[Ben] This bill is very simple.
It would just modify the incorporation law
in the state of Rhode Island to include
workers cooperatives as a form of business.
Any legislators that you talk to. 
They want to know what are the tax implications?
This  bill would have no impact on the taxes law
and it would really just recognize a group of people who have come together
to form a business as equal worker owners and
provide a basic structure for that type of business.
[Raul]  That is correct.
And the reason for that is because if there's no structure we go back the same idea of owning a
business which is the person at the top makes all the decisions for everybody
for everybody in the middle.
So by recognizing actually cooperatives
you are consciously creating a structure where everybody is part of the decision making.
Everybody has the, you know, one worker one vote.
Everybody has the same
rights responsibilities
and share everything within the co-operative.
So because of our a lack of our experience in the legislative process.
That is why we sought help from RI Center for Justice and Jobs with Justice.
RI Center for Justice are the ones who drafted the bill
based on information from other states
across the United States
that had passed similar legislation.
Obviously, it was reviewed by many other lawyers in those particular states.
After that, we had the final draft.
Then we decided to move it 
to the process to find a sponsor,
find somebody to champion for that bill.
Find somebody who's going to move forward
with the exact idea that we
had at the beginning because we wanted to have cooperative with social justice mentality structure.
[Ben]  Okay, so that is sort of what the bill is and the history of the bill.
One of the things that I would like to talk about is the history of cooperatives in Rhode Island.
So maybe for the long history, the far and away history,
Richard, do you have any ...
[Richard]  Well, the history of cooperatives in Rhode Island remains to be written.
So, it's a good project for student at one of the universities to take on.
We do know that the first African-American Mutual Aid Society
in the country was founded in a Newport in 1780.
In the late 19th century, the Knights of Labor, in the 1880s,
formed cooperatives in Olneyville and Pawtucket.
There was actually a childcare cooperative in one of the mills in Olneyville.
But, I think and I don't know this,
this is a project for someone,
that when Unionism came in the 20th century that became the main form
of improving the lives of working people and co-operativism kind of took a back seat.
If you look around the world it's mostly in places that have a
strong Anarchist tradition:  Spain, Argentina, Quebec, France.
I was just in France studying actually what they call
social and solidarity economy for a couple months
and in Brittany, the region of France that I was in,
about 15% of all enterprises are social or solidarity enterprises.
They are mutual associations.
They are cooperatives. They are social enterprises.
They're socially oriented foundations.
So there are parts of the world where this is quite prevalent and, again,
it's mostly places that have an an Anarchist Union tradition.
That's not what we had.
We had a Craft Union tradition here.
So I think the reason that people don't know so much about this is really historical.
In the 1990s, I had done some work with the United Latino workers committee
on temporary workers, at the time that that was becoming a real issue.
There was some talk about doing work on cooperatives then and so I'm really excited to see
this coming out of Fuerza Laboral which is the right place for it to come out of.
[Ben]  So I wondered if maybe we should go
around the table and talk about some of the places around the world that you've
had experiences with, what worker cooperatives were like there,
what work was like there, and maybe even if there's any similarity between what you saw
there and in Rhode Island
and If there's challenges or opportunities that go along with those similarities.
Do you want to start, Heiny?
[Heiny]  Well, I would like to put this  in a little context
of why we got to this point about worker coops.
It started when we started (Fuerza Laboral) 11 years ago
we needed to battle poverty within our community, poverty being a huge problem.
We needed to battle the different actions of bad employers against the immigrant working class.
The focus of (Fuerza Laboral) is to 
eradicate labor exploitation,
the biggest source of these bad actors are
temp agencies and sub contractors.
During (Fuerza Laboral’s) growth we witnessed so many repeating examples
of temp agencies who were cheating the system and were always finding ways to exploit our community.
The reason we decided to form cooperatives was to give an answer to these problems.
We realized that the temp agencies and the subcontractors
were the middle men and that (the community)
were the ones who do the work yet we barely make minimum wage and without any benefits.
For these reasons (Fuerza Laboral) decided in 2011 to develop cooperatives because
we had the capabilities to create cooperatives.
We were born and raised in the cooperative culture in our countries.
This is how we confront crisis.
[Richard]  One of the more important movements in
the last 20 years was the recovered
factory movement in Argentina which
inspired a group called the Working World which now operates in Argentina,
Nicaragua and New York City, basically
providing finance for cooperatives.
But we don't have to go that far.
