Austin PPS blogs — Dan

Last night, I went to a big party, Austin CoopFest, put on mostly by one of the housing coops, ICC.  In attendance were consumer coops small (Wheatsville–groceries) and large (REI), as well as student and non-student housing coops, alternative economics institutions (Austin Time Exchange).  And, of course, beer was provided by Black Star Coop, another consumer coop.  White Ghost Shivers–a quite fun old-timey band–headlined and a good time was had by all.  I even ran into an old friend from Boston who I didn’t know had moved down to Austin.

There was little that was explicitly coop-y about the whole thing; the coops who paid for booths probably did so partly to advertise to the student audience.  But I still think that events like these are one tiny step in the direction of setting up a participatory economy, by cementing the idea that coops prefer to deal economically with other coops, are willing to accept propping up other coops even at a loss, etc.

I do wish that the Credit Unions were there.  I don’t know whether or not they were asked to be, but the credit unions in Austin are easily the largest consumer coops, and it would be great if they started to feel that part of their “brand” as credit unions was being part of and giving support to the local cooperative economy.  Credit unions are hot right now with the financial sector collapse–I know that my credit union has been growing like crazy over the last year or so, and especially over the last few weeks.  It would be nice if people started to get that same reassurance from other coops–credit unions are solid and safe, because they are coops and democratically run; other coops must be too.

If this really happened, and there really was a functioning coop economy, I could imagine campaigns to get all the coops to accept certain principles.  A good, timid, first principle might be maximum compensation gaps.  That, say, coops in Austin accept a minimum wage for their employees of $8/hour and a maximum wage of $50 (=salary of 100,000).  If the coops aren’t tied together into a community, a push like this would be really difficult; it would be coop-by-coop, and essentially a campaign to lower a couple people’s salary.  But if they were tied together, this principle could be a broader campaign for fairness.

Well, a dream for now.