn't like what he was doing. They let him know right away that those tariffs he was going to hit Mexico with, that might be good for your reelection. But if you do that, we're going to be hurt. And if we're hurt, you can kiss your reelection Goodbye. And in 24 hours, the tariffs against Mexico disappeared. They were all ready to go. They disappeared because Mr. Trump realized, ooh, ooh, this is not a way to get reelected. This is a way to get defeated. So that was the end of the story in Mexico. And immediately he hyped up the. The aggressive attitude towards China. Again, the same plan. I will get her reelected if it looks like terrible economic crisis is coming, because then the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates and then everybody, hopefully, will borrow and we will stave off. We will delay this catastrophe from coming down on us. Here's the global economic problems, Mrs. Lagarde, Christine Lagarde, who's the head of the International Monetary Fund, has announced officially that her agency, and it's one of the most respected agencies in the world for this kind of economics. Her agency estimates that the loss to the world in economic wealth from the United States China trade war, if it continues much longer, will be in the neighborhood of $455 billion. That's half a trillion unspeakable loss that will be, of course, pushed on those who can afford it least. We are watching the Republican Party and Mr. Trump ready to destroy vast sectors of a global economy to get themselves reelected. And the only really interesting question is whether the rest of the American system, the business community, the Democratic Party, the working class, will sit by and watch this theater played out in the way that it has been and the risks being taken to pander to this politician's reelection hopes. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Again, I want to remind you, please sign up to be a YouTube supporter, where you get informed of what's happening with this program and our activities. Simply go to YouTube and slash democracy at Work and you'll find this program. Make use of our websites where you can communicate to us. Follow what we rdwolf with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info and finally, as always, a heartfelt thanks to the Patreon community. Join us there. Your support and encouragement through Patreon is of enormous importance. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for today. I am very pleased to welcome to our microphones and our cameras John Duda. He is the director of communications at the Democracy Collaborative. Some of you may remember Gar Alperovitz, with whom I've worked on and off over the years, works at that and has developed that over the years. John here works at the Research and Development Lab working on the democratization of the economy, which is one of their major projects. In addition to his work at the collaborative and working on models of worker democratic control of the workplace, John has practical experience. 15 years working with a bookshop and cafe in Baltimore, Maryland, known as Red Emma's. It's very well established, very well known. I've been there myself. And so I thought John would be a good person to talk not only about the theory and the idea of worker co ops, but the practical realities of them. So, John, welcome very much to the program.

[B]

Great to be here.

[A]

Okay. Many Americans are interested at least a little bit in worker co ops. They kind of know that that exists. But mostly it has had the reputation, which I don't think is accidental, that it's a little bit pie in the sky, it's a little bit utopian. It can't work very long or not for more than three or four people. So when I hear that and I try to explain, no, no, it has much greater reality than that, I get incredulous looks. You've been working and I want to particularly ask you to talk about practical realities. And the one I thought might be good place to start is that part in Italy, Emilia Romagna, which is an economy in which, if I Understand correctly, roughly 40% of the enterprises are worker co ops. Been that way for decades. Prove that this is a viable way to organize business. So tell us a little bit about it.

[B]

Yeah. So Emilia Romagna is fascinating. And it's fascinating because it's not just one worker co op, right? You can point to one worker co op in the States here and there, and people are like, okay, maybe it's not totally utopian, but they still can't imagine how it fits together. They can see the business, but they can't see the economy. You look at Emilia Romagna though, and you see an economy in which one third of the GDP of this region, it's a small region, maybe 4 million people, but one third of the economy is generated out of cooperative business. This is really, really incredible.

[A]

Across different kinds of work, right?

[B]

Across different kinds of work, different kinds of cooperatives. So some worker cooperatives, some consumer cooperatives, some producer cooperatives, but all really working together and held together in this really incredible ecosystem. And that's the key thing, right? It's not a monolith. It's not one great idea that just happened to be really, really successful. It's an ecosystem of innovation, of mutual support, of cooperative finance. And all of these pieces fit together. And you have a situation where if you're talking to somebody on the street, you have a 1 in 20 chance of meeting somebody who's a worker owner at a worker co op. It's an incredible, incredible cooperative density compared to the United States.

