As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Nowhere does that ring more loudly true than in the aisles of every Walmart store. Always low prices, yes – but at what cost?

There are, unfortunately, two inconvenient truths about the dollars you’ve supposedly saving from having elected the world’s largest retailer over Joe’s little store just down the street. First off, what you don’t pay, someone else is paying for. And secondly, the actual price you pay is much higher than what your receipt tells you.

I’m aware that the slogan I mentioned earlier is outdated. The irony was not lost when, in 2007, the company swapped it for the rather idealistically sounding “Save Money, Live Better” – a far cry from the everyday reality facing the average Walmart employee in the United States. Making an average hourly wage of $8.81 an hour, or about $18,300 a year working full-time, is hardly the way to live better. It’s only slightly over a third of a living wage for an adult with one child. 

That’s why Walmart isn’t quite as cheap as you’d think – because much of what you’re not paying at the cashier ends up getting paid for through your taxes. It’s estimated that every Walmart store in America costs citizens $1.7 million in welfare benefits such as food stamps. Taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the retailer for its failure to pay employees a living wage.

Abby Martin outlines Walmart’s horrible treatment of employees and destruction of the planet on Breaking the Set:

Why Walmart is an Economic Death Star

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Amazingly, Walmart could afford to give all of its employees a 50 percent raise without even touching its bottom line – but it chooses not to. And why does it choose to perpetrate the countless other assaults on its outsourced workforce, female employees and the environment? The answer’s simple: profit maximization.

We’ve all heard of corporate social responsibility. Be it sincere or mere corporate whitewashing, the “triple bottom line” of economic, social and environmental sustainability surely fares better than the single-minded focus on profit that prevails under the current global economic order.

The existing objective, profit maximization, is exactly what it sounds like: putting profits above all else, be it workers’ right to “live better”, the planet’s capacity to sustain human activity, worker and consumer health and safety, economic stability, or human lives. This reckless pursuit of profit is why taxpayers are propping up large corporations that make obscene profits in the meantime.

It’s why 1100 Bangladeshi workers, many of them making garments sold at Walmart, lost their lives when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed due to blatant disregard for building safety on the part of the companies it supplied (Walmart still refuses to sign an international agreement that would ensure worker safety in its sweatshops).

It’s why General Electric, Toshiba and Hitachi did nothing about the flaws in their nuclear reactors at Fukushima that caused them to melt down in 2011, despite knowing for decades that they were unsafe.

It’s why there is still no vaccine for ebola despite over 2000 deaths at the time of writing – because there’s no money to be made out of it. Or why corporate tax evasion through loopholes and tax havens costs the United States some $300 billion every year.

It’s why governments, on behalf of their grossly bloated financial sectors, are negotiating a secretive international financial treaty that further deregulates global finance known as the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). 

And so on. What these failures of the capitalist system, or what neoliberal economists term “market failure”, share is a common root in the unwillingness on the part of businesses to fully account for their costs. Taxpayers pay the price for Walmart’s refusal to adequately pay its own workers. The manufacturers of the Fukushima nuclear plants, unwilling to dish out the money to fix their inherent design flaws, unleashed a public health disaster that threatens to get worse. Global finance triggered the Great Recession through their own risky but rewarding behaviour and want to do it all over again.

The very nature of business needs to change if humanity is to avoid yet more Rana Plazas, Fukushimas and Great Recessions, and if it is to ever overcome ebola, tax evasion and corporate welfare. We need to move away from the predatory capitalist “I want it all” ethos and towards new business models that account for all costs rather than leaving them for others to pay. This is not financially impossible, and there’s no reason why such a model can’t be financially self-sustaining. But it’s only when business owners and executives start to acknowledge their responsibility to really help the rest of society to “live better” rather than taking more and more for themselves will that model be possible.

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Top Five Worst Corporations for US Workers

Abby Martin calls out the corporations that refuse to pay their workers a living wage, despite posting record profits and generously compensating their CEOs.

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Written by Ming Chun Tang; image by Flickr user Jim

The sit-down strike by General Motors workers in the winter of 1936-37 was one of the galvanizing events in U.S. labor history. Similarly, the efforts of the primarily African-American autoworkers of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the other RUM’s sparked the resurgence of rank and file militancy in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. In more recent years, the New Directions caucus and Soldiers of Solidarity carried on the radical tradition in the United Automobile Workers.

