Pa'lante Cleaning Coop; African American Cooperativ​es - 27:40

Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
featuring 
Jessica Gordon Nembhard, economist, author, Prof. of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Dept. of Africana Studies at John Jay College

Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s research & policy analyses connect community- based economic development with community based approaches to justice.  Her multi-dimensional research now fills a particularly glaring gap in our understanding of the significance of the African American cooperative movement in the U.S., one of the largest in the world. She explores the practice of community economics; cooperative economics and worker ownership and liberates our imagination for better ways to organize 
our economic lives 
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Immigrant Cleaning Women Themselves Start Worker-Owned Green Cleaning Coop Pa’lante 
featuring
Members of Pa’lante Forward Green Cleaning

Make the Road a community organization that seeks to empower Latino and working class communities just celebrated the opening of Pa’lante Green Cleaning. Pa’lante’s  fifteen cleaning women, now worker-owners with the assistance of Make the Road joined together to solve the common issues they faced as workers in the cleaning industry, such as the starvation wages, job insecurity, and poor health and safety conditions. Now they have become the city’s 25th worker cooperative business and are part of a growing coop movement that is proving how workplace democracy can address issues of income disparity, create quality jobs and support local economic development.

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