Several Thousand Heads are Better Than One: The Hydra Approach to Building a Cooperative Economy  

Cooperation among cooperatives is one the Seven Cooperative Principles, and something many of our workplaces practice on a daily basis without a whole lot of hoopla. But recently I've been hearing from a few different quarters some percolating questions and ideas about how to institutionalize our support for each other and for the larger cooperative economy.

Our Board member Steven Yarak of Black Star Coop wrote a piece in the most recent newsletter encouraging us to see ourselves as intentionally part of a larger cooperative economy, including credit unions. Organizations as disparate as NCBA and the Solidarity Economy Network are promoting the practice of making connections among various sectors of the economy to build a cooperative economy and a movement for economic justice, respectively.

Promoting connections for connections' sake isn't a luxury we have right now. To my thinking, cooperation among cooperatives is about the material reality of resources and survival. In a U.S. economy where all the cooperatives in the economy (that's consumer coops, ag and producer coops, rural electric coops, housing, and our beloved worker coops) make up only 1% of GDP, according to the recent University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives study on the economic impact of cooperatives, we may not survive and we certainly won't grow if we don't commit to mutual aid and support. And by that I mean working together, sharing ideas and time, bartering and brainstorming, yes all of those important and sustaining things, but I also mean money.

I mean taking an inventory of everything we spend on and invest in, and figuring out how we could spend and invest in a way that supports and grows the cooperative economy. And if those options don't exist yet, we need to think seriously about how to create them. How many of us have held our noses while our workplaces pay thousands of dollars a month in interest to multinational banks, corporate health care premiums or traditional Wall Street pension plans, because there are no better options? How many times has your cooperative or collective been at the mercy of price increases from vendors who are consolidating and charge a premium to smaller accounts? How can we marshall all the creative resources that go into our daily work and spend them on solving some of these larger, community questions?

These are hard questions. We'll run into a number of barriers immediately. There is no ethical large-scale health insurance option, no groovy cooperative pension plan. (But NCBA is working on one, did you know that?) Coming together to do group purchasing takes some commitment and coordination. We may need to convince some credit unions to do business lending. And in some cases, there may be hard decisions to be made about whether to purchase higher-priced and higher-quality goods or services from cooperatives or to buy based on cost alone. But as my friend and worker co-op media superstar Omar Freilla of Green Worker Cooperatives says: Your dreams are only as big as your problems. We who have visions of a worker-owned and worker-controlled economy have a pretty big problem to tackle.

As I see it, to address any of these questions we have to start with our intentions. What is our intention and our commitment? Are we just trying to buy the cheapest and do most convenient thing, or are we committed to a larger vision? How can we balance that commitment with our own survival as businesses? And isn't our own survival pretty deeply tied to that commitment?

I was talking with Mike Nee of Isthmus Engineering at the NCBA conference, and when an NCBA rep asked him why he was in a cooperative, he responded, "because 28 heads are better than one." Well, we have several thousand heads in the worker cooperative community alone, and thousands more in the larger cooperative economy. It seems to me that if we apply these heads to just one part of the problem with the creativity and perspicacity we're known for, we can't help but set something exciting in motion.

As just one example of the possibilities, Jenny Silverman of Red Sun Press is starting a conversation at the Madison member meeting about ways we can support one another with a commitment to purchase from cooperatives where possible. It's a sort of "BUY UNION" idea for worker cooperatives. Join us for the discussion - both in person in Madison and here on the Internets - as we get down to big problems and big dreams.

-Melissa