Gregg Shotwell was active in both New Directions and SOS for much of his 30 years working at General Motors during which time the UAW’s rolls fell from1.5 million members to 382,513. He published Live Bait and Ammo, a boisterous newsletter that regularly skewered management as well as official union passivity. Often hilarious, always biting and sometimes depressing, Live Bait and Ammo documented the devastating impact the collaboration between automakers and the UAW has had on workers in the factories.

Haymarket Books published a collection of Shotwell’s Live Bait and Ammo in Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream. In this interview, Shotwell talks about the onslaught of auto management, the decline of the UAW and the efforts of autoworkers to resist both.

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MR: What was the situation in the auto industry and in the UAW when you began as an autoworker in 1979?

GS: It was at that time American auto companies first started to experience serious competition from foreign automakers and they weren’t prepared for the contest. US consumers demanded fuel efficient vehicles and the American auto companies took advantage of the opportunity to upgrade their products by laying off hundreds of thousands of auto workers. In the best of times the companies took all the credit for success but when times got tough they put all the blame on workers and then proceeded to design some of the most notorious failures in auto history. Ralph Nader pilloried the Corvair but it didn’t take Consumer Reports to bury the Vega, the Pinto, and the Gremlin beneath the irredeemable crust of US car history.

In the Eighties GM, Ford, and Chrysler were obsolete manufacturing enterprises. Rather than retool and revamp to make more competitive products, the companies took advantage of the situation to attack the UAW and blame poor quality and lackluster production on workers. The companies never relinquished what we called “paragraph 8″ in the UAW-GM contract, or “management’s right to manage.” That is, management reserved the right not only to hire and fire but to design both the product and the means of production. Publicly, workers bore the brunt of the blame for GM’s failure, but on the inside, pencil pushers made all the decisions.

In 1981, we started producing valve lifters for Toyota and the first batch we shipped was returned for inferior quality. Toyota taught GM how to produce first time quality products at our plant and I suspect at other GM plants as well. It wasn’t magic. They simply raised the bar.

For its part, the UAW responded to the crisis of foreign competition by promoting hatred of brothers and sisters in other countries and encouraging UAW members to identify with the bosses.

MR: Were you involved in the union right from the start?

GS: No. My initial response to the sensory assault of auto production —the noise, the smell, the relentless pressure to work faster and faster— was to drink alcohol. I wasn’t alone but the addiction kept me undercover. It wasn’t until I quit drinking that I began to get involved in the union. I needed to feel integrated in the workplace and getting active in the union helped me to feel like I was a part of a larger and more meaningful organization. I never would have believed it was the beginning of the end for the UAW.

MR: In Autoworkers Under the Gun, you talk about how workers had far more control of the shop floor 30+ years ago than now. Can you elaborate on that?

GS: Automation and lean production methods, which are an intensification of Taylorism, have successfully sped up and dumbed down the jobs. In the Seventies, auto production required a lot more people power. Our sheer numbers gave us a greater sense of influence on the job and in society at large. Workers had more control over the production and pace of the work because manufacturing depended more on workers’ knowledge, skills, and muscle.

Today, everything is automated, computerized, and heavily monitored. As a result human labor is devalued and workers feel less important. Thirty years ago, we also had a union culture that advocated confrontation rather than cooperation with the boss. There was a clear demarcation between union and management. In the Eighties, management attempted to blur that difference and the UAW went along with this ridiculous idea that the boss was your friend rather than someone who wanted you to work harder for less. It’s been a painful history lesson and one that UAW President Bob King has failed to acknowledge despite the overwhelming evidence that concessions and cooperation do not save jobs.

In my early years, whenever management would start to crack down, we retaliated by slowing down production. The bosses learned quickly that if they wanted to meet production goals, the best way to do that was to treat the people who did the work with respect. If I was running production and the boss gave me a hard time, I would create a problem with the machine and write it up for a job setter, who in turn would shut it down and write it up for a skilled tradesman. When I told him the boss was on my back he would ask, “How long do you want it down?” This wasn’t something that we organized, it was a part of the shop floor culture. We agreed never to do someone else’s job, we had clear job definitions or work rules and we adamantly refused to violate our contract. Today, the UAW promotes speed up, multi-tasking, and job definitions or work rules which are so broad they are worthless. Workers today enjoy less autonomy because they have less support from the official union and a shop floor culture of cooperation rather than confrontation with management.