[A]

And is it reasonable to say that it has existed for so many years that obviously it meets a need? It's something that the people there value, it's something that they work to reproduce, that if there are enemies to worker co ops, they have not been able to undo this cooperatively based economy?

[B]

Yeah. Oh, I definitely think so. I mean, you see that it has generated real results for the people of the region, like higher wages. It's one of the. Honestly, it's one of the most prosperous parts of Italy in part because you've had this cooperative economic development strategy that brings together basically small and medium sized enterprises, some cooperatively held, some not cooperatively held, but all kind of tied together in a big network of innovation. That network of innovation produces high quality food products, high quality ceramics products, does exports, cabinets across the world, all sorts of really interesting small industries that together form really a network of prosperity for the region. That is, I think, you know, something that people are really attached to. I think they've developed the policies to accelerate this. Right.

[A]

The government in that area supports them. In other words, the government provides benefits, supports, contracts to the worker co op sector just the way it does to the capitalist sector of the economy. I think that's a very important issue because here in the United States, for example, when you talk about building up worker co ops, people tend to think, well, that can only happen if the government helps them, as if there's something wrong with that, you know, and then I have to explain, because I do economic history, that the history of capitalism is the history of endless efforts by every capitalist enterprise to get subsidies, to get contracts. The state has been supporting capitalism. All that the worker co ops would ask is basically a level playing field of getting that kind of support for their alternative way of organizing business.

[B]

Yeah, and that's what's happening in Emilia Romagna and Italy more generally. You have a number of interlocking policies around cooperative finance. You have to take 3% of your net profits as a co op and basically kick them down to the next generation of cooperative entrepreneurs to give them.

[A]

Capital to help their businesses.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. If you're unemployed, your business folds. In Italy there's something called the Marcara Law, which allows you to, to take some of your unemployment benefits, but also to access wider cooperative finance and take over your business, run it as a cooperative, do it better than the bosses who ran it into the ground. So this is, there's all sorts of policies like this, favorable tax treatment, things that allow cooperatives to self finance themselves and to keep money flowing within the cooperative economy.

[A]

So the co op, the worker co ops, I assume, have been working to get politicians, political leaderships, government agencies to give them that support. In other words, there's a kind of almost natural collaboration between the worker co op and at least parts of the political structure to reinforce each other. Just the way capitalist businesses cultivated relationships with their political parties to get the support of the state. And there's nothing that should prevent the worker co op from basically doing that too.

[B]

Yep. And just like traditional businesses will have things like the chamber of Commerce and things like that, in the Italian situation you have very powerful cooperative federations that worker co ops are part of, depending on exactly where on the ideological spectrum they lie. And these cooperative federations provide policy advocacy, but they also provide technical assistance, they provide financing support. So they become powerful ways of banding together for the cooperatives.

[A]

And so a politician, not to push the point, but a politician would not want to be viewed negatively by the association of worker co ops because that would hurt his or her chances of reelection, et cetera. In other words, they have to respond to the worker co op sector. Given that it's a third or more of the economy in their region, they couldn't possibly ignore it. Or at least it would be then a political warfare of some sort. Can you imagine a sector of the American economy comparable, let's say a third of the American economy at some point in the future, replicating this story of Emilia Romano? In other words, can it happen here?

[B]

Oh, I certainly think so. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if it's, if I didn't think in my heart of hearts that it was actually possible. I don't know it's going to be possible tomorrow. But I certainly think we've seen tremendous, tremendous growth and excitement in worker cooperative models. I know personally, I helped start Brett Emma's worker cooperative in Baltimore about 15 years ago. And when we started, there was nothing. We were idealistic radicals who had read about worker co ops once or twice and gotten excited about the model. There was no support, there was no movement. There was just a lot of people like us discovering that this was an economic alternative that made sense for us and our lives and the way we wanted to put our values into practice. And then fast forward to today. You see a tremendous movement. You see a national federation that's getting much more sophisticated, much more nuanced, much more powerful in terms of the way it's engaging with policy. You see national financing networks springing up that are creating grassroots financing to help worker co ops help other worker co ops. You see all sorts of really interesting shifts in local economic development policy. When we started back In Baltimore in 2004, it was, you know, we were from crazy town, right? Nobody was. They would look at us and be like, you're a what now?

