Green DrinksBelow is most of the short presentation I gave at Green Drinks Edmonton about ERC and the power of cooperatives! We are using a hybrid model that combines the best parts of worker coops and consumer coops. I think it’s a really exciting model because it gives real power and autonomy to the workers who run the business, and also provides opportunities for consumer members to be involved and included in decision-making if that’s something they’re interested in. I think it’s really important for consumers and workers to have some level of power and control over the way that they consume and the work that they do and that is so often not the case in our society. Our collective goals are to strengthen community, provide environmentally friendly and socially responsible products to members and non-member patrons, provide safe, empowering employment to our workers, and prioritize alternative and democratic workplace strategies. We want to lead by example, providing alternatives to grocery oligarchs, traditional exploitative business structures, and profit-driven business models that will always put profits before everything else, including our own quality of life on planet Earth. I think that in this stage of capitalism, and general descent into a dystopian nightmare situation, people are really yearning for alternatives to the “Big Guys” that are taking over the world and influencing in some way everything we do, and we want our coop to be a beacon of hope for people. We want to prove that workers don’t need owners or bosses and that we can democratically run our workplaces and the economy. I also think it just feels so much better to purchase goods from someone you know, and where you know the profits will be put to good use. I can promise you that none of us are going to be buying a yacht with our paychecks! Speaking of yacht owners, let’s pretend that the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future paid a little visit to our friend Jeff Bezos and successfully guilted him into converting Amazon into a worker coop. Amazon made about 76 and a half billion dollars in profit just this past year, and that should belong to the workers who clock in every day and keep things running. And Amazon could totally still be this huge, powerful company, but Bezos wouldn’t have $177 billion right now, and he wouldn’t be a supervillain, he would just be a regular worker like the rest of us. My point is that cooperatives don’t have to be small grassroots organizations and they could have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of members. Coops can be a tool to push back against the current economic system that is destroying our planet, and can be used as a stepping stone towards something better.
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