The Workers Lab is iterating its way to the future of the labor movement. But despite being backed by unions, that future might look a lot more like startup life than the union halls of yore.
Participants of The Workers Lab summer institute gathered at the Impact Hub in Oakland, California.
Caroline O'Donovan / BuzzFeed
A dozen or more people are crammed into a second-floor office at Impact Hub, a thrumming co-working space in Oakland's rapidly developing downtown -- philanthropists, lawyers, venture capitalists and labor organizers all clothed in some variation of "business casual." On one wall, a floor-to-ceiling sheet of plexiglass reveals the scene on the ground floor, where dozens of founders and would-be founders are making phone calls and sending emails. On another, a single hanging bookshelf displays, among other tomes, a copy of Thomas Piketty's Capital, the nuevo-Marxist best-seller that invigorated the national discussion about inequality when it was published in 2013.
It's the last day of The Workers Lab summer institute, a two-day workshop for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to turn their big ideas for empowering workers into sustainable businesses. Though Workers Lab CEO Carmen Rojas and president David Rolf are both present, the man of the hour is clearly Stanford Business School lecturer Michael Bush. Bush has been called in as a consultant to walk the five participating projects through his nine building blocks of revenue-generation. He wears a gold watch on one wrist and a gold bracelet on the other.
Knocking business sense into do-gooders is something of a hobby for Bush, whose day job involves consulting for large corporations. "That's my capitalism," he told me. But for decades, he's also done pro bono work in the Oakland community, helping nonprofit directors and the like come to realize that making money is the only way to make real change. Bush teaches a business class at the Impact Hub — where the Wi-Fi password references SayHerName, a campaign against police killings of black women — every Monday night. He says he always starts the class with the same announcement: "I'm going to talk about money."
The Workers Lab receives funding from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, but at heart, it's a project of the Service Employees International Union. David Rolf is president of both the lab and the SEIU's Local 775 in Seattle, the project's major financial backer. Rolf has been public about his lack of faith in traditional organized labor's ability to defend the American workforce going forward into the 21st century. He says he's committed to finding a better solution.
A big part of that commitment is The Workers Lab, an experimental, five-person organization studying whether the principles of capitalism and the structures of startup culture might produce better outcomes for workers today. The two-day institute was an exercise in taking nascent ideas for recruiting networks and organizing platforms and seeing if there might be a way to turn them into financially sustainable projects insulated from the fickle whims of philanthropy.
Bush's process, which involves many poster-size sticky notes on the walls, embodies the agile, aggressive, early-stage startup business strategy that Silicon Valley has become known for. Teams must identify their customers, their immediate and long-term goals and their available resources. They must also draw up operating budgets, determine their value proposition for customers and potential partners and, crucially, target their most promising revenue streams. The point of the process: determine the most logical business plan on which to build their fledgling start-up and identify the steps that need to be taken to execute it.
The Workers Lab summer institute at the Impact Hub.
Caroline O'Donovan / BuzzFeed
"Are you going to be for-profit?" Bush asks Chelsea Sprayregen, one-third of the founding team of a child care project that came in named "Work Hard, Play Hard" and left as "Provide." After a second's hesitation, she replies in the affirmative.
"Good," Bush said. "I like that."
With Provide Sprayregen wants to make life easier for working parents and child-care providers by taking better advantage of government child care subsidies. Parents working irregular schedules often have difficulty accessing affordable child care; by helping them pool together already available but underused resources, Provide hopes to make child-care easier for parents and more profitable for child-care providers, many of whom are low-income women with families of their own.
If Sprayregen and her co-founders were seeking funding from philanthropic organizations, they might present Provide as an effort that will positively impact the lives of working parents and child-care providers both. But Bush coaches them to instead tout how their product can help potential buyers and partners save money --which is why he prefers the idea of them incorporating as an LLC.
For example, Rolf explains, unions have a lot of money and are often searching for new perks and benefits that will help them shore up dwindling membership. If Provide were able to convince a union that subsidized child care is something a majority of it members want, that union could become a lucrative business partner. Bush writes "unions" on one of the giant Post-its, and just like that, traditional labor becomes a potential customer for the new labor movement.
Not all of the projects workshopped at Workers Lab are new. Working World, for example, a lending institution that provides funding to worker-owned businesses and cooperatives, has been around for over half a decade. Labor Exchange, a platform where low-income people of color can search for jobs, is the brain child of Yscaira Jimenez, who took the idea through MIT's Sloan School of Management and came out with some preliminary funding, contacts at companies like Yelp, Google and Facebook, and a new co-founder, Sheldon Trotman. Bush tells Jimenez it's clear that she had read his nine building blocks to revenue before the event. He looks very happy when he says this.
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