LDS Cooperative "one heart and one mind...with no poor among us"

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Michael Leung is starting a credit union to finance worker cooperatives. He graduated from the University of California Berkeley in 2000 with a B.S. in Engineering Physics and completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton University in 2006 working on cosmology, accelerator, and particle physics experiments.

The goal of this project is to start a credit union or cooperative bank that will aid the development of worker cooperatives in the United States. Worker cooperatives are business that are worker owned and democratically managed by their members.

Democratic self management in cooperatives provides empowering jobs where the members have decision making authority and responsibility. Self management also leads to inherently better protection of workers rights. Worker ownership helps reduce income and wealth disparity by retaining profits for the members.

The mission of the credit union is to maximize cooperative employment by providing financial services and developing the capacity to systematically generate new worker cooperatives. This will be done by starting an internal entrepreneurial group focused on worker cooperative development and providing financial resources to increase cooperative employment. It also will make it easy for the average person to contribute to worker cooperative development simply by using its financial services. The entrepreneurial effort will be funded by slightly lower interest on deposits and slightly higher interest on loans than would otherwise be available.

In order to compete in a corporations-dominated economy, worker cooperatives need millions of dollars to finance large-scale businesses in manufacturing and production.

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"That's the hole in the cooperative movement which there needs to be some infrastructure for...I don't personally see a way where co-ops have the mechanism for large-scale growth," said Michael Leung. "As far as I know, the cooperative is the most effective way to fight corporate power. [Capitalists] "can't make money off of co-ops because of the democratic structure,"he said.

What's needed, Leung believes, is a financial institution whose sole aim is to serve the cause of worker cooperative movement. According to Leung, the goals of the participatory credit union would be to:

1) Produce empowering, well-paying jobs in democratic workplaces by providing loans to start cooperatives;

2) Operate with a high degree of democratic management with member involvement in both policy formation and decisions;

3) Provide all members with training in self-management, finance, large-scale economic coordination, participatory economics, workplace democracy and specialized skills;

4) Provide cooperative employment opportunities in all sectors of economy;

5) Build the capacity to offer employment to seven million unemployed, and tens of millions of low wage or underemployed workers below the poverty line;

6) Build skills, self-confidence, and a sense of personal responsibility among the working class;

7) Remove/reduce the influence of owners, managers, and the coordinator class by giving democratic decision-making powers to all workers.

Leung estimates that it will take at least $300,000 to organize a full service credit union with the same services as a traditional bank. This estimate, based on information from the National Credit Union Administration, includes operating costs for several months, computer equipment, consulting fees and office space, he said.

Organizing the credit union is expected to be no easy task. Obstacles include raising $300,000 for the chartering costs, assembling a team with banking expertise to found the credit union and recruiting 3,000 credit union charter members. Once founded, "the credit union [will also need] people with expertise to find areas (industries) where co-ops can succeed," Leung said. "I see this as a very long term project."

JOIN THE WORKER COOPERATIVE CREDIT UNION TODAY!!! Fill out the form in this link.