Berkeley’s Missing Link Bike Cooperative – A closure in the context of a larger cooperative vision
by Bernard Marszalek
The Berkeleyside story on Missing Link going out of business after 50 years
INTRODUCTION
Missing Link Bike Co-op – founded 50 years ago – was a Berkeley institution much like the Cheese Board Collective. Given the popularity of cycling and support from the City of Berkeley, I found ML’s demise especially confounding. The City of Berkeley spends millions to fund programs to promote “micromobility” by expanding a network of bike lanes, by offering bike rental kiosks and, with the assistance of BART, storage. The city also funds a non-profit that has successfully lobbied the City to expedite bike lane construction. I was spurred to write this report to excavate the social context for ML’s closing. We see enthusiastic stories of new worker cooperatives forming, and rightly so given the recent expansion of that sector of the cooperative economy. To me analyzing why an established worker cooperative closed seemed relevant. Business failures may be depressing and tragic for the participants, but we can’t dismiss understanding them for that reason.
I began this report with several interviews of Missing Link members in December, 2022, before their closing. Early drafts were passed on to ML members and to the worker cooperative developers and institutions in the San Francisco Bay area. Subsequent communication with ML clarified this report and amongst the worker cooperative community only one responded to early drafts with comments and clarifications – Sustainable Economies Law Center.
This report isn’t intended to delve deeply into the specifics of Missing Link’s closing, but to address issues in the worker cooperative community that, I think, deserves reflection. It is also an overview of the history of the worker cooperative community in the SF Bay area and conclusions that I draw from that history and the current economic circumstances that affect worker cooperatives in this part of Northern California. I suspect that some conclusions may resonate with other parts of the country.
My opinions are mine alone and not those of Missing Link members. – Bernard
Missing Link Bike Cooperative closing after 50 years
The City of Berkeley officials take pride in promoting worker cooperatives. Recently, Berkeley announced that three established businesses transitioned in worker cooperatives. Given the population of Berkeley (approx. 125,000) it may have the most co-ops per capita of any city in the US.
Missing Link was a cooperative bike shop established fifty years ago during a wave of political unrest in the city of Berkeley in the wake of the fight for Peoples’ Park in 1969. Literally hundreds of communes and collectives formed throughout the SF Bay area during that period. This phenomenon – a literal grassroots upsurge of economic alternatives – deserves a book to document the social/economic upheaval of those years. That era gave rise to Inkworks Press where I was a member. It closed in 2015, though its location on Seventh Street in West Berkeley still displays a 150 foot mural across the entire front of its building. The mural “Visions of Peace and Justice”1 was painted by students in the Mural Design and Creation Class at Berkeley City College, directed by Juana Alicia. Heartwood Woodworking Cooperative2 also formed during that period and it still operates in the Sawtooth Building3, also in West Berkeley. Both Inkworks and Heartwood originally were projects that developed at the Bay Warehouse Collective. Other co-ops formed during this period, for example, BookPeople Distribution, which later moved to Oakland and subsequently closed due to online competition, and Uprisings Bakery, which closed in the mid-90s. There were many other collectives that formed into radical egalitarian ventures – more as anti-capitalist organizations than anything like traditional businesses.
After the demise of several collectives, those that remained were prompted to consider their longevity. Illusions about changing society by simply being a utopian example faded. The main impetus to consider their future stability, however, issued from the vicious nature of the capitalist system and the marketplace of rising costs for materials, rent, taxes and a sundry variety of bureaucratic hurdles that threatened their viability. Discussions amongst the remaining collectives led them to form a SF Bay-wide federation. This was the origin of the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives and Collectives (NoBAWCC – pronounced No Boss!). More on this organization shortly.
Missing Link had been a successful cooperative for many decades, with a membership of between fifteen to twenty, but its revenues began declining about twenty years ago. The reasons for a drop in sales are many. New bike sales especially to University of California at Berkeley (UCB) students declined because of thefts. That decline in new bike sales affected their retail distribution contract with Trek bikes. Trek wanted them to buy their parts, while ML preferred to purchase the best parts available. Then there was the competition with tax-free online sales. When that got corrected, price competition with online outfits that could buy in bulk below Missing Link’s wholesale prices devastated retail sales of accessories and parts.
Missing Link preferred to maintain and repair “acoustic bikes” instead of e-bikes, which would entail buying a hydraulic lift to hoist the heavier bikes and cut into the number of repair jobs. Also, working with toxic and fire-prone lithium batteries meant more complications regarding safety and possible insurance issues.
