https://www.thenation.com/article/society/worker-coops-elder-care-dementia/ The Dignifying Solution to America’s Care Crisis: Employee ownership turns care work jobs into good jobs—and leads to better patient outcomes. Excerpt: Even in this politically polarized time, worker ownership is embraced by people across the political spectrum as a solution to unprecedented wealth inequality. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents (including 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of independents) in a national survey said they would rather work for an employee-owned company than for shareholders or the government. “Americans disagree about a lot of things, but this is not one of them,” says Joseph Blasi, the director of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the most enthusiastic backers of co-ops and employee stock-ownership plans (ESOPs) in Congress, is the lead sponsor of the Employee Ownership Financing Act, which would create a loan program to expand financing options for workers seeking to buy the businesses they work for. At a Senate committee meeting last year on employee ownership, while talking about ways to make the formation of ESOPs easier, Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted said, “ESOPs are one of the most virtuous forms of capitalism in America.” Still, Adria Scharf, a researcher who works with Blasi at Rutgers, cautions that “we can’t overburden the worker-cooperative structure and expect it to solve all the systemic problems.” Indeed, increased public funding will be key to addressing America’s care crisis. The last significant effort to transform the funding landscape was in 2021, when President Joe Biden proposed the Build Back Better bill, which would have stabilized and strengthened the home-care sector. As the sector now waits for another big push at national reform, local efforts show what is possible. “These precious organizations are just hidden in the shadows, and they are so different,” Scharf says. “They’re so beautiful.” Peggy Powell knows that cooperatives represent a tiny fraction of the larger sector, but she doesn’t see scale as the only measure of significance. “Coming out of working-class roots, coming out of roots where you know you have very little control over many things in your life…putting one foot in front of the other is the victory,” she says. Her daughter Adria is still fighting for full-scale transformation. “We need access to capital, technical assistance, co-op-friendly policy, robust and strong cooperative networks, and investment in leadership and development pipelines for workers and worker-owners in the cooperative sector,” she says. “Worker-owned home-care service delivery in the US,” she adds, “is the cornerstone of a far more equitable and caring economy.” Thanks to a listserv member for forwarding this post. jz
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