Well, coming from a historically marginalized and oppressed community,
we've seen time and time again, city after city, state after state, all these
incentives of bringing in companies, like you say, that just extract from the
people and exploit our people. We have talents, we have skills, and we
have our own needs. And so we want to change and shift our focus and paradigm. We're
at the stage now capitalism, like look, they're not bringing in quality jobs.
Anywhere. You all in New York I think will be catching a whiff of that, and
soon, with some new developments. And so our thing is, like look, nobody's coming
to save us. What can we do ourselves with the resources and the skills that we
have to transform our own situation? So workers getting together, trying to
create, you know, avenues of sustenance for themselves to make a little bit of money
here and there to sustain themselves, improve their own quality of life, that's
what we're about. You know, not trying to wait for somebody else to come with some
great new jobs and new ideas but starting with the things that are within
our ability to do and reaching out to allies and say 'hey support us in this
effort and endeavor'. And we're going to create the jobs and substance that we
need with our own, with our own hands. And for us there's a political piece to this.
We do see ourselves as on a project of trying to build socialism from the
bottom up, and worker coops being a vehicle to do that based upon their
democratic nature both in terms of planning, management, execution, and a
division of whatever is gained, and how that's distributed to to those who've
done that labor and put in their time and effort. So it'll be the workers
themselves who build this and who reap whatever benefits it has instead of a
group of investors maybe thousands of miles away- Somebody sitting here in New York City
Figuring out a way to - that's right. You know your story reminds me of how I explain what
probably is the most successful worker co-op in the world:
Mondragon Corporation in Spain. There's a story they tell if you go and visit them,
which I did, and they say back in 1956 there was this priest in this northern
part of Spain named father Arizmendi. And he made a
famous speech to his little Catholic parish that he was the the priest at. And
he said, 'if we wait for people to come in here and give us a job we'll all die of
old age before it happens'. So everybody laughs and he says, 'So the only thing for
us to do is not to wait. We'll be our own boss. We'll set it up'. And with six
workers, six, in this medium-sized town of Mondragon in the north of Spain, they set
up this corporation which today has a 100,000 workers and is one of
the most successful worker co-ops. It's actually a family of a 200 plus worker
co-ops. So in a sense, it sounds to me like you are following, in some sense, in those
footsteps. You are trying to apply here - Oh, very explicitly. Mondragon has been a driving force behind a lot of
our thinking, going back over almost 30 years that we've known about Mondragon.
And many people within our network have gone to visit over the years. So we've
taken a lot of examples and a lot of lessons from Mondragon. You know, one
of our key things that we borrow from them is, you know, this is not
heaven and we are not angels. Because, you know, it's challenging to do this type of
work, as you know. As the old saying, "As long as there's two being human beings on the
planet there's gonna be politics". So, you know, you you have to deal with all the
different types of conflicts and things that emerge. It's not easy but they've,
you know, I think blazed a path. Absolutely we are trying to follow, learn
from- You know, we have to adapt to our own conditions, which were doing, but very
explicitly we draw from Mondragon, always have.