Event: Co-operating to Create Our Own Future: The Role of Worker Co-ops in Addressing Unemployment in Windsor, December 10

When: Monday December 10, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
Where: CAW Local 200/444 Hall, 1855 Turner Road
Everyone welcome

Ontario has lost over 250,000 well-paid manufacturing jobs over the last five years, and Windsor has paid a particularly high price. In 2000, Windsor's average annual unemployment rate was 5.4%. Today, the official unemployment rate has almost doubled to 9.6%, well above Ontario’s rate of 5.8%.

On December 10, Russ Christianson, a Co-op Developer with the Ontario Co-operative Association will be speaking at the Turner Road CAW Hall about the consequences of global free trade for working people, and the potential for worker co-operatives to create meaningful employment in Windsor. “The devastation experienced over the last two decades by Ontario’s manufacturing sector is a far cry from Brian Mulroney’s promises of ‘Jobs, Jobs, Jobs’ in the Free Trade election of 1988”, says Christianson.

Over the last twenty years, Christianson, a Queen’s Commerce grad, has helped develop over one hundred co-operative businesses, with a seventy percent success rate. “I don’t take credit for this success rate, all the credit is due to the people who started these co-ops and kept them going.” A Quebec study has found that co-operatives have twice the average survival rate of regular businesses.

Christianson says “co-operatives are the best kept secret in Ontario. I challenge you to find them listed in business textbooks or magazines, or mentioned by business consultants. As democratic, economic organizations you would think our politicians would love promoting co-ops, but it seems they have mostly bought into the mythology of global competition”, he said.