On October 5th, 2023, Fuerza Laboral celebrated our 17th Anniversary with a milestone event: the inauguration of our very own building, which we purchased this past summer, thanks to a loan from the Cooperative Fund of the North East and a grant from the US Department of Agriculture. This purchase has us reflecting on the nature of ownership.
Over our seventeen year history, we have been housed in some pretty diverse places. In the nine-month gestation period prior to birthing Fuerza Laboral, the George Wiley Center, a direct action economic justice organization, gave us space to meet, dream and plan in their office in Pawtucket. When we launched, the Catholic Diocese of Providence gave us significantly below-market rent in our first office, subleasing from their social services program, Project Hope. But when Project Hope moved, we had a slumlord who didn’t respond to calls when the heat went out, and who rented the shared space (that once housed a food pantry and social services) to a pawn shop. On multiple occasions, we arrived at the office to find the door that separated our spaces broken. Needing to get out quickly, we then spent a year working out of borrowed space in two janitor’s closets, keeping the doors open for air.
Our next rental was a room in an old factory on Clay Street, with a high ceiling, enormous windows and a floor polished smooth with a hundred years of sweat and machine grease rubbed into it by the soles of workers’ shoes. We could hold meetings of over a hundred people in that space (and did), but we had to wear coats and hats and huddle around space heaters in the winter, and run a noisy industrial floor fan all day in the summer, that made one-on-one conversations difficult, let alone membership meetings. Our last office was in the same mill building, and luckily there was more temperature control, but it was far too small to house our vision, our growing projects, and the network of co-ops we work with.
For a long time, we’ve been wanting to own our own building. Part of this desire was for stability; to not be at the mercy of landlords with regards to maintenance, health and safety, and constant rent hikes. But there is something else:
We subscribe to a different vision of what ownership can be.
As a workers’ rights organization, we see a strong connection between housing and labor injustice. In our society we are generally forced to sell our labor to a boss, and then rent our housing from a business. Our labor and our rented housing both become objects for purchase. The worker / renter exists solely to make profit for the owner, and as much profit as possible. Anything that doesn’t increase profits, like health and safety, or fairness, is often seen as a distraction.
In organizing for justice, we have seen many times over, employers who threaten workers with physical violence and exploitation of people’s marginalized statuses to coerce and terrify them to work in terrible conditions for low-to-no pay. But we don’t have to accept this as the way things are–there is another way.
To imagine how both housing and labor can be different, we start by asking,
What would it look like for no individual to exercise control over another person and deprive them of rights or power in this relationship?
What would it look like if we didn’t imagine this as a zero-sum game, where, in order for someone to benefit, others have to lose?
How can we undo barriers that have worked to exclude communities from their own autonomy and sovereignty?
The goal of our Worker-Owned Cooperative Incubator is to build a vehicle for workers who have been excluded from ownership to have direct control over their employment decisions and conditions. Worker-cooperators own the business, yes, but they also own their labor, and the fruits thereof.
We can build businesses that let us be the architects of our lives, and be guided not by profit alone, but by higher values of justice, dignity, community and the environment. We can build businesses that are successful financially while also being successful on all the fronts, when we value, to paraphrase singer and storyteller Utah Phillips, “making a living without making a killing.”
It was exciting to see our new headquarters pulsing with life, conversations, affirmations, music and dancing at our inauguration. This is our house, and that “our” is one that contains multitudes. The building is shaped like the letter “C,” for community, cooperatives, and connection. Together, we will ensure it is a space guided by these values.