The City of Berkeley’s emphasis on micromobility may have discouraged some cycling especially amongst UCB students who, increasingly, live downtown where the ubiquitous presence of e-scooters and bike sharing kiosks provide easy access.
Another blow to their business came when the public parking lot around the corner from their location was eliminated for a City of Berkeley sponsored affordable housing project. The parking lot was a real benefit for those who had a bike to repair or families who came with their children. The casual cyclist often used their car as a convenience when shopping.
After the loss of the parking lot, shocking news came to all of Berkeley: the tallest building in Berkeley, a 28 story residency, was planned like an enormous concrete spike into their block. Their building, where they had been located for decades, would be razed to accommodate this high-rise for “young professionals” with 599 units, roof top restaurant, and a pool on the 14th floor. The high-rise will gut the entire block of small businesses, provide parking for only a minority of renters, and, as a requirement for building such a tall building offer 40 low income rentals.
While the process of receiving City permission to build could take some time, new California laws have superseded municipal zoning jurisdiction and ended previous local control on matters of housing. These laws eliminated the previous process of permitting construction. This meant that though their landlord gave them a slight reduction in rent for 2023, ML would still have to close and relocate from their prime, near downtown location during construction and that would entail additional costs and loss of revenue.
Missing Link adjusted in many ways to cut costs like moving their separate bike repair shop from across the street into the main store. Finding experienced bike mechanics at their wage scale also proved difficult.They further reduced overhead by not replacing staff and they tightened their operation in other ways to save money. And before the pandemic Missing Link connected with Berkeley’s Office of Economic Development (OED) to gain some assistance to raise their sales. OED has a system of aiding businesses in several ways, with financing, marketing, and management. Missing Link took advantage of a consultancy that the City partnered with – Uptima Entrepreneur Cooperative. Uptima, originally founded In Oakland and now with outposts in Boston and Chicago, bills itself as a multistakeholder cooperative with entrepreneurs, workers (staff), and investors as members.
OED introduced Missing Link to Uptima in February, 2020, a month before the pandemic hit all retail businesses. Uptima, founded in Oakland, CA in 2014, counseled ML during most of 2020, helping them obtain government emergency pandemic funding and offering business advice in the form of suggesting that they adopt a Direct Public Offering. The funds they secured did tide them over during the worst part of the economic collapse.
Then just as they were entering the “post-pandemic” period with a fully opened store they had to contend with the two unforeseen developments mentioned – the loss of parking and the impending construction of a high-rise.
The high-rise development was the stick in the spokes that brought down Missing Link and sent the membership contemplating a move to a new location. A new space, however, would mean moving farther away from the downtown area and the campus and taking on the task of re-establishing a new customer base.
The limits of OED assistance are apparent. The City promotes small businesses, and although it has modified its revolving loan fund for co-ops, securing a loan would still require that half the co-op membership co-sign and place their assets in jeopardy. The City of Berkeley offers grants to Arts institutions, but not to worker cooperatives, even if the small business happens to be an iconic community institution like Missing Link that supports Berkeley’s cycling agenda. This is the downside of speaking of worker cooperatives as groovy businesses and not recognizing them as a different species from capitalist enterprises. One is people-centered while the other is simply, and ruthlessly, profit-based.
A changing economy and Missing Link
Digging deeper into Missing Link’s decline in trade raises some unknowns. For example, each new academic year had students flock to their shop for bikes and gear, but this influx declined in recent years. This may be in part, as mentioned, due to the fear of bike thefts that reduce new bike sales. There’s also a student volunteer bike repair shop on campus to help maintain the older bikes many students own. This shop may have hurt ML sales and repair business. On the plus side, there are over a thousand students living in co-op housing, but unfortunately there is no ongoing connection between the student housing cooperatives and Berkeley worker cooperatives. There is a student-run co-op food store that is a member of NOBAWC.
The early years of NoBAWC
Aside from a local co-op lawyer who is helping them with the closing process (which will be another tribulation unless they do it right) there has been no communication with other Berkeley worker cooperatives with one exception.4 Berkeley’s local online newspaper broke the story of ML’s closing, but the community of worker cooperatives email list never reported their demise. The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives outreach amongst worker cooperatives lately consists mainly of social gatherings. Socializing is essential for maintaining some semblance of organizational coherency, yet this level of communication amongst the co-ops fails to match the historic role of NoBAWC. (The second “C” for collectives, was dropped soon after it was founded.)