In Cleveland, there is the Evergreen
Cooperative Group which works with
foundations and social entrepreneurial
groups and has founded now a number of
cooperatives in poor neighborhoods in Cleveland.
In Vermont, the Vermont Center for Employee Ownership
gets some money from the state and works
with enterprises. Now, this state is going
to miss the boat on something.
The proposed law is a fine law and
it ought to be adopted tomorrow.
There's really not an issue.
But it's not enough, right?
So we're going through 
a generational shift now which a lot of
baby boomers are going to age out of
their businesses and they're going to
want to sell their businesses.
There are places that give employees the right of
first refusal and, if the workers want to
form a cooperative and buy that
business, they get the first right to buy the business.
We give away, and, let's call it what it is.
We give away millions of dollars
to big enterprises in this state
all the time but we can't give just a
little to people in the neighborhoods
who want to start democratically owned enterprises.
So, there are examples in the United States.
The ones I know the most
about are in Ohio and in Vermont.
I mean we can go to France. We can go to
Argentina. We can go to Mexico.
There are many examples. But there are examples
here, and I think it would be too bad if
because of a lack of vision or
understanding of what actually goes on.
I was struck by the discussion of
subcontracting which which is absolutely correct.
I was struck by the discussion
of rights consciousness
which sometimes gets in the way.
These were the themes of the book
that I published 10 years ago, 
Are Worker Rights Human Rights?
So we can look all over the world,
but we have examples in the United States.
And here, sometimes, we tend to be
a little bit too inward looking and
we're going to miss the boat
on this generational change.
There's an opportunity to create a social economy
here now and starting with this law
is great but we need to move beyond too.
[Heiny] At the end of 2013 we received funds for this project,
we have knocked on many doors and gone many places to talk about cooperatives
and what we encountered was a lack of knowledge and
education on cooperative economics.
[Richard] Just to support that,
I was at a conference last week with
woman named Jessica Gordon Nembhard,
who is the leading scholar of African American
cooperative development in the United States,
and she was asked what is the most important
thing for a cooperative to be successful?
She said continuous education and training.
And that education training is in two ways...
you know some business knowledge....
a little accounting is not going to hurt anybody
but also continuous education
on the principles of economic
democracy and worker cooperativism.
Because if the people don't have that,
then this doesn't work.
[Pavel] That's one of things..
We are trying to get this information
to change the matrix in our knowledge,
to create an vision of how to manage business.
How can we do business.
Because, we came from this labor culture
to being employee,
to being subordinates, to being obedient.
[Ben] I mean, it's in the culture.
[Pavel] Yeah, because the Colonialism
educates to us to obey.
To follow their rules.
We need to break the mold and think differently.
Because we need to empower the people who has this
vision of business to grow.
Just last week in UMass,
a student, works in this factory.
He is very concerned about how can the
workers support this employer
to compete with other industries.
I asked him, do you know how many profits he wants
in the year about this business?
"well so, so, yeah."
And how is the cost of the investment in the works?
"less than half of the enterprise."
There is your solution.
Take away the employer,
make a cooperative.
Take the enterprise and develop the power of workers
and then you can compete.
Because, if you don't have this guy taking big profit
and you can compete.
We have the expertise.
We do the work every single day in our enterprises.
But, we don't know how to manage the things.
[Ben] I think how many businesses,
local businesses, its been said to be not competitive anymore.
Maybe they could be competitive if they
were structured differently.
[Pavel] In the roofing work, in Framingham,  people says the owner of the company
takes 80% of the profit.
If you take away this guy, and create a cooperative,
you can compete with better prices even
for the people who you are working for.
And do this kind of business more decently.
For your conscious.
For people to hire you to develop this kind of work.
The work is not too expensive.
The profits make things expensive.
This savage way to get profits.
Greed in the middle makes this insane.
[Ben]  There's I think also something that I heard about recently.
You know the games that we play,
let's say when we are kids.
Probably one of the most popular board games in the West or in United States, for sure,
is Monopoly.
[Pavel]  I don't like it!
[Ben]   You win by it by consuming everything.
[Pavel]   Greedy.
[Ben] But the interesting thing is that not all board games are like that.
I'm not a board game an expert but my understanding is
Continental Europe, the German style of
board games, actually is inherently cooperative.
You have to form alliances
with the other people playing the board game.
And you can't win unless you actually cooperate.
So it teaches people to think differently from when you're a little child.
And, this goes into another question that I wanted to bring up because some of the reactions that
we've gotten from when talking about
the bill especially today, from
legislators, have been very interesting and very telling.
