COBURNICUSThere’s a piece of advice that keeps coming up whenever somebody talks about AI replacing jobs. If your job gets automated, learn new skills, embrace AI, maybe start your own business.
I understand where that comes from. I’ve spent a good portion of my life developing software and building businesses. But telling everybody to become an entrepreneur is a ridiculous economic strategy. Most people don’t want to run a business. Somebody who spent twenty years in accounting shouldn’t have to spend the next twenty cold-calling strangers and chasing unpaid invoices just to buy groceries.
And businesses need customers. If millions of people lose their incomes, where are the customers supposed to come from?
That question is why I made this film. I don’t know how fast automation will move, and I don’t think anybody else knows with the certainty some people claim. What I wanted to think through is what we could build in the places we live, in case traditional employment becomes a less reliable foundation for people’s lives.
Productivity and paychecks are separate things
We’ve spent generations inventing ways to make work easier. Nobody is campaigning to bring back washing every family’s laundry in a creek.
The worry starts when technology replaces the work somebody gets paid for. Our system hands out income in exchange for labor or ownership, and for most households that means a job. A company can become far more productive while its former employees see none of the benefit. Your mortgage is still due next month.
A hundred houses, a lot of lawnmowers
Picture a suburban street with a hundred houses. How many lawnmowers are sitting in those garages? Add the pressure washers, ladders and drills bought for one project three years ago. I’ve got tools in my own garage that mostly take up space.
In the film I put a number on screen to make the point concrete: if 75 of those households each bought a $600 mower, that’s $45,000 spent on machines that sit idle most of the week. That figure is hypothetical purchase arithmetic. It isn’t a measured savings estimate, and sharing lawnmowers won’t solve unemployment.
The principle reaches further, though. Childcare, transportation, home maintenance and help for older people staying independent are all things families pay for one household at a time, often while the family next door is dealing with the same problem. We measure economic security by how much people earn. I’m interested in whether we could also improve it by reducing what each household has to carry alone.
Community needs a budget
Everybody loves the idea of neighbors sharing until somebody has to write the budget. So I’d treat this as a real institution: professional management, a small paid staff, maybe three or four hundred households, starting with one or two services such as a tool library and a workshop. Rules, deposits and maintenance schedules, the same way libraries and recreation centers have managed shared resources for a very long time.
Evergreen and Preston
Two real examples shaped the second half of the film.
Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland. According to Evergreen’s own network page, it runs employee-owned businesses including Evergreen Cooperative Laundry and Berry Insulation, serving commercial and institutional customers, with employees holding majority ownership. What I like about it is how ordinary the work is. Nobody had to invent a new market.
Preston, England. The city became known for “community wealth building,” which included getting big local institutions to spend more of their purchasing budgets with nearby suppliers. In a 2019 report, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) and Preston City Council put the share of that spending retained in Preston at 5% in 2012/13 and 18.2% in 2016/17.
The limit matters. A hospital won’t relax its infection-control standards because a cooperative is down the street. The local business still has to compete on price, insurance and reliability, and if it can’t, it shouldn’t get the contract.
Work gives people more than money
The part that worries me most has little to do with economics. Jobs give people routines and friendships, and a sense that somebody depends on them. Retirement shows how differently people handle losing that. Now picture it happening to people in their thirties and forties who weren’t planning to stop.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and isolation described social connection as a factor in individual health and in community well-being. We were already dealing with isolation before adding job disruption to the mix. Helping someone pay their bills and helping someone keep a fulfilling life are related problems, and whatever we build should be thinking about both.
What didn’t make the film
A few details from the research notes are worth adding here.
The Preston numbers apply to the participating anchor institutions in the program. They don’t cover every purchase made in the city. They describe what the program achieved. They don’t prove the program caused the whole change, and they don’t guarantee the model works everywhere.
“Employee ownership” also covers more than one structure. The U.S. Department of Labor separates worker cooperatives from ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans) and employee ownership trusts. Its worker cooperative guidance notes these businesses can still use conventional management, which matches what I said in the film: a co-op still has managers and accountants.
And Evergreen does more than start new businesses. Its Fund for Employee Ownership describes buying existing companies, converting them to employee ownership and supporting them afterward. That may be the more practical path for a lot of towns.
The question I keep coming back to
There’s a real danger in all of this. You could build a predatory franchise dressed up in the language of community, where a central company collects the fees and the local group carries the debt. Who owns the assets? Who can replace the management company if it isn’t doing its job? Those have to be settled at the start.
I’d like to hear from people who have run cooperatives or shared-resource programs, especially the ones that failed. Would you use a neighborhood resource center if it saved your household money? I don’t know yet what a version that lasts past the first six months looks like, and I suspect the failures would teach us as much as the successes.
Sources
- Evergreen Cooperatives, “Evergreen’s Network of Cooperatives”: https://www.evgoh.com/evergreen-network
- Evergreen Cooperatives, “Fund for Employee Ownership”: https://www.evgoh.com/tfeo
- U.S. Department of Labor, “Employee Ownership”: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/programs-and-initiatives/employee-ownership-initiative/tools-and-resources/employee-ownership
- CLES and Preston City Council, “How we built community wealth in Preston: Achievements and lessons” (2019), pp. 12-13: https://cles.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/CLES_Preston-Document_WEB-AW.pdf
- U.S. Surgeon General, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” (2023): https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
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