When NoBAWC was formed in 1994, there were no co-op developers in the area. The main co-op support group was at UC Davis (the State’s original agricultural school) and it functioned as an adjunct to the corporate agricultural economy of California. The new executive director, recognizing the need for better outreach to housing and worker cooperatives, provided assistance to these cooperatives. She organized bi-annual conferences that provided educational support for all the co-ops along with maintaining the Ag efforts that had been institutionalized.
After several years with UC Davis the director founded a non-profit, the California Center for Cooperative Development (CCCD)5 to carry on substantial state-wide efforts supporting housing, childcare, healthcare, and worker cooperatives.
Arizmendi Association, a local cooperative development agency, began replicating Cheese Board’s co-op in Oakland a few years after NoBAWC was formed. And for several years it was the sole development resource for NoBAWC. It provided legal, financial, and organizational support on a pro bono basis in some instances, while its main program consisted of establishing other successful versions of the Cheese Board with that co-ops’ valuable assistance.
NoBAWC’s founding was enthusiastically supported by the local Industrial Workers of the World union branch (IWW). The IWW had a coherent political agenda of spreading workers’ control through the worker cooperative movement in the SF Bay area and beyond. This syndicalist infusion was seen as integral in the formative period of NoBAWC, but as the real mission of NoBAWC took the shape of a consultancy for co-ops, some in dire straits, that political mission was superseded by more immediate needs. A number of worker cooperatives in the 90s took advantage of the expertise of members of the larger established co-ops. Some of the worker cooperatives that sought assistance are, unfortunately, only historic footnotes today: Book People Distribution and Publishing located at the time in West Berkeley and Uprising Bakery also in West Berkeley come to mind as co-ops that attended successive monthly meetings of NoBAWC to air their concerns and difficulties with surviving. Other co-ops gained valuable assistance through challenging times. Towards the end of this period Nabolom Bakery hosted several meetings that brought together both NoBAWC, their elected City of Berkeley Council Member and their customers to discuss a strategy to keep the bakery open.
The growth of the worker cooperative sector in the larger SF Bay area was propelled by the initiative of the Cheese Board to replicate its cooperative in other parts of the region. Their success in promoting the cooperative model, along with the success of house cleaning co-ops proved the viability of cooperative businesses. To meet the growing need to develop the worker cooperative sector several nonprofit development agencies formed to provide legal support as a centerpiece of co-op development. The most innovative of these agencies, the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC)5, continues today with a program expanded beyond co-operative development.
The staff at SELC, consisting in part of lawyers, have for over thirteen years successfully co-managed their workplace. They are renowned for their Legal Cafes that have aided co-ops to steer the legal tangles to establish a solid foundation for their ventures. Besides SELC’s attorneys and support staff, Project Equity6 formed recently consisting of co-op developers who have administrative experience to focus mainly on transitioning traditional companies to “employee ownership” as ESOPs and worker cooperatives.
With the influx of this expertise NoBAWC’s hands-on approach to assisting co-ops somewhat diminished, though it was not totally eliminated. Instead of meetings totally devoted to providing advice to struggling cooperatives, NoBAWC took on more of a public relations and marketing role. It produced, for example, poster maps of the cooperatives and it issued membership cards that were used to obtain discounts at worker co-ops in the SF Bay area. In this manner it reverted to the old IWW vision of growing the co-op sector with a vision of worker’s control, but it did so without the overlay of Wobbly politics. Margot Smith’s video “Democracy in the Workplace: Three Worker-Owned Businesses in Action”6 was released around this time to document three worker cooperatives.
A diminished role for NOBAWC?
The upshot of all this is that ML never reached out to NoBAWC in part because the organization over the years moved away from the hands-on approach at its origins. Several years ago, after a period of semi-dormancy, NoBAWC was revived with a part-time director who visited member cooperatives. A board was reorganized and began holding quarterly meetings and it continued the practice of maintaining its e-list of general information and services available by consultants. Currently, it is sponsoring a survey. And, as noted previously, it sponsors occasional drink nights. Many years ago it ceased monthly meetings. The vigor of the early years diminished and so too, I believe, the co-op community has dissipated.
Some of this can be excused by the intensity of small retail businesses to stay afloat, which leaves membership exhausted and hesitant to attend yet another meeting. However, one could say that this was the case since the early days of NoBAWC and while that is true, there are some extenuating circumstances that may explain the decline of participation. The largest co-ops in the early years, like Rainbow, Book People, Cheese Board, Good Vibrations, Other Avenues, and even Missing Link and Inkworks, had members who in some cases were financially supported to attend meetings. And those that weren’t paid to attend NoBAWC meetings received support from their co-ops when they delivered reports on activities to their respective co-op meetings. Beyond that, Inkworks, for example, offered deeply discounted and sometimes free printing to NoBAWC, as did another local print co-op. On the plus side, NoBAWC meetings tried to be upbeat social gatherings that were supplied with snacks and refreshments from co-op bakeries and shops.
