Janine Jackson interviewed Real News Network‘s Jaisal Noor about worker cooperatives for the June 11, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Covid laid bare a number of conflicts, hypocrisies and frank inequities that “normal times”—and corporate media—kept hidden (from some). Perhaps most depressing: The pandemic saw media openly suggesting that some workers could be both essential and expendable. Some faceless thing called “the economy” could demand that people return to work, but would not be responsible for protecting their lives and their health when they did. Other countries were guaranteeing wages while encouraging workers to stay home to protect their lives and those of others, but—Avert Your Eyes from those examples! Those models are not for us!
In the US, the economy simply had to restart, though it necessarily meant picking sides in a battle that one New York Times headline described as “Lives Versus Livelihoods.” A “moral trade-off,” the paper called it.
Well, important to maintaining the idea that such a trade-off is necessary is obscuring, erasing and denigrating other economic models. Jaisal Noor has been looking at co-op businesses, specifically during the pandemic. He’s senior reporter at the Real News Network. And he joins us now by phone from Baltimore. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jaisal Noor.
Jaisal Noor: It’s great to be back on.
JJ: Corporate media report the crises of corporate capitalism as flawed, and yet still the only game in town. They allow debate, but only up to a point: when you start asking questions about the structure.
And that’s why it’s so valuable to dig into other structures that exist. Co-ops are facts on the ground; you can’t say, “Well, if the workers were the owners, they would be lazy,” because there are real-world examples. So I just wanted to start you off by saying, what did you learn from this project on co-op workers, and, specifically, what did those workers tell you about their pandemic experience?
JN: Yeah, and I really appreciate the invitation to have this important conversation, because a lot of what I ended up doing was media analysis in this project.
Because before I started this project, I was reporting on how other businesses and institutions dealt with the pandemic. And you’re absolutely right: What workers were told, what the public was told, was that there was this choice: You can keep the economy going, or you can keep people safe; you can’t do both.
So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to look at how worker cooperatives responded to the pandemic. They’ve been around for decades, and fundamentally they work within the capitalist system, but their top priority isn’t profits. Now, they are businesses; they are for-profit businesses, they are seeking to make a profit, but because the workers are the owners, they’re not going to put profits in a higher importance over their lives.
That’s a deeply profound thing in our American society, where profit is God; where Jeff Bezos is God, where he gets thousands of these articles talking about how much his wealth has increased during the pandemic alone, and very few people are asking, “What cost does that come with? What social cost does it come with, to have this massive concentration of not only wealth, [but] power?”
So the amazing thing about cooperatives is that even though they are small businesses owned by workers—for the large part, that come from communities that don’t have a lot of wealth—most worker cooperatives in America (and I’m talking about, specifically, democratically controlled workplaces), are in frontline sectors, they are in service sectors: It’s low-wage work, it’s not going to generate massive amounts of wealth, but you can have a workplace with dignity, you can have profit-sharing, you can have a living wage. And these are all things we are told that you can’t have in America; you can’t have a profitable business while also protecting their workers.
JJ: Right
JN: And so, when these businesses were confronted with the same challenges other businesses were facing, where you had CEOs telling workers to go into the warehouse, no matter how many people were getting sick, ignoring—like in Amazon’s case—the thousands of workers that got sick, maybe the dozens that died.
When you have CEOs and managers making a decision, and they’re not accountable to the workers, they’re going to make very different decisions than democratic workplaces, where the workers can make their own decisions—can vote, debate and decide what is best for them and the business.
And it turns out that by taking those steps, your business has a better chance of succeeding. There’s reports of 100,000 small businesses closing because of the pandemic, and according to the figures and the numbers we have so far, what we know, worker cooperatives fared much, much better.
There are 60 worker cooperatives that work with a loan fund called Seed Commons, and none of them closed permanently due to the pandemic. The worker/owners at these cooperatives were able to work together. They still faced challenges, many of them had to close temporarily or had to pivot their business models, but they were able to stay open, they were less likely to lay off their workers, and they prioritized public safety, their workers’ safety and keeping their businesses sustainable.
That all goes to say that basically, what you’ve raised: This lie that we’ve been taught, that it’s profits and nothing else matters, is wrong. Even in our current society, even with this inequality, we can have successful businesses that exist, that pay a living wage, and that treat their workers with the respect they deserve.
And as you mentioned, these are the heroes, these are frontline workers that were.… There were placards and billboards created to “honor” them while they were still being given substandard wages, not given PPE, not given sick leave, and these are all things that work and co-ops provide.
JJ: I think part of the story that media tell is that it’s “business owners versus workers.” And yet, I’ve spoken to numerous business owners and small business owners who aren’t about that—as you’re just saying—and who recognize that, if their workers can buy food and buy clothing for their kids, they’re more likely to stay at the job; it’s all very simple, if you just think about it. And yet, we’re overcome with a narrative about a conflict between profitability and workers’ lives that doesn’t really exist. So in other words, it’s part of about who people listen to; it’s part of about who gets to speak in the media.
So I guess I just want to ask you, as a media person, as well as a person who’s been researching co-ops: What would be the translation? What could journalists do that would lift up this model, that would complicate the narratives that major news media are telling about the economy? What would the intervention of actually knowing about cooperative businesses, what could that do?
JN: So on a very simple level: One thing I was struck by when there were reports all across the country, I was looking at newscasts from local TV stations where they were talking about this “worker shortage,” and all the people they interviewed—and I watched dozens of these broadcasts—almost every single person they interviewed was a business owner, and in some cases, small business owners.
You know, you can talk to workers; you can talk to people that don’t want to work for low wages and put their lives on the line for a minimum wage and no benefits. On a simple level, talk to workers.
And if small businesses or restaurants are facing challenges in hiring workers, at this current time, find a local worker cooperative in your area, or any business that pays a living wage that has benefits, that has some type of profit-sharing or democratic control of their workplace; are they facing the same challenges? If not, then maybe you’re on to something.
What the workers told me is that it doesn’t feel like a job in a traditional sense—when someone is a master over you, over your work.
JJ: Right.
JN: When you are your own boss, when you get to create the job, you get to create the working conditions, and you get a share of the profit at the end of the day; that’s something that most jobs won’t offer.
And I think the biggest part of that is just bosses being unwilling to give over control, and thinking they know what’s best for their workers, what’s best for their business. And cooperatives prove that the people that are actually doing the work that the bosses and CEOs are profiting from—they actually know a little bit about what it takes to run this business. And having a say, and having power, can be transformative.
So yeah, so talk to workers, talk to worker/owners, talk to people in cooperatives, and see if their perspective is different than what CEOs are telling.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jaisal Noor. He’s senior reporter at the Real News Network. You can find their work at TRNN.com. Jaisal Noor, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JN: Thanks so much for having me.
The post ‘Having a Say Can Be Transformative’ appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2021-06-22T19:37:49+00:00) ‘Having a Say Can Be Transformative’. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/06/22/having-a-say-can-be-transformative/
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