MR: Why, after so many years where “cooperation” with management has been so devastating to autoworkers, is the UAW pushing it harder than ever?

GS: Because they are getting paid by the company. The Big Three (GM, Ford, Chrysler) set up separate tax-exempt nonprofit corporations which are managed by the company and the union but financed solely by the companies. It’s a 501-c. As a result, salaries for UAW International appointees are subsidized by the company. The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) requires that unions make all financial records available to the membership, but these corporations are separate legal entities.

More generally, many unions, not the just the UAW, have lost their bearings. Union leaders don’t have a world view independent of the corporations they serve. The institution of Labor is infected with opportunists who claim we can cure the afflictions of capitalism with a heavier dose of capitalism. As a result, union leaders advocate that we work harder for less and help the companies eliminate jobs. Competition between workers and cooperation with bosses is an anti-union policy, but it makes perfect sense to union leaders who have more in common with bosses than workers.

MR: You belong to an organization of rank and file autoworkers called Soldiers of Solidarity. What is SOS and what kind of work does it do?

GS: SOS was a spontaneous reaction to an urgent crisis. Delphi hired bankruptcy specialist Steve Miller, who threatened to cut our wages 66 percent, eliminate pensions, reduce benefits, and sell or close all but five Delphi plants. The UAW didn’t respond so I called for a meeting of rank and file UAW members to discuss what we should do to defend ourselves. Autoworkers and retirees from five states representing all the major automakers and suppliers came. They recognized that Delphi was the lead domino and if they took us down, the other companies would follow suit.

We agreed on the name Soldiers of Solidarity at our third meeting because we felt like we were engaged in a battle; we felt our struggle was not limited to the UAW or Delphi; the solution was solidarity; and the acronym was a distress signal. Initially, we decided not to focus on elections and internal union disputes because of the urgency of the crisis. A number of us had been in New Directions and we didn’t want workers to think our idea of a fight back was electoral. We wanted to focus on direct action and work to rule. We understood that we were fighting the company, a cooperative union, and a capitalist government but we kept the focus on the company to attract as many workers as possible. We knew how ruthless the Administrative Caucus that controls the UAW could be but the Administrative Caucus was at the bargaining table and most members were pinning their hopes on them. As it turned out, the Administrative Caucus didn’t waste any time attacking us anyway.

As a result, SOS was forced into behaving like an underground movement. We were in the shadows dismantling the apparatus of profit and threatening to take down the whole edifice of partnership if our demands weren’t met. I said in one of my newsletters, “Management likes to throw money at problems. Let’s give them a big problem to throw money at.” We did. As a result, GM and Delphi, started meeting the primary needs of a majority of the members — safe pensions, early retirement, subsidized wages and transfers back to GM. Workers made choices based on what was best for their families and resistance deflated. The downside to this guerilla defense was that we lacked a structure that could sustain us after the immediate crisis ended. SOS continued to advocate direct action but our numbers dwindled as so many chose retirement.

MR: How widespread is rank and file resistance to the union’s collaboration with the companies?

GS: There is a lot of dissatisfaction but actual resistance is minimal at this point. I think we have to bear in mind how fragile workers feel in the current economy. The government hasn’t done anything to help create jobs, organize unions, or improve opportunities for working class people. Whenever there is a crisis for unions or working people in general, Obama is Missing In Action. If unemployment benefits are extended, it is always at the expense of the working class as a whole like with the extension of the Bush tax cuts. I do believe, however, that momentum is building, primarily because the new generation of autoworkers doesn’t have the golden handcuffs: pension and health care in retirement.

The previous generation was bound to the company and the union by the promise of retirement after thirty years. Young autoworkers don’t have anything to look forward to except a weekly paycheck and they are grossly underpaid for the work they perform. They have no reason to feel loyal to the company or the union that stabbed them in the back. As this new generation takes control — and they will soon gain a majority in the UAW — I believe we will see more resistance to the union’s collaboration with the bosses.

MR: The 2009 auto bailout was much talked about, yet next to nothing was said in the mainstream media about how it furthered the attack on autoworkers. At the same time, autoworkers were said to be grudgingly accepting of the deal because the alternative was unemployment. Can you talk about this?

