An Infrastructure for Dignity: Building a Cooperative Economy in Cincinnati

Zeke Coleman’s story says a lot about his worker cooperative, Our Harvest — part of Co-op Cincy’s growing network of worker and community owned businesses. But it also says a lot about America:

Before [here] I worked at a chicken processing plant. I got a raise one or two times, at fifty cents, and that was it. I didn’t receive another raise for the next four years. [It’s] different here, because I feel like I’m treated like a person, and it’s not a big corporation where the CEO is making millions and millions and millions while the workers are getting peanuts.

Coleman is a worker-owner and the food hub manager at Our Harvest, a worker co-op founded by Co-op Cincy in 2012. Growing healthy food across two urban farms, and sourcing more from community food system projects, Our Harvest connects local growers and producers to customers, creating good jobs along the way.

And they’re expanding — in March, they acquired a six-decade old greenhouse located up the road, giving its workers a chance to join their cooperative when a longtime owner decided to retire. That deal relied on over a million dollars of capital, which Co-op Cincy was able to access thanks to its membership in Seed Commons — a national cooperative that channels non-extractive investments through its 39 member organizations into worker-owned businesses like Our Harvest.

Worker co-ops, union jobs

The workers at Our Harvest have something besides cooperative ownership supporting them — they’re also members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW). Co-op Cincy, in fact, got its start as the Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative. While the name has changed, their commitment to combining the promise of worker ownership with the power of organized labor has not.

Kristen Barker, Co-op Cincy co-founder, explains how the union organizers and social justice activists who started the project were inspired by the worker cooperative model: “We were doing all kinds of policy work, things to uproot injustices. That’s all incredibly important. But it’s also important to build the alternative.”

A small study group on the history of Mondragon, the legendary complex of cooperatives in the Basque country, grew into the Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative in 2011, with the goal of creating union jobs in cooperatively-owned businesses.

Green jobs, worker power

Flequer Vera, co-founder of the Sustainergy worker co-op, knows first-hand about exploitation in the American workplace. Immigrating here in 2001, he spent seven years undocumented, working brutal 12 hour days doing construction for just $65 a day, and was swept into faith and labor organizing as he struggled to prevent his own deportation:

Being undocumented really shaped me, because while it was literally the worst stage of my life — you live in fear every day that you will be deported, separated from your family — it really gave me this sense of solidarity, and helped me see the world better. […] 

The idea behind Sustainergy was simple — create green jobs improving home energy efficiency, at prices working class people could afford, lowering their bills and cutting emissions in the process. But as an undercapitalized startup, this wasn’t an easy road — Flequer worked for two years without being able to pay himself, for instance.  

But Sustainergy worked, and is making a difference for its worker-owners, like Vera’s colleague Yovany, another first generation immigrant. When Yovany’s car was stolen, the co-op’s revolving loan fund helped him avoid extractive payday lenders. With the share of profits distributed to worker-owners, on top of wages, now averaging $7 — $10K a year, Yovany could make a down payment on his first house. 

The union structure is working as well — with open book management at the company, and a weekly meeting to help workers build financial literacy, everyone at Sustainergy knows exactly how much money is coming in and where it’s going.  

Barker underscores that all of this got started without a ready source of financing, let alone the non-extractive financing offered by Seed Commons, as she puts it, “the coolest kind of capital.” Now, when a co-op is getting off the ground, there’s a stream of resources to support them and help them scale. Sustainergy, for instance, has been able to expand into higher-margin solar installation services, which in turn has raised wages across the cooperative.

This is the kind of just transition we need, more urgently than ever. And what Sustainergy offers is popular, even in places you wouldn’t expect. Unlike multiracial, reliably Democratic Cincinnati, the suburbs across the Ohio river in Northern Kentucky get really red, and really white, really quickly. 

Vera recalls his first foray there as a brown-skinned Latin American man, and the “open, pure racism.” But he did sales visits anyway — and as much as conservatives nationally may bluster about the environment, a big energy bill is the same big energy bill, no matter who you voted for. 

And when Vera gets a chance to explain their business model, he often finds unlikely champions: “I tell them that we are a co-op. They love the idea that we’re not looking for a free lunch. We set our wages, control our jobs — this is what we do and they love it!”

Eyes on the prize

Co-op Cincy has created or supported over 150 jobs at worker-owned companies, with over $7.4 million invested in the local cooperative economy. It’s an impressive start—and one that has been made possible by access to non-extractive capital as a member of Seed Commons.

But their ambition is even more impressive. Barker explains that they are now starting to think strategically about the next half century, estimating that if they can grow the democratically-controlled economy in the Cincinnati area by just 6 percent each year, by 2072 they will have built a complex of cooperative and worker-owned jobs 80,000 people strong — about the size of the Mondragon experiment that inspired them. 

“Ultimately, we want to see a real shift in wealth inequality, the elimination of poverty,” Barker said. “That’s what we’re going for.” 

This piece was adapted from a longer case study of Co-op Cincy, which you can find at seedcommons.org.