Human Agenda Supports Co-op Goal Setting in Santa Clara
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ON: January 29, 2020
TO: Mayor Gillmor, Santa Clara City Council, City Clerk and City Manager
FR: Richard Hobbs, Esq., Executive Director, Human Agenda
RE: Goal Setting Meeting
Human Agenda applauds you as you set goals for the coming years to make the City of Santa Clara more democratic, equitable, cooperative, kind and sustainable, the five DECKS values of Human Agenda that we see in play in your deliberations.
We perceive the policy goals of the City of Santa Clara as meriting extraordinary public support, as you can see from the vision and values of Human Agenda and the institutional support that you can provide for these by supporting worker-owned cooperatives. If you were to quintuple your support for the development of worker-owned cooperatives you would be on the cutting edge of transformative workforce development and community wealth building.
Human Agenda is a local human rights non-profit with a county-wide vision of serving the needs of local residents and protecting our local environment, with the following:
Vision: The good society is one where people have the time, resources, and duty to participate in five fundamental activities.
First, care work. We need the time and resources to take care of ourselves, our family, and our immediate community. This means that the second shift should end for women and men should participate equally in care for children and seniors as well as housework.
Second, social labor. We all need to have the opportunity and the duty to produce goods or services of value for society at a living wage with reduced work hours. These goods and services like food and health care have to be available to all, covered by the living wage or income equivalent. In our society we often produce useless things below a living wage forcing many people to work long hours.
Third, we need the time and resources for life-long learning with accurate information.
Fourth, we all need to have the time to participate in democratic decision-making, from the family unit all the way to the United Nations, but especially in our local governments, neighborhoods, and workplaces.
Finally, at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we need time for self-realization, to do the things we enjoy and that make us fully human.
The foundation of this vision is reduced working hours with sufficient income. We need to optimize our working hours and consumption, not maximize our working hours and consumption, which is the existing model.
We need a new model that credits the four activities unpaid under our current economic system: care work, life-long learning, civic engagement, and self-actualization.
Values to Reach the Vision. We need new institutions based on new values, the DECKS values of Human Agenda: democracy, equity, cooperation, kindness and sustainability. In Human Agenda we believe that worker-owned cooperatives, public banking, Medicare for All, public education, land trusts, publicly financed elections and many other institutions can meet these values. The critical key for our economy key is creating worker-owned cooperatives.
Worker-Owned Cooperatives Meet these Values.
They are more democratic. With one worker one vote they are the epitome of participatory economic democracy, deciding on all major decisions of the enterprise.
They are more equitable. Sharing profit among all coop members is far more fair than current profit centralization in our current economy, which widens the breach between the wealthy and the destitute on an ongoing basis. Coops are also more equitable because the difference between the highest to lowest paid is 1 to 1, or 2 to 1, or even 5 to 1 as in coops in Mondragon, Spain, in sharp contrast to the 400 to 1 prevalent in high tech companies in Silicon Valley.
They are more cooperative in that they make all important enterprise decisions horizontally and collectively, not hierarchically and coercively.
They are more kind. By working together the members resolve problems through dialogue, democratic decision-making, and mediation, not adversarial mandates and confrontation.
Finally, cooperatives are more sustainable. Coop members seek fair and modest levels of consumption, not conspicuous over-consumption. Cooperatives optimize instead of maximize income and consumption, lowering the carbon footprint of coop members. They make environmental decisions that won’t negatively impact their workforce or their immediate community.
Quintupling the impact funding for cooperatives in the City of Santa Clara can send a strong message in support of democratic community wealth building.