Recently one of the reactions when when we were giving
testimony on on the bill was ...will ...
there....was a concern from one of the legislators that
.... will workers know what they're getting into when they go into a worker co-op.
I'm paraphrasing here but they said....
you know owners take on a lot of responsibility.
They have a lot of education about how to manage a business.
The fear of this person was that .....
workers wouldn't know what they
were getting into and suddenly faced with actually having to run the business
themselves would be overwhelmed.
What thoughts do we all have on that?
[Heiny]  To me thats ignorance.
Part of the reason Fuerza Laboral created the legislation
and one of our goals as the POWER Network is to formalize cooperatives in RI.
The first steps are the legislation, then to spread education, and investment.
Its not something we invented
we are using the experiences from our countries
so we can help our communities lift themselves up.
Also working to get the state to educate, train, invest, and create the structure to form cooperatives.
Not only as an individual cooperatives,
all cooperatives need to work together
in support networks with broader social justice in mind.
This relationship (the POWER Network)
is meant to cross sectors,
the public sector, the private sector,
and we need to support each other.
[Richard]  It's the same thing people say...
well how could women know how to run a business.
Well, women have been running businesses forever.
They're called households ...you know ...and they do it with a child on each hip.
So it's kind of a crazy thing to say.
On the other hand,
this problem of the Colonialism being in people's heads is a real problem.
I work on some of these issues in Cuba where people are used to the state doing everything
And the notion, now, that people can have
their own businesses and run them democratically
is a very difficult idea for people.
So it's a very difficult idea for people here to.
It's not for everybody.
If people just want to have a job and go home and watch sports on TV this is not for them.
If they're interested in community, democracy, participation,
having some control over the conditions of your own life, it's a lot of work but its for you.
So you know I don't think anyone's saying that every enterprise needs to be a cooperative.
But, I think what we are saying is there are people who come out of traditions where
they know how to do this.
And, if the state would at least just get out of the way....
a little help would be nice.
But, if you can't help, just let us do our thing.
[Pavel]  Step aside.
[Ben]  There's lot of organization going on right now
to resist various political movements that people are intimidated or scared by the direction of the country.
I think one of the lessons people can learn from that is we won't always have control over
who gets an office,
in state office, in federal office, whatever,
but one of the ways you can have
more control over your own life,
and what is happening to the people around you
is in the workplace, if it is a cooperative.
But if you just go, if you're just an employee and you collect a check
at the end of every two weeks,
and go home and, like you say, to watch TV,
you have to rely more on your politicians and so on and you don't have you may have to go
and march and call and stuff,
if they're doing things that you don't like.
But, if you actually have a role in the workplace,
your workplace becomes a place
of organization and power as well.
Just like traditional businesses are actually very powerful in our political system.
We all know that.
But, if it's a democratically controlled  workplace,
more people have a
say in how that power is used.
[Raul]  Well, I think one of the things that is worth knowing,  maybe go back to where we gave up,
workers gave up
the right to collective bargaining.
So, when we lost what we gave up, those opportunities will allow for states to pass
the right-to-work laws.
And, in so doing, they took away our power.
We gave away our power.
And so what we're trying to do with the cooperatives,
is to bring that back.
You know. We are looking for the right to collectively bargain for better working conditions.
[Pavel]   You know, most people think this wage theft thing affects more immigrant people.
We have some data in Massachusetts.
About 80 percent of the people to suffer wage theft
are white people
And they don't do anything about these things,
because in a cultural way
this is not correct to complain.
People who work for the government,
there is a big theft.
Taking the wages of the people
and the people don't complain.
We need to think how we are educating.
This perception of these immigration thing is because we speaking loud.
[Ben]  Anyone who's worked in an office in a white collar job knows the pressure.
How we are made to work longer and longer hours
for the same wage.  That's wage theft.
[Pavel]   Because, I'm sorry to say that the white people are forming to be quiet, to be obedient.
Sorry
[Audience] When I think about cooperatives
and why I came today.
I'm thinking about what next.
It's also the intersection of that work is no longer be...
The work of today will no longer be.
Like we we are training our young people to do things that will no longer going to exist because of technology.
If we don't shift the understanding of what
does it means to build power,
to build a political space of our own
and understand what a strategy,
like a cooperative strategy.
Thats larger right.
Your talking about the solidarity economy.
If we're not shifting and helping folks understand that,
that its not just about this one thing
It's the larger sense today that our work is no longer.
So you talk about Uber. That's not our work.