GS: The 2009 bailout was, from a UAW member’s perspective, extortion. We were told to accept it or lose everything we ever worked for. The general public was given the impression that UAW members were treated like prima donnas because they didn’t lose their pensions, but none of the CEOs who engineered the calculated catastrophe lost their pensions. For some reason, Americans are led to believe that workers don’t deserve contracts but no CEO in the nation will work without a contract replete with a golden parachute. Tell an auto supplier the contract is canceled and see how many parts you get on Monday. Contracts are the way capitalism works for capitalists, but workers aren’t included in the legal equation.

Companies take the value generated by labor, transport it overseas, and then act like their pockets are empty. Labor has a legitimate lien on Capital. Companies routinely charge the customer more for the cost of doing business, as in the deferred compensation of a pension, and then spend the extra money on themselves rather than honor the contractual commitment. Bankruptcy is a business plan and a growing industry in the USA.

It seems outrageous that the government would give the companies so much money and not require a job program making worthwhile energy efficient products. Instead, the government gets company stock which binds the public to Wall Street rather than autoworkers, their natural allies, and union members get a contract that makes non-union an attractive option. Not only did new hires get half pay, they lost pension and health care in retirement — about 66 percent of fair compensation. Then the extortion contract included a no-strike clause during the next set of negotiations which rendered collective bargaining a charade. The only people who had the stomach to watch 2011 auto negotiations were Right to Work for Less advocates and day traders making bets on the side. In 2011 traditional workers didn’t get a raise in their pensions for the first time since 1953. Their pensions were effectively frozen and, considering how quickly new hires will be the dominant force in the union, I don’t expect they will ever see a raise. But no one seems to notice the effect of a frozen pension on the future prospects of a workforce that can’t conceivably work the assembly line until they are 66 or older. The Obama administration revealed its anti-union underbelly. Every reason that a non-union worker had to join the UAW is gone. Now Bob King is pretending that workers want the UAW so they can have a voice in the workplace. Whose voice? A UAW nepotistical appointee who thinks the boss is his bosom buddy?

MR: In your book you write, “The institutions – corporate, government, union – that brokered the self-destructive contrivance called neoliberalism are obsolete and need to be replaced.” Union obsolescence seems to suggest that horizontal alliances between rank and file workers from different industries, as well as with community activists such as we saw to some extent in the Occupy phenomenon, is more the way to go than, say, the seemingly Sisyphean task of reforming a union or unions as a whole. What are your thoughts about this?

GS: The so-called social contract has been broken and yes, I do believe that rank and file workers will have to decide whether the unions can be reformed, or if it would be better to organize a new union, one that included all workers. But that’s a vision and I am not a visionary.

The building blocks of a revitalized labor movement are not in the sky. The building blocks are work units. In my experience struggle, not elections, is the fulcrum of change. Elections reinforce learned helplessness. Direct action reinforces the power that workers have over production and services and thus, profit. Likewise, demonstrations which may be inspiring and may be an organizing, agitating and educating tool are easily tolerated. Look how quickly and efficiently the government developed tactics to corral and disperse the Occupy protests. I agree with Joe Burns, author of Reviving the Strike that the best way to organize is with a strike. But I believe in this era of precarious employment the best strike method is on the inside.

The trouble with traditional strikes today is that union bureaucrats don’t play to win. They use strikes to soften resistance and encourage compromise with management. One of the best examples of this was the UAW strike against American Axle in 2008, a time when American Axle was eager to reduce inventory. I felt that workers were set up to lose.

Whether one chooses to reform the union or start a new union, one must first organize workers. People work to support families, not ideologies. If you want to organize a workplace, fight the boss and win. Even a small victory is a building block. I was notorious for my criticism of the UAW. I called the bureaucrats the Rollover Caucus, the Concession Caucus, and eventually just the Con Caucus. But that didn’t prevent me from working within the union, not only by attending meetings but by winning elected positions on the Local Executive Board and working on committees like Education and Civil Rights and By-Laws.

These positions gave me access to knowledge and opportunities for new allegiances and influence. I think we have to use every tool in the box. Which reminds me of my favorite line by Ani DiFranco: “Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right.” In the end I believe workers find that solidarity is not an ideal; solidarity is a practical solution to an urgent need.

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Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author who has written for Z Magazine, The Indypendent, Counterpunch and many other publications. He can be reached at [email protected].

