Witherell: Right they are looking for, willing to help us implement their model, a worker ownership model that is affiliated with them...
The key part for us is whatever we do first, we want it to be successful even if it's 5 people. You want to be sure that it works right and is successful. Then you figure out how to do the next one...
Q: Are you aware of other unions that are interested in this? Have any contacted you since the announcement and said that they want to get involved?
Witherell: Generally the answer is no. I think our union is a little bit different. We are more willing to try stuff that is a little outside our experience. I don't know that anything else is really invested in this yet...
Q: Do you have plans for educating your members and the public?
Witherell: Generally the piece is to pull all of our allies and friends together and figure out where the common ground is, where the common ideas are that we can work together and build from that. So that's really the extent of the education piece because, again, depending on the situation, it could be way different from one piece to another. A bigger piece is going to be a lot more complicated to create a couple thousand member owners all at once, right? So it really depends on what are the opportunities that come up and how we deal with those. The analogy that we were drawing on this week is the start-up of the blue-green alliance. Very few people in the mainstream media nobody really got it at first, right? And so, as it took formation and there was a lot of interest scattered about, it was a way to kind of channel those folks together, and it developed some momentum. Now there are about 7 or 8 million people who are affiliated with it...
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Thanks to Susan McLeod for speedy help with transcription of this conversation.
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