But if we don't figure out how to shift our frameworks
on how we think about that
we are going to loose out even greater.
It has to be how do we intersect
to help think about what we actually
want to have for our future and help
people build a vision around what is possible.
[Pavel]    One of the most biggest and I don't know how to call in English, in proper way......lies....that people say
....the power people say, the child and the young people
are the future.
We need to provide them in the future about conditions.
It's a lie.
Because live today, they need today,
conditions to grow through their development.
They need today opportunities and we are thinking in the future
to provide in the future something.  It's a lie.
It's a very comfortable lie 
to do nothing at all about these things.
We need to grow together, create opportunities for the child these young people,
because if we don't do that we're going to lose it.
We can create cooperatives for everything you think in something and you can create a cooperative.
Education, Housing, Food Distribution, Farming.....
anything, because it's community power.
You can get together profits from that
and grow together.
[Heiny]    Fuerza Laboral in 10 years wants to create
4 cooperatives,
each coop will be formed by 12 people
so that benefits 48 people and their families
and this is power which can become political power to demand change.
If we do not become aware of the power
we have as a people
then we will always be controlled
and strangled by the economy.
Basically what a cooperative is, is a way to organize to take control of our own recourses
which is why we are called the POWER Network.
We are the owners of our own recourses, we have to empower ourselves and
we need to find people who represent our needs,
we cant continue to be represented badly,
we are creating a new economy and
we have to be in control of this.
[Ben]   You mentioned Uber,
which is something we talk a lot about in the
Democracy At Work Providence group
because it is so interesting as a
recent model of sorts.
It's a good example of a lot of new types of gig economies
The funny thing is it hasn't been around for very long and, already,
the programmers in the Bay Area,
it's come out, that there's a lot of
really bad fraud and exploitation of workers within the computer science engineers.
What's interesting about that is we were always told, we're talking about myths and lies,
that are told to children. You're sort of told that
if you become an engineer,
if you become a computer programmer
you're going to have a good job.
you're going to have a good opportunity.
Well it turns out that might not be so true.
Then, on the other side of their business, when you look at the drivers, there's two categories of drivers.
Some people who are just doing it sporadically.  Occasionally doing
some driving here and there to make a little extra money and that's what it was always sold as.
It's like you can just drive a couple of hours a week and pick up money to go drinking on the weekend or something, whatever you know
Then there is this other group who does the bulk of the actual hours of driving and it's
basically a full-time job for those people and those people don't have the
protections that taxi drivers have.
They're doing the same job as taxi drivers do still or try to compete for but they don't have the same protections.
The riders don't have the same protection in the cars and so on.
So it's it's interesting when you talk about these new models.
Worker cooperatives are a new model for a lot of people but they offer a lot of
protections and benefits and growth and stake for the employees to actually gain equity in something.
Whereas these other models strip you of any equity whatsoever.
You're just a contractor, basically,
[Heiny]  For example, Uber,
the person who drives needs to finance themselves,
we are giving up our power for a few dollars
and at the end we don’t get anything out of it.
They (Uber) are the ones who benefit the most.
Whats interesting here is that this money becomes globalized,
there is no reinvestment in our community, our state, our country.
You have no idea where that money is going.
[Pavel]  The corporate world has a lot of profits, and right now they don't even live and
pay taxes in the United States.
That's global business moving to Singapore, Bahamas,
to other places and don't pay taxes and don't provide the money to grow this country.
That's the thing and that's why we
are trying to change even in the language we are speaking about how
we can build these cooperatives.
Because we need to speak this language in capitalism words.
That's why we are trying to create enterprises from the worker's.
As IWCC, I may need some water to wash my mouth.
We are trying to create a corporate from cooperatives.
That's interesting.
Because we need the money from all cooperatives together to grow and
develop other business.
Because in this country, the corporate world has rights.
We can provide these rights to our members.
Thats interesting.
Thats new.
We can speak Capitalism but in other understandings.
I need to speak slow these things because we need to understand what I am talking about.
[Ben]  I think that is really good.
There's nothing set in stone
that says that our democracy has to protect rights for these certain types of businesses
and not cooperative businesses.
[Pavel]   ...and let me finish. Thats the thing
We are trying to create a democratic process
in gender ways in our houses.
We need to create democracy first because if we don't create this democracy, we cannot create
our social enterprises.
We need to develop different ways to the relationship within us, between us.
We need to build and create democracy in our houses,
in our communities, in our organizations,
in our enterprises.
Then we can grow together.
Thank you very much