MEDIA ROOTS – United Front Against Austerity (UFAA) is a grassroots coalition with the bold initiative and hopefully the tenacity to inspire a generation increasingly strapped with debt and a diminishing political voice. Lead by such notables as author Webster G. Tarpley, an initial conference is scheduled tomorrow in New York City and will feature input from other activists such as Cindy Sheehan.

The event is sure to invoke a desperately needed review from where previous recent social movements have left off. The assembly intends to build on the advances that have already occurred in Wisconsin with insightful decisions, specific demands, and mobilized action. It will be streamed live and mechanisms are in place for online participants to also share their voice.

Dr. Tarpley, a lifelong historical philosopher, drafted an opinion piece earlier this week on how the establishment political parties (Republicans and Democrats) are succeeding in demeaning the vast majority of the American electorate – the middle and lower classes.

“There is today a consensus between Wall Street and Washington that draconian austerity must be imposed in the United States. This will be the case no matter whether Obama or Romney wins the upcoming election,” predicts the author of George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, a 1992 publication about the senior past president. Dr. Tarpley continues, “the financiers of lower Manhattan are thus ignoring the evidence offered by these other countries showing that austerity policies reduce employment, lower production, cause severe mass privation, introduce powerful elements of chaos into society, and actually increase the government budget deficits in future years — meaning that austerity fails even in its own terms.”

Because it is already ensured that virtually nothing will change upon the outcome of this year’s presidential election, this coalition is wasting no time to act. After all, effective social movements are not established overnight and time may actually be even more limited than the dwindling value of today’s dollar.

For more information on the UFAA conference, be sure to check out againstausterity.org and tune in to the live feed starting Saturday, October 27 at noon Eastern.

Oskar Mosco for Media Roots.

Image provided by United Front Against Austerity.

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PRESS TV – Observers have noted that Obama and Biden, in their three debates held so far with their Republican rivals, have never mentioned the traditional Democratic Party platform planks of raising the minimum wage; preserving the funding of the food stamp program (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program of the US Department Of Agriculture) which keeps some 50 million Americans alive; maintaining and extending unemployment insurance payments to the jobless; or making it easier for trade unions to organize. 

This failure by Obama and Biden to even mention these concerns of lower middle class working people and the working poor does not represent astute politics. On the one hand, it is true that the Democratic Party has almost entirely lost its earlier base of support among white male workers. But the Democratic Party still has a sizable constituency of working women, often single mothers, who have no college education. These are the so-called “waitress moms,” for whom the economic issues are very important. But the Democratic Party ignores them, since promises of this type might get in the way of delivering the austerity demanded by Wall Street. 

To read Dr. Tarpley’s article in its entirety, check out Republicans, Democrats attacking Americans in bipartisan push for austerity at PressTV.ir.

UNITE HERE– As University of California Regents prepare to vote for another tuition hike next week, students and workers gathered July 8, to protest drastic higher education cuts, while corporations like Disney win generous tax breaks.

Students and workers targeted their protest at media CEO Monica Lozano, who is the publisher of La Opinion newspaper and a University of California Regent. As a UC Regent, Lozano has approved seven recent tuition hikes, while simultaneously serving on the Disney corporate board, which last year won millions in potential tax breaks.

One such tax break, an Enterprise Zone distinction in Anaheim, could bring Disney more than $1 million in tax savings just by hiring 100 employees throughout the year, including student summer hires.

Students called on Lozano to reject the latest UC tuition hike. UC tuition and fees will top $11,000 per year this fall.

“As a UC Regent Monica Lozano is assisting in the devastation of California higher education, while getting paid by Disney, which is getting huge tax breaks,” said Joe Silva, a UCLA student. “Disney made $4.4 billion in net profit last year — does it really need a tax break?”

Disney paid Lozano $246,911 in 2010 to serve on its board.

Gov. Jerry Brown had proposed the repeal of the Enterprise Zone program, which costs the state roughly $465 million a year in tax revenue, but doesn’t create jobs, according to a study by the nonpartisan California Budget Project.  However, in the final budget deal passed on June 28, the Enterprise Zone tax breaks were left in tact, while $650 million was cut from the UC system, $650 million cut from CSU system and $400 million cut from community colleges.

Read more about Students, Workers Protest Higher Ed Cuts, Corporate Profits

© 2011 Unite Here! Local 11

Photo by Flickr user Jim DeLa

MEDIA ROOTS- As the current US labor system trembles with insecurity, leaking the salaries, benefits and rights of workers across the country, people are increasingly wondering what alternatives there are.

