Co-op Hour Mutual Aid Series:
Hear from worker cooperative voices about what it takes to create sustainable solutions to the perennial economic crisis that only works for 1% of the population. For many, the crisis of the pandemic comes on top of many other crises of debt, rights, exclusion, inequality, low wages, etc. With all the challenges that a democratic process brings, worker cooperatives have been spaces to help revert the exploitation of the ruling class by engaging in practices to build agency, empowerment, and shared responsibility.
This session:
Collective distribution for small business survival
COVID-19 has pushed local businesses to not only seize the means of production, but of distribution. Earlier this year, as supply chains broke down in urban and rural communities alike, became unreliable, or became an essential new avenue of doing business, cooperatives mobilized quickly to not only support their individual businesses, but to create local systems for distributing goods, enabling small businesses to keep up sales during the pandemic. People have long turned toward cooperatives in times of economic decline – learn from New Day Distribution Cooperative about how they have swiftly leveraged their relationships to survive in 2020.
This series is a co-production of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and Democracy At Work Institute.
