The Transformative Potential of a Union-Coop Alliance

The Transformative Potential of a Union-Coop Alliance

The following is an audio excerpt and transcript from a point raised by Kali Akuno from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Escaping Corporate Capture.”

Kali Akuno: One of the things, why this [pension investing] interests me so much, and how we’ve been trying to go about making an impact in this world, is fundamentally by pushing for broad union–cooperative alliances and initiatives.

One of the particular angles by which we’ve always pursued that is Cooperation Jackson is really trying to convince, in particular, many of the trade unions about controlling their investments and controlling their pensions and redirecting that towards cooperative development, so that we won’t have to face certain kinds of standard market-oriented return rates if structured in a particular way by drawing upon those resources. And this could be a potential way by which unions increase their density and membership, but also their particular leverage points within sectors of the economy for more bargaining power, just at a basic level.

But a critical piece of this has always been centered on, in order to tackle that we’re going to have to do some major [work] and get them and broader social forces in various communities to tackle this pension piece. Because, if you look at public workers, employees, and things of that nature, they make up a huge amount of the endowments that folks have in a lot of these states.

But we don’t control it, so we’re going to have to first get ourselves organized in such a way that people see the strategic value—folks who are placed in this relationship—and then make the democratic push to seize those resources back and put them back in our democratic control.

So for me, the opportunity is the aspiration, and one that I think is increasing, because there are a lot of instances where these two, which—if you look at it, I would argue—co-ops and trade unions as they exist in the United States, they’re really, historically, two sides of the same coin. But they kind of got disconnected and disjointed by how unions were formally kind of recognized in this in this country and then segmented in such a way where they can’t act in solidarity. Or, they can’t engage in political coordination or activities, at least in a concerted form, which then blocked and removed them from doing certain types of organizing outside of maybe certain kinds of mutual aid benefits for their members.

But we want to circumvent that and say, no, we need to be working together in concert. And we need to be reinvesting in our own communities, and not just relying upon the corporations to provide jobs, but for us to start thinking about how do we actually meet the needs of our own communities?