In the Bay Area, one doesn’t have to venture far before coming across a local favorite, the Arizmendi Bakeries. Backed by a development and support cooperative, the Arizmendi Association has 6 cooperative bakeries that specialize in morning pastries, artisan breads and gourmet pizza. Together, these bakeries comprise one of the most successful worker owned associations in the region.

Although cooperatives can take many different shapes, they share a fundamental characteristic: the workers are the ultimate decision-making body. Each worker is a shareholder in the business with one vote in every decision that guides the organization. At Arizmendi, every employee is part owner in the bakery with an equal share in the company.

Tiffany Martinez was a labor rights activist and union organizer before becoming a worker owner of the Emeryville Bakery four years ago.  Despite her years of involvement fighting for worker empowerment, Tiffany was never taught about cooperatives.

“I felt cheated, in the same way that I wished my high school counselors told me about trade school… I didn’t even know about unions until I got to college, which I think is this huge failure in our education system. Young people don’t have exposure to all the different options after high school.”

A co-worker at the union Tiffany worked for told her about Arizmendi. Feeling over worked and underpaid, Tiffany decided to pursue a job opening at the bakery. Following the interview process at Arizmendi – a sit down with the cooperative’s hiring committee and then a tryout in the bakery– she was hired.

“Having dedicated so much of my time as an adult to workers rights I felt really conflicted about having to do anything else or something that contradicted what I had been working for. But the cooperative is about worker’s rights too, so I threw myself into it.”

Arizmendi grew out of a study group in 1995. The group was studying thriving cooperatives in Spain, the Basque region and Italy, to find out why they were not similarly flourishing in the United States.

The study found that cooperatives in other parts of the world used their success to build new cooperatives, while co-ops in the United States were more scattered, without any kind of network to connect them.

“Learning to cooperate among cooperatives has been one of the keys to our success,” explains Tim Huet, a participant in the ’95 study group and member of the Arizmendi Development and Support Cooperative. It is this branch of the Arizmendi Association that coordinates the development of new cooperatives while providing ongoing support to the existing bakeries.

The successful Cheeseboard Collective, which became a cooperative in 1971, presented an excellent, local model from which to build future cooperatives. When approached by the study group, the Cheeseboard Collective agreed to lend its name, recipes and facilities to train people in starting a network of new local bakeries. In this way, Arizmendi was born in 1997, opening its first bakery named after Father Jose María Arizmendiarrieta, the founder of the Mondragón cooperative movement in Basque Country.

The Development and Support Cooperative of the Arizmendi Association is the closest thing in the organization to a manager insofar as it creates the business plan for the cooperatives, finds the funding to start them, recruits and trains the new worker-owners and provides ongoing education and legal support to the bakeries.

Everyone hired at the cooperative goes through an extensive business education program before becoming a worker owner. Tim is a part of this training process.

“We teach them how to read financial sheets and make decisions from that. We teach them conflict resolution because in our co-ops, there are no bosses. There are no managers. There is no one to solve your conflicts so we teach people how to work things out directly.”

The worker-owners are also taught the legal responsibilities of being an owner and director of a cooperative corporation, alongside the history and principles of cooperatives. Learning how to facilitate decision-making rooted in consensus among owners is another important element of running the business.

No one co-op is the same – individual worker-owners decide the shape their cooperative will take, and the differences between the bakeries tend to exist in how much the co-ops delegate decisions and tasks.

“Some cooperatives tend toward making all of their decisions together in one room. Other cooperatives tend to have more work groups that have authority in certain areas as long as they don’t contradict the overall mission,” explains Tim.

The beauty of cooperatives like Arizmendi is the flexibility granted to their workers. As the business changes over time and in size, so can the structures by which the worker owners decide to operate.

However, one consistency across all of the bakeries is the central tenet that every worker has one vote for every decision made. Thumbs up are a go, thumbs to the side are a stand aside vote, and thumbs down are a block. To maintain accountability and clarity in the decision-making process, stand aside and block votes have to explain their positions.

Arizmendi Emeryville delegates decisions among different committees to keep the many tasks at hand from becoming too many or too tedious, and every worker-owner is expected to be involved. Some committee positions are elected like the Policy Council, the Hiring Committee and the Collective Evaluation Committee. Examples of the volunteer committees include those that deal with finance and marketing, the details of production, and the maintenance and repairs of the bakery property.