[A]

Well, tell us, I don't mean to interrupt, John, but tell us a little bit about Red Emma. Tell us, because that's a practical project. You were involved from the beginning. How has it developed? Give us a little sketch. I think people will be very interested to know.

[B]

It started as a radical bookstore and coffee house. It started just with the goal of paying the rent. The idea that we could create dignified work for the people who work there on a full time basis was a little bit outside of the horizons when we opened the doors. But what we found is that the model worked. We found that people really got something out of being in control of their workplace. That sense of control over a piece of the economy that you have to interact with on a basically daily basis was valuable. And we found that it was also valuable to create space in the community. And it's grown. Today we've expanded for the second time. There's about 30 people on the payroll.

[A]

How many started it?

[B]

It was about 12.

[A]

So you've gone from 12 to 30? Yep. And these are people who all have a more or less equal say in the decisions how to run the business, how to develop, how to move, how to grow.

[B]

Yep, everybody. And it's pretty standard in worker co ops. You have, you don't make somebody a worker owner the minute they walk in the door because, you know, sometimes you meet people and doesn't work out. But once you've proven that you're somebody that is, you know, excited about the future of the business, you become a worker owner, you become a member of this cooperative and you become part of this democratic enterprise that's, you know, really quite different than a traditional business.

[A]

Do people get paid the same amount? Do they get paid differently? How does that work?

[B]

There's a small range. I think there's a moral impulse to make everybody equal. Right. Everybody gets the same salary. In practice, people want to see raises over time. They want to feel like the longer they invest in the project that they get a little bit back. So we've capped it at 2 to 1. In practice, it's much, much lower than that in terms of ratio. And that is very, very different from, of course, traditional businesses in the US where we see 350 to 1 things like that, ratios between the paid and the highest paid employees.

[A]

And in some ways, the most important thing is that's a democratic decision. What that rate. In other words, it is decided democratically. Correct. Whether everybody gets the same or there are differences. And what those differences are how big they are when you get them. In other words, you really are, you know, that you're not in a regular business because you're in the process of having decisions over what everybody gets paid.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

What's your sense of America today as a society trump the chaos of the wars against China and Mexico, and where the movement for worker co ops fits into all of that?

[B]

I think it fits into restoring a sense of control. And I think that's what's driven a lot of the politics in the US Is people feeling like they're in free fall, people feeling like the bottom has fallen out of the American dream. And they've turned in many cases to very reactionary ways of feeling in control, ways that are focused on hurting other people. Right. Locking them up, criminalizing them, building a.

[A]

Wall, caging the children.

[B]

Yeah. And I think what worker co ops do and what other kinds of democratized economic formations can do is give people a different sense of being in control, a sense that's grounded in solidarity, that's grounded in participation, that's grounded, honestly in community. Community, as you know, it actually is. And that, I think is really, really important. I think we need that desperately in the United States. And I think what you see in terms of people flocking to these kind of ideas and getting incredibly excited about these ideas is these people are really. They're really hungry for ways to feel that they are in control of their own economic life.

[A]

Right. And not at the play of these forces that seem. That seem overwhelming. Last question that we'll have time for. There's so many. Is there a generational issue? In other words, do you discover, as you say, people are flocking, old people and young people, or is there some identity of particular people that are responding?

[B]

You know, I think it's interesting because I think you see young people and old people relating to this in different ways, but equally excited. We actually at the Democracy Collaborative did some polling around worker ownership, and we found that it was remarkably popular across ideological spectra, across age differences. And what we found in practice is that you have a lot of young people who want to work at a worker co op. You have a lot of older people who might be the owners of businesses. And they're thinking about the future, they're thinking about their legacy, they're thinking about what's going to happen to this business I created and giving them the model of the worker co op. They relate to it in a different way, but they see the same possibility.

[A]

John, I wish we had more time. Thank you very much for your insights. For all of you, this is a wave of the future. That's what we're learning and that's why we bring it to you. I hope you found it interesting and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.