GREENSAW Blog: Second-guessing the co-op

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Second-guessing the co-op

I guess it would be a red flag if Beeg, among others, didn’t immediately take issue with the pragmatism of an employee-owned co-op. Sure, you can pull it off in the talcum-white bell jar of Martha’s Vineyard, the mountains of New Hampshire, the hills of San Francisco. But Philly? C’mon man. Built on the shoulders of industry, proud of how far we stray from the actual meaning of our Greek name (City of Brotherly Love), this a city of grit, of the last man standing. If you don’t know the time, don’t bother asking. Just get a goddamn watch.
Nope, ain’t nothin' cooperative going on around here, buddy. Leave the collectives to the Puritans up in Boston, the co-ops to the hippies on the west coast. We’re here in the 215 doing what we do best: living in a dirty city, protecting ourselves from the police, trying not to get parking tickets.
And ESOPs? Well, we all saw how that worked with Enron.

If you ever find yourself considering starting a business in a city that charges a “business privilege” tax, you’re crazy. If you can negotiate this craziness with the help of meds/yoga/drugs what have you, then I counsel you to employ the services of Terence Buckley aka. Beeg. He just about kicks ass, slicing through the bureaucratic and seemingly impenetrable scar tissue that has enveloped City Hall. He’s also a cynic. As T.S. Eliott avows, a cynic is just a hurt romantic. I could flesh this out further, but not without Beeg, a bottle of bourbon, and his consent.
In any case he keeps an eye on the ticks and chiggers crawling in the fur of the dirty underbelly of any creature we wake up. One of his remarkable and valuable skills is coming up with hypothetical situations where we could get put in a tough situation – and thus looking out for our best interest.
“This took me five minutes to think of – it might take them seven. Yeah, you want to set up a co-op and head out to Alaska? Why don’t you go ahead fuck yourself while you're at it? Yeah -- go out to Alaska, sleep with the polar bears, have a wild affair with an Inuit, freeze your nuts off, and while you're at it, go fuck yourself. Yeah, we’ll buy your tools, we’ll even take your truck, but paying shares for your company, when you’re not gonna even be around? You shitting me? We’ll just start our own goddamn company.”
You see what I mean, both about Beeg, and about Philly. He comes up with worst-case scenario thought experiments, expressed in a disturbing and profane vernacular.
Except here’s the thing: it’s not working out that way. Even for Beeg, who, fascinated with the concept of starting Philadelphia’s first employee-owned co-op, has been generous with his time and expertise. And not for anyone at Greensaw.
We have scheduled, for the weekend of January 28th, a retreat in northern Pennsylvania. There we will don our powdered wigs (a gesture of the Romantic age in-and-of-itself, started by King Louis XIII when he was losing his hair) apply our beauty marks, and unleash our quills on what will become Philadelphia’s first employee-owned co-op constitution. Of course it would be even cooler if we could take a field trip ten blocks south to Independence Hall and have it all go down there as the Japanese tourists snap pics -- but I’m not sure the National Park Service would be down.

Since we mentioned it let’s take a closer look at Enron. As John Abrams observes, not hyperbolically, “the Enron debacle and others like it are only the terrible perversion of a good thing, like rape is to sex.” There you have it.
At Enron thousands of employees lost $1.3 billion set aside in 401ks. In fact, only a very few had any say in the direction of company – which worked to the advantage of those in charge. These people at the top overstated earnings, encouraging employees to invest further into a company that was already tanking. They then, brilliantly, transferred the maintenance of the 401ks to a separate company, which required the money to be frozen for a month’s time. During this month they sold off their own stocks, made a killing, while ordinary Americans got the shaft, as did the reputation of ESOPS.
So much for that.
As far as co-ops go, there is no question that the entire structure has its foundation in trust. As John Abrams pointed out in an email, the owners at South Mountain, while he was down in Boston taking care of his wife, could very well have voted him out of the company.
“But they won’t,” he wrote.
From whence this trust?
It reminds me, if you can forgive the stretch, of the (near) penultimate line of Jonathan Franzen’s very good book “Freedom.” Spoiler alert, if you have intentions of reading it.
The book tells the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, and their two children. Patty cheats on Walter with his best friend, the transgression is discovered, a separation ensues. Walter goes to live in the wilds of Minnesota, while Patty does her best to cope, but mourns. After six years, she goes up to Minnesota, and sits on in the cold on Walter’s porch, until she is just about dead of hypothermia. Furious, he takes her in, they undress, and he curls up behind her to save her life. Full of rage, anxious for her life, mildly narrow-minded to start, Walter can’t figure out what to do. Patty, intuitively feeling his unease, whispers, “It’s me. It’s just me.”
Rest areas, birthdays, missed birthdays, scraped knees, dead cats, cracks in the plaster, victorious dinners, undercooked meals underpin both simple assertions. I mean life histories. These lines are signifiers to entire existences, over the course of which trust has been built.
And this – this is what sets us apart. Tenuous, yes. Adamantium-strong, yes. A living, walking paradox? Yes. Something to put my life’s work in the hands of?
Yes.

posted by Brendan Jones @ 5:10 PM

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A blog addressing the importance of re-using material, and building with existing structures. A strong emphasis on architectural salvage, as well as the people that make the difficult work possible.

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