Currently, one of the most challenging decisions facing the Emeryville cooperative is how to increase their prices in a global climate of rising food costs.  It is a delicate and difficult line to navigate between sustaining the bakery and worker-owners while still keeping the food accessible to the community.

Over the years, Arizmendi has met great success with its business model. In 2010, a year in which jobs loss was high and few new businesses were created, Arizmendi opened two more bakeries employing 30 plus people. Furthermore, Arizmendi has sparked inspiration in other parts of the world and for those who are moved to create cooperatives of their own, Arizmendi has the policy of spending at least an hour with whoever contacts them seeking support and advice.

For both Tim and Tiffany however, the greatest successes of the Arizmendi Cooperative Association are interpersonal.

“A lot of times when we hire people they’ve never been asked how they want their work place to run, they’ve never been asked to make decisions about their pay. So it’s a profoundly altering experience in that case,” explains Tim. “A lot of time people gain skills about conflict resolution with each other and how to run meetings and how to run a business, that then spill over into other aspects of their lives – their family lives, their community lives.”

On a personal level, Tiffany says that the amount of time, energy and personal investment that she has put in the bakery is something she was never compelled to do when she was working for someone else or as a union organizer.

“I’ve never felt taken advantage of or pushed to do something that I couldn’t do – that I didn’t have the training or support to do.”

Tiffany described a lesson she received in humility after years of working the same shift. “I thought I knew everything and there wasn’t anything I could be told that I didn’t know. But that was so arrogant. I realized I have to learn how to listen to people when they have feedback about my stuff. I started practicing taking feedback again and not taking it personally- it’s not about me, it’s about the food that we are putting out together.

We fight like brothers and sisters sometimes. There are a lot of family dynamics there. You know, sometimes we bring our A-game and sometimes we don’t. What I’ve experienced in the last couple years is that we call each other out when we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing and that is really hard because how do you give someone feedback in a way that is going to help them out and not shut them down? That is something that we have all been learning about.”

If she were to leave the bakery, Tiffany said she would go to another worker-owned cooperative because she could no longer imagine working for a boss or a system in which she has no say.

“Look at what is happening in Wisconsin right now. We have to have more structures where people are going to be respected and have a say over what is happening in their workplace. It just seems so logical. Why would you go into a work structure that at its core isn’t committed to making your life better? So that you can have sick time off, so you can be with your kids and have healthcare. So that there aren’t unilateral changes to your shift that affect you and your family.”

The stability of her job at Arizmendi and having coworkers that care enough to shift schedules and work to accommodate the changes in their colleagues lives is simply something Tiffany had never experienced elsewhere. “I may not always agree with my coworkers but I love them and I can’t say that about my previous work experiences.”

The central aim of the Arizmendi Cooperative Association is to create a truly democratic economy – one in which everyone has a say in the decisions that affect them on a day-to-day basis. The biggest challenges to achieving this goal, explains Tim, are raising money (they do not take government or foundation grant money) and more importantly, living in a society that actually teaches people to be powerless.

“I think our political institutions, and most institutions in our society, train us to be undemocratic and they actually want us to accept a role that is not democratic. They have no interest in incorporating new or democratic skills in folks. The idea is that you will follow orders and so they have no interest in having work places where people learn democracy. They actually train people in this kind of deal where you are going to be an employee and take orders and the benefit of that is you don’t have any responsibility. You can complain all you want about the politicians, you get to complain about your bosses all the time and because you have no power, you have no responsibility.

We often encounter people who have been through enculturation into that and part of our job is to teach them that you can’t just be complaining anymore – you are the ones in power, you have to take responsibility to change things.”

Some worker-owners of Arizmendi have not previously had much input in their lives but now have a voice in arguably the most consuming aspect of life – how they earn a living. They come from a diversity of backgrounds, entering into a collective partnership as owners of their own business, feeding the community, and providing inspiration to others.

Arizmendi believes that the solution to the present broken system is to create an every day democracy.

“If people are working in authoritarian work environments, are going to authoritarian schools then they are not going to have the democratic skills they need to run a democratic society on a city, state or national level,” Tim explained. “So, I really think we need to give people that experience in the day to day – how you come together with your coworkers about how you run your business – and that will lead to reform on a national or regional level.”

Written by Alicia Roldan

Photos by Abby Martin