WHERE WE WORK

The Working World manages revolving loan funds to support worker cooperatives in Argentina, Nicaragua, and the United States. Our funds are united by a common goal to support democracy in the workplace using a finance model that places people over profits.

 

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The Working World as an idea was conceived in 2004 by Brendan Martin, a former Wall Street businessman who was looking for a way to support the factory takeovers sprouting up throughout Argentina in the wake of a massive economic crisis.

As workers began to put their factories back to work under self-management to eke out a living, public support began to grow for something that was becoming increasingly viewed as a form of popular resistance against the destructive underbelly of speculative capitalism. One of the principal weaknesses of this burgeoning worker cooperative movement was its lack of access to capital.

The industrial and manufacturing sectors tend to require large amounts of investment capital in the best of cases, and many of these factories were old and had been decapitalized, sometimes intentionally, by their former owners. Most commercial and investment banks were unwilling to finance these “recovered” factories, while traditional microcredit viewed them as too large and outside of its mission to support individual entrepreneurs.

In these circumstances, and with the help of Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, and collaborators from their documentary The Take, Brendan opened the first “La Base” revolving loan fund in early 2005 to support the growth of worker cooperatives. At first the going was slow, as The Working World’s young team worked to build a fund for which there were few if any precedents, all the while navigating a treacherous political landscape and a people whose trust in financial institutions was at rock bottom. But as the years passed The Working World’s hard work, integrity, and openness began to pay off as we gained the trust of the ever-growing cooperative community. To date we have made hundreds of investments for millions of dollars in Argentina, all while maintaining a 98% success rate and without ever extracting one cent of wealth from the community we serve.

Encouraged by these successes, in 2008 Brendan and new team member Emma Yorra began to conduct a feasibility study with an eye on opening a second “La Base” loan fund in Nicaragua. The idea was to see if our model, fine-tuned over years in Argentina, could be replicated in a completely different context. Nicaragua certainly provided this opportunity. A low-income and largely agrarian society, it contrasted markedly with Buenos Aires’ middle class industrial character. Moreover, years of overexposure to unsuccessful “Western aid” efforts had left Nicaragua’s people deeply distrustful, particularly to microcredit initiatives, which all too often devolved into doppelgängers of the loan sharks of the past. In this setting, in 2009, we opened our second “La Base” branch in the city of León. While we have indeed found the challenges different, the experience has nonetheless proven the durability of our model, as we have maintained our high impact and rate of return while only requiring that successful projects be paid back.

 

Finally, in Summer 2011, longtime Argentina team member Ethan Earle returned to his native United States to open The Working World’s third revolving loan fund. Again, the challenges are to prove the durability of our model in a very different context. Based out of New York, we are operating in a world center of wealth and power, yet also a city suffering from high and persistent unemployment rates and an even higher poverty rate, adding up to a double employment crisis in which nearly a million people cannot lift themselves out of poverty despite holding a job. The challenge is also special, and especially important, because we are bringing a strategy from the Global South to the center of the so-called developed world, where the need for new ways to look at finance and job creation is becoming increasingly evident.This is the story (up until now, at least) of how we became a local organization gone international. We still view each of our funds as an intensely local project, designed to best meet the needs of the community it serves, each with its own set of stakeholders and particularities. However, we also believe that what we’ve hit on — namely a new way for finance to interact with job creation in the service of ordinary folks — is something too important not to be shared with the world. A new way of doing business in the 21st Century may just be at stake.