| When workers take charge We Can Do It! | ||||
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 We Can Do It! In 2006, Latina immigrants in Brooklyn, N.Y. formed a housekeepers' co-op to avoid exploitation, according to Vanessa Bransburg, cooperative coordinator of the Center for Family Life. With the help of the community organization, 19 women from Mexico and the Dominican Republic formed We Can Do It!, or Si Se Puede!, a slogan used by organized workers in Latin American and California. "A lot of these people really had the entrepreneurial spirit, but a lot of them don't really have up to high school education, so they weren't able to get a traditional job," said Bransburg. "Instead of following somebody else's rules, they wanted to be the bosses." The Center acts as their agent, with 100% of the cleaning fees going to the workers, who pay $40 in monthly dues to cover marketing costs. The organization has spun off two other worker co-ops: Beyond Care, with 19 child care workers, and ?migr? Gourmet, a cooking collective. All the worker-owners have equal control over marketing and they develop their own relationships with their clients, said Bransburg. "With all of this happening, they've been able to withstand the recession and even grow in the last few months," she said.  Full Sail Brewing Co. Chief Executive Irene Firmat and her brewmaster husband James Emmerson converted their business, Full Sail Brewing in Hood River, Ore., to a worker-owned company in 1999. Firmat said they wanted to avoid being bought by a larger company and "incentivize the [47] people already working there." Now, 55 of the 90 workers are partial owners, and she said this arrangement has helped the company find ways to save money and increase profits in the face of a recession. Last year, when the brewery faced soaring commodity costs, she said that owners from different departments agreed to buy efficient new machines that saved on expensive raw materials. This year, the owners agreed to accept smaller margins and make new hires even as job cutting became rampant nationwide. "The decision to live out this time with smaller margins was supported by our investors -- our employees who were implementing this strategy and seeing results daily," she said. "I think it would have been far different if we had a more traditional ownership with disengaged investors just seeking shorter-term results." Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing  Isthmus Engineering in Madison, Wis. is a custom designer and builder of factory machines. The company was formed in 1980 and morphed into a worker-owned shop three years later. Ownership has since expanded to 28 "directors" who share democratic control, and this has helped company ride out the recession, said John Kessler, an engineer and one of four co-founders. Isthmus laid off two paid-by-the-hour workers earlier this year, but it still employs 20 non-owner assembly workers, he said. The directors have avoided further layoffs by agreeing to accept a lighter profit, and by juggling schedules between the machining, assembly and engineering departments. "As a worker-owned company, we can make the decisions to take work at a lesser margin in order to keep people," said Kessler. "We have reshuffled duties to keep the work that we do have from going out the door, while also spreading out the pain as much as possible."
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| Обновлено ( 23.09.2009 21:58 ) |