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Try walking in management's moccasins [1]

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Date: 2023-01-30

Urban Ore's Gustavo Barrios with "Dignity" fountain.

I co-founded a reuse and recycling business called Urban Ore 43 years ago by being a scavenger at the Berkeley landfill. Now we occupy 3 acres in pricey West Berkeley, and we own most of the land we occupy. My wife Mary Lou and I are trying to turn Urban Ore into a worker-owned cooperative, a structural adaptation that we hope will carry the company forward for at least 100 years. We’re almost half-way there already.

Our employees call me truthfully the owner of a business, but the other part of the truth is that the business owns me.

I’m a hard worker by inclination, and I feel your pain. I’ve been teetering on the brink of closing Urban Ore due to not enough income and too may bills to pay. Not once, but many times. I was a worker doing one of our very physical jobs—stocking and restocking doors—for forty years. Eventually I couldn’t do that kind of labor anymore. I did lots of other jobs before that before passing them on to other specialists. Seven day weeks were common in the early days, when I was young and tough. I’m 83 now and still working full-time. I’m also an editor, part of a project I started and the company finances: Recycling Archives. Oral history. Important stuff for an important industry that I helped build. It’s all of a piece.

With all due respect to your obvious talents, it seems to me that you as employees need to have a deeper understanding and appreciation for the difficult position the managers are in. They didn’t want to tell you all about the impending financial disaster until the last minute, because the last thing they wanted to do was layoffs. Horrible, terrible outcome! Plus it’s hard to know if it will really happen until you reach the breaking point. If you tell employees about the financial hardships too early, you risk causing big harm from tanking employee morale. You think maybe things will change for the better. Maybe one of the somethings you are trying to do will save everything. You’re totally busy trying to shore things up, looking for ways to either increase income or reduce costs, on the phone and doing emails constantly. Survival of your business baby takes over your life. You have trouble sleeping nights because your baby is crying out for help.

That said, I have some suggestions that have gotten Urban Ore out of jams. One is to get a bridge loan from a bank, or if not a bank, from the local, state, or federal governments. Governments want enterprises to succeed, because after all, a labor-intensive business like Daily Kos is a source of payroll taxes, even property taxes.

I have no doubt that if Daily Kos doesn’t own the building you work in and the land under it, the managers had to sign a triple net lease that obliges them to pay the landlord’s property taxes. If Daily Kos owns the land and buildings, you get to pay the property taxes anyway, and they are big bucks. So there’s a symbiotic relationship between Daily Kos the enterprise—and it is an enterprise—and people who can either lend or grant you money.

I speak from recent experience. When Covid hit in March, 2020 and we had to shut for three days until we learned we are an Essential Business, a $350,000 federal Payroll Protection Act loan kept us afloat while we reorganized. It was forgiven because we used the money to hire new people and make some capital improvements that improved efficiency. We also got a $150,000 disaster relief loan from the SBA, which we recently paid back with one check, because we came back strong after half of our staff never returned after being invited back. They were afraid, rightly so, but we put that behind us.

So join with management to get this worthy business a loan or a grant. Write proposals. Learn to read financial statements. Do due diligence. Figure out ways to capitalize on the company’s intellectual property; you guys are sitting on a gold mine. Your Ukraine reporting and info is among the best; you’ve got books to do, and not just about Ukraine.

Try doing a GoFundMe; we did that when we were in a tight spot and people who loved us came up with big bucks to help tide us over.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/30/2150180/-Try-walking-in-management-s-moccasins

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