Collective Courage
Описание книги
In Collective Courage , Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.
Отрывок из книги
COLLECTIVE COURAGE
COURAGE
.....
Evidence suggests that cooperatives increase productivity and create value, particularly those owned and controlled by employees. Levine and Tyson, for example, surveyed the research and found that “both participation and ownership have positive effects on productivity” (1990, 202). Vanek (1971) similarly emphasizes the importance of and efficiencies gained from active participation (in ownership, which leads to participation in control and management) and equitable income sharing. Levine and Tyson summarize the research and conclude that cooperatives create superior working conditions. Spear finds that worker co-ops are more flexible than traditional companies, and have “less inflation and less unemployment in downturns which produces a positive macroeconomic effect” (2000, 522). Logue and Yates have found more recently that worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms have survival rates that equal or surpass those of conventional firms, and produce a combination of conventional and nontraditional economic returns. They “place more emphasis on job security for employee-members and employees’ family members, pay competitive wages (or slightly better than their sector), provide additional variable income through profit-sharing, dividends or bonuses, and offer better fringe benefits” (2005, ix). In addition, cooperatives often support community programs and facilities such as schools and health clinics. Cooperatives tend to promote increased civic engagement (see, for example, Gordon Nembhard 2000, 2002, 2004b; Gordon Nembhard and Blasingame 2002, 2006), helping to empower communities to create new economic structures and infrastructure that meet their myriad needs, based on their particularities and experiences. Small, democratically governed cooperatives in particular, whose members are often low-income, work to broaden and democratize business and home ownership, and allow members to pool resources and skills to enable them to be owners and to achieve economies of scale and higher efficiencies.
Birchall and Ketilson (2009) document both the resilience of the cooperative business model and the ways that cooperatives and credit unions have weathered financial and economic crises over the past hundred years or more. Cooperative business ownership, cooperative financial institutions, and co-op housing have been solutions to past economic challenges, such as debt peonage under Jim Crow, and lack of food, affordable housing, and financial services during the Great Depression; and they can solve current and continuing economic challenges such as the redevelopment of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and recovery after the housing crisis of 2007–9 and the current “Great Recession.”5
.....