CRAFTING A BUSINESS OWNED BY ITS WORKERS
During the past year I have been in correspondence and conversation with a number of people who are transitioning their companies to employee ownership, starting worker co-ops, or thinking in new ways about worker ownership and cooperative business.
Among them: Rick Dubrow and Cindy Landreth at A-1 Builders in Bellingham, WA, who are working on an employee buyout of the business they bought in 1976 from the original owner who started it in 1955; Jamie Odegaard who, with four friends, is starting a worker owned building company in Western Massachusetts; James Kosacz, the president of Autoworks in Kittery, ME, who is considering selling to his employees; Mark Skimson, in Terrace, BC, who is leading an effort to make a co-op purchase of a small ski area called Shames Mountain (following the path blazed by Mad River Glen in Vermont); Jeffrey Hollender and Gregor Barnum, formerly of Seventh Generation in Vermont (Jeffrey was the founder of 7th Gen) who are developing a major new – and very exciting – co-operative enterprise.
And the list goes on. Read more
Where Will All The Solar Go?
This was published as an op-ed today in the Vineyard Gazette.
Wind turbines get all the negative ink. Noise, vibration, flicker, interruption of beloved views. Big troublemakers, aren’t they?
Solar panels, on the other hand, are considered to be quite benign. The Nantucket Historic District Commission doesn’t like them much, and some people would rather see roofs without them, but by and large they have come to be widely accepted.
But what about when we scale them up with considerably larger installations that can make a meaningful contribution to our energy supply? Are they really so benign?
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JOHN ABRAMS is co-founder and CEO
of South Mountain Company and the author
of COMPANIES WE KEEP read more
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COMPANIES WE KEEP is published by Chelsea Green Publishing
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