Transcript
Richard D. Wolff (0:00)
Welcome Patreon friends to Economic Update Extra. Here is where we continue the interviews from the regular part of the show or the major discussions I sometimes lead myself in order to give you some of the extras that we enjoy as a kind of return to you for the support you have provided to us. So on the program, the regular program, I was discussing with my guest Kalia Kuno from Jackson, Mississippi's Cooperation Jackson, the economic development program they're engaged in, with its special focus on worker co ops as a kind of core institution.
Interviewer/Host (0:40)
And I wanted to continue the conversation by asking you to give us some flavor, if you could, of what it means to set up an enterprise as a worker co op for people who have a vague idea but would like to know, since there are variations, of course, how are you doing it? What kinds of democratic workplaces are you setting up? How do they work?
Kalia Kuno (1:04)
Our model, I would say, is a bit unique and let me describe kind of why. So in our case, we started off, you know, a mere four years ago knowing that most of the workers that we were going to encounter do not have a deep credit history other than a negative one, you know, in many cases. So there's hardly any credit. Now, why is that important? We knew that in the traditional sense of bringing folks together and trying to secure loans and resources, that our folks are going to be at a major disadvantage. So we tried to set up our model in such a way that we could kind of pool some resources together, like as a central entity and then have that entity, which is the Cooperation Jackson main body, serve as both kind of a training hub and incubator, but also kind of a small loan provider. Right. And so in our case, what we've done over the course of this couple of four years, we bring folks on to work with stipends, right? Like minimal stipends, to be able to buy some of their time so that they can learn, set up their, you know, do the bylaws, do the internal operating agreements, the things that you need to do your basic operation, and then determine, well, what is the share going to be? Like, how much can you contribute? How much can I contribute? You know, what are going to be, you know, like the parameters of the work, who's going to fall into doing this division of labor, that division of labor, how often are we going to meet, right? How are we going to make decisions? Are we going to make decisions by majority vote, we're going to make decisions by consensus, or are we going to do some combination of that? People have to figure all that out Right. And so we've kind of bought some of the time with these stipends to bring people on. Then the other unique feature about our pieces of what we've been able to do, you know, gracefully and thankfully at this point is to provide all of the startup groups with a bit of startup capital. And this is important in our case because you don't. We've set it up so that they don't have to start off going for kind of external loans. And it gives people some time and some flexibility to kind of experiment and tweak and get it right without necessarily having to completely fail and fall flat on your face, which is in the normal market, a normal business happens all the time. That happens all the time. And you have to do that. So we tried to take that experience, you know, many of us, a few of us in the original corps, having run some businesses and run some, well, and lost some, try to take that and say, how do we build a foundation that will be able to last? And so we've been able to provide Freedom Farms, which is one of the main co ops, the green team, we've been able to provide them with Freedom Farms is a range of. I think we've given them $20,000 that can start up and they've taken that and run with it. The green team, I think, has been more about like $30,000 over the course of the last two years. They've both grown to a place now where they're paying that money back into kind of our own internal revolving fund so that we can now start some other endeavors and initiatives and they would have those resources available to them to be able to grow. Now we've just kind of gotten to this point with those two, which is why I'm citing. We've just kind of gotten to those two points, but this was always a part of our program and design. But it takes time. I mean, I was one who thought initially we'd have like 30 co ops in five years. Takes a little bit more time than that, in part because you're dealing with so many uneven aspects of individual development amongst the folks that you're working with. People coming in with different variances of skills, different demands on their time between family, sometimes other jobs, you know, trying to make ends meet. So it takes some time. And then there's learning how to be democratic.