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United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Conference, Stamford, CT March 25, 2012 Selected audio from plenary sessions and panel discussions

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Communities Adopt New Cooperative Models to Cope with High Unemployment

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Posted Sept. 14, 2011

Interview with Sarah vanGelder, co-founder and executive editor at Yes! Magazine, conducted by Scott Harris

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The official jobless rate in the U.S. hovers above 9 percent, with the real unemployment rate estimated to be as much as 16 percent. Those grim statistics translate to some 25 million Americans unemployed, underemployed or having given up looking for work. Unemployment is by far the most important issue for a large majority of Americans, but with the election of the GOP-controlled House of Representatives last November, the imposition of austerity measures to reduce the nation’s deficit has until recently been the Number One preoccupation in Washington.

And while many of the nation’s largest corporations are reporting record profits, the U.S. poverty rate increased to the highest level seen in two decades. A recent Census Bureau report found that median income fell 2.3 percent from 2009 to 2010, while the number of Americans without health insurance increased to nearly 50 million.

In the midst of this dismal economic environment, a new Do-It-Ourselves movement is emerging across the country, where communities are forming to create innovative and cooperative models for sustainable employment and alternative financing of small business enterprises. In a series of articles titled, “New Livelihoods: How We’re Building The Do-It Ourselves Economy,” just published in Yes! Magazine, people tell stories about how they created their own jobs with the help of neighbors who shared ideas, space and local buying power. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sarah van Gelder, co-founder and executive editor at YES! Magazine, who talks about this movement that’s creating new models for employment and redefining middle class values.

SARAH VAN GELDER: Going it alone isn't necessarily going to work. And so often, I think the message we get is, "If you're not doing well in this economy, it's your own fault. You didn't try hard enough for a job." Or, "You weren't talented enough to rise to the top." Well, it's not your own fault. The dynamics that are at work right now are that ordinary Americans have been losing out for decades. We've been seeing our wages stagnate. People made up for it by working lots of extra hours and by having more than one wage earner in a family. Our wages kept stagnating while more and more wealth was accumulating at the top, and so people made up for that by going deeper and deeper into debt. And now with this recession or depression on what you want to call it, those options are no longer there. The jobs aren't there for us to work the extra hours and we can't go further into debt because of what happened to housing prices and credit.

So people are really hurting. And yes, this issue looks at a lot of things that people are doing to make things work for themselves and their communities. And also, the kinds of changes that we need to come together around so that we can get the government to once again be working on behalf of ordinary people instead of large corporations.

I guess the starting point, the best place to start is at the neighborhood and community level, because that's where the jobs are created. Big corporations have actually reduced employment by 3 million jobs over the last decade. So the jobs are coming from small business and medium-size business and they're coming from local communities. So we ask the question, "What does it take to get those local economies functioning again so that people can get jobs?" And you know, there are no sort of silver bullets. There aren't any magic wands you can wave and suddenly you'll have millions of jobs in your local community or even thousands of jobs. But each community has its strength and if we focus on those strengths and we make sure to support our local businesses and buy from them instead of from the Walmarts or from the big box stores, buy from our local businesses.

If we look for ways to build on the institutions that are thriving -- for example, one of my favorite stories is from Cleveland, Ohio, which is known as a Rust Belt city which has had tremendous economic problems. And what they did is they look for where they have their strength, and they have their strength in a university and in a hospital and in a clinic. And "they," in this case, is local foundation and some local community groups. They looked for ways to build on those local strengths to create worker-owned cooperatives that could sell to those institutions. And now they have a worker-owned laundry that supplies laundry services to the hospital. They have a worker-owned solar company that rents the roofspace on the roof of the university and several other institutions and sells electricity to the university. And they're building a worker-owned greenhouse that will be growing massive amounts of local greens that can supply those institutions year-round with fresh, local produce.

So that's one of my favorite stories, because it shows what we can do in our own local communities, even the ones that are really hard hit by an ongoing economic crisis.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Sarah, how effective are approaches to creating your own jobs and sustaining your livelihood even in the midst of this horrible economy with things like job sharing and space sharing and cooperative efforts in general? How is that a healthy and effective approach?

SARAH VAN GELDER: I think one of the strengths of doing that is that (for) a lot of small businesses, or a lot of people who would like to start a small business, there's a lot of barriers. And one of them is the initial cost of getting going. So if you can do something like have an office space that's shared by a lot of different small-scale entrepreneurs, start-ups where they need that deskspace and they need Internet and they need some camaraderie and they need a place to get coffee, but Starbucks just isn't quite enough to set a workspace. Those kinds of things can help people get that first step up.

And an even stronger example, I think, is kitchen incubators. Because if you decide that you decide you have just the right salsa recipe and you could make salsa and sell it at the farmer's market or sell it to restaurants, well, you have to get your kitchen certified by the health department. And that's a big barrier for a lot of people who are just trying to start up.

So a number of communities have started kitchen incubators. It might be a church kitchen that gets certified by the health department and once its got that certification, and once you've got your food-handling license, you can go and try it out and see if you can make that recipe and see if you can make our business work.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Sarah, you talk about in the article the idea that these local movements, these local new models of economic development and economic survival also can contribute to the pressure that's needed from grassroots movements to make sure that government at the federal level is really doing what it's supposed to be doing to really help those in need, in terms of the legacy of the Great Depression where these social safety net programs where developed and now, they're under attack.

SARAH VAN GELDER: That's right. It's not as important as all the local economy building is. We also really do need our federal government to start working on behalf of us ordinary people and not so much on behalf of what Wall Street wants and what big corporations want.

As far as I can see, in U.S. history, the way that that happens is because people come together, form social movements of various kinds and insist on it.

For more information about YES! Magazine, visit http://www.yesmagazine.org.

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