The Promise of African American Worker Cooperatives by Stacey Sutton, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Urban Planning and Policy University of Illinois Chicago
Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D. Political Economist and Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development Department of Africana Studies, John Jay College, City University of New York
The African American cooperative movement is ascendent, although most people may be unaware of it. The 2008 financial crisis unmasked the chimera of economic security and upward mobility for the average worker in the United States. Consequently, it also fomented a swell of popular resistance to extreme inequality, capitalist exploitation, and the insidious conviction that “there is no alternative” to capitalism. The post-Great Recession economy and decade-long growth between 2009 and 2019—marked by record-low rates of unemployment, a soaring stock market, and inflated property values—catapulted some middle-class, mostly white families into economic security as they recouped wealth eroded by the financial and mortgage crisis. But the economic benefits of growth, much like the burdens of decline, were not equitably distributed. For the average Black and low-wage “essential” worker, the last decade amplified a conjuncture of crises long in the making. The incessant erosion of labor power, wage stagnation, insurmountable debt, and prolonged if not permanent detachment from the formal labor market were particularly deleterious for Black communities destabilized by “predatory inclusion” (Taylor, 2020), housing foreclosure, eviction, gentrification, and displacement. In some African American communities, even those hit hardest by the perniciousness of capitalism, heterodox models of cooperative economics, democratic governance, community control, and mutualism, such as worker-owned cooperatives, are emerging and flourishing (Bledsoe, McCreary, & Wright, 2019; Gordon-Nembhard, 2014; Hudson, 2019; Sutton, 2015). In this paper, we will explain the critically important longevity of cooperative enterprises, particularly worker-owned cooperatives, for the African American community and describe contemporary examples that 28
