The following article written by Laura Flanders was published in August 2014 in Yes! magazine. But it’s still worthy of a read for those who haven’t seen it:
Before Zaida Ramos joined Cooperative Home Care Associates, she was raising her daughter on public assistance, shuttling between dead-end office jobs, and not making ends meet. “I earned in a week what my family spent in a day,” she recalled.
After 17 years as a home health aide at Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the largest worker-owned co-op in the United States, Ramos recently celebrated her daughter’s college graduation. She’s paying half of her son’s tuition at a Catholic school, and she’s a worker-owner in a business where she enjoys flexible hours, steady earnings, health and dental insurance, plus an annual share in the profits. She’s not rich, she says, “but I’m financially independent. I belong to a union, and I have a chance to make a difference.”
Can worker-owned businesses lift families out of poverty? “They did mine,” Ramos said. Should other low-income New Yorkers get involved in co-ops? She says, “Go for it.”
New York City is going—in a big way—for worker-owned cooperatives. Inspired by the model of CHCA and prodded by a new network of co-op members and enthusiasts, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council allocated $1.2 million to support worker cooperatives in 2015’s budget. According to the Democracy at Work Institute, New York’s investment in co-ops is the largest by any U.S. city government to date.
Cooperatives are businesses owned and controlled by their members on the basis of one member, one vote. Given enough time, worker-owned cooperatives tend to increase wages and improve working conditions, and advocates say a local co-op generally stays where it’s founded and acts as a leadership-building force.
“There is no greater medicine for apathy and feelings of living on the edges of society than to see your own work and your voice make a difference,” says a report on co-ops by the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies in New York. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Obama's Chamberlain impersonation fuels new progressive uprising:
Summer of 2009, Democratic lawmakers were swarmed by phone callers and town hall attendees by the then-nascent teabagger movement, furious at the creeping socialism of a government-run health insurance option. You see, Republicans were so worried that the government-run program would be so efficient, effective, and affordable that it would drive the private insurers out of business. And their teabagger allies rose up in unison to defeat this great threat while progressives, burned by serial Democratic capitulation, essentially sat disgusted on the sidelines.
Democratic leaders ignored signs of an intensity gap in 2010, and proceeded to further capitulation and inaction on issue after issue important to base Democrats. In December 2009, I literally had David Axelrod argue with me in the Green Room of ABC News' This Week that the base would come home because — I shit you not — Obama would score big points for negotiating the START treaty. That's when I knew we were doomed in 2010.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin provides a pundit roundup in absentia. One part “lol nothing matters,” and one part “SS,DD.” Joan McCarter notes GOP fissures over ACA repeal, Ohio’s attack on abortion, the IRS impeachment flop and the “for Trump only” legal waiver for Mattis.
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