Can worker-owned businesses, innovative affordable housing practices and other cooperative efforts decrease economic inequality? A local co-op incubator is holding a national event here this weekend to explore those possibilities.
Co-op Cincy, formerly known as the Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative, will bring more than 200 cooperative workers, business leaders and community and labor organizers to the Queen City for its “Liberating Our Futures Together: Building the Cooperative Ecosystem” symposium Nov. 15 and 16.
The event will include sessions about practical steps toward starting and managing worker-owned cooperatives, insight into renter equity models for affordable housing that Co-op Cincy has deployed here, business succession strategies that result in worker ownership and more.
“The symposium offers a look at what’s happening on the ground to establish integrated networks of worker-owned, unionized businesses,” a news release for the event reads. “It exposes people to proven innovative models to reduce inequality and poverty. Participants will discuss best practices, union co-op management, financing, training, the power of the union co-op model, and how to build an economy that works for all.”
Speakers at the event will include Harvard University Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson, Humberto Montes de Oca, a Mexican electrical union leader who will speak about a worker-owned utility co-op that employs 2,000 people there, and Ibon Zugasti, international projects manager for Mondragon, a 60-year-old cooperative system that employs roughly 70,000 people in Spain via more than 100 co-op businesses.
Co-op Cincy, a nonprofit, was founded in 2010 and has since launched five union co-ops, including Our Harvest, a two-farm food hub, Sustainergy, an energy retrofitting company, and Renting Parnterships, a renter equity housing initiative. The group works to establish co-ops following a model developed in 2009 by Mondragon and North America’s United Steelworkers union, in which unionized worker-owners democratically run their workplaces via a general assembly that elects a board of directors from among its members.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 12, 2019.