I’m no longer involved with NoBAWC since retiring from Inkworks and an activist role in the co-op community. I remain on the listserv and follow the postings. My impression is that not much communication is occurring between worker co-ops, though there may be other forms of communication that are not public and which I am not aware of.
From my conversation with members of Missing Link I am left with the impression that NoBAWC played no role years ago when Missing Link first experienced a decline in revenues. And NoBAWC has been MIA in the more recent past. There is no assumption on my part that NoBAWC could have rescued Missing Link if it had intervened on some level. But we will never know for certain.
My references to the early history of NoBAWC were meant to record a history I know and meetings I attended where the discussions assisted members of worker cooperatives with issues to resolve.
A few observations
Based on my experiences with NoBAWC, here are a few observations. When a worker cooperative is in trouble and the community comes to assist that co-op, even if it doesn’t provide an immediate solution to the difficulty, the members of the co-op in trouble benefit from the solidarity expressed. The NoBAWC meetings helped to cauterize seepage of membership in the troubled co-op.
The members of the co-op seeking assistance were buoyed by NoBAWC support even if there was no tangible resolution in the first encounter. The realization that they were not alone to figure out a solution to their difficulty, or a path to take, meant that their own co-op meetings took on a positive aspect and alternatives could arise internally as a consequence. A return to the NoBAWC community meetings then sometimes provided more tangible advice based on the discussions the troubled co-op had. A dialogue would ensue at the NoBAWC meeting and a plan emerged. Sometimes.
But for any of this to happen, and for the membership of the co-op with challenges to avoid a downward spiral of depression and apathy, the co-op had to be proactive in asking for assistance and the community of worker cooperatives had to be able to respond quickly and empathetically. Collective intelligence is a thing. And it is especially useful when the participants come with a diversity of experiences to contribute. This is the case when worker cooperatives collaborate. Co-ops often face the same problems though they may resolve them in unique ways depending on the composition of the membership and the co-ops’ circumstances. To not benefit from collective intelligence is a tragedy for a cooperative community.
My other observation is based on assumptions more than lived experience. As the professionalism of the development organization grew, I believe, their expertise replaced the hands-on advice provided by the worker cooperatives. That expertise is necessary to grow the community and shouldn’t be discounted. It might be more focused on developing than sustaining co-ops on a daily practice, but nevertheless it is essential. The problem arises when co-ops turn to the ‘experts’ and not to each other. There should be, in my opinion, a complementary relationship that builds solidarity amongst the members of the cooperatives. Precisely how that could be implemented is not for me, removed from the current worker cooperative community, to advise.
CODA
The situation that Missing Link faced is not entirely unique to them. Cooperatives at the mercy of landlords will always be precarious. And cooperatives that can’t compete in the marketplace must face the fact that the market is a hostile environment for all cooperatives, where the values of cooperation are always tested. The current stress on “worker ownership” discounts a vision of cooperatives as essentially radical, democratic, organizations of members8—as, in other words, a commons. And as members/commoners, who value their work more as a community service than a profitable resource, they cannot survive easily in an economy that discounts, if not actually is hostile to, those values. A situation like the one Missing Link faced cries for an extension of the cooperative economy beyond one workplace and into the larger community. And given the nature of rentier capitalism, this also means extending the commons to land and involving land trusts as integral to a cooperative economy. In theory, and to be clear I am not advising ML that this was the path they should have, or could have, taken, but in theory, extending the cooperative community means that a value-driven project needs strong support from the larger community to offset and diminish the ravages of the market, of capitalism. As I see it, the goal is a commons that expands so commoning becomes a commonplace experience for all interested parties.
The ultimate wind-powered vehicle (patent pending)
Notes
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1 https://designaction.org/about/inkworks-press/
3 http://www.sawtoothbuilding.com/
4 A Missing Link associate visited Cheese Board who offered to supply free pizzas for a “closing” party or workparty. ML was too overwhelmed with emptying the store to take them up on it. However, they did not reach out to Cheese Board for financial advice, which one ML member regrets. ML did obtain a $20,000 loan from them in May of 2016 which they paid back in September 2016.
8 https://youtu.be/gJgLtA3KI28
9 Corey Rosen, co -founder of the National Center for Employee Ownership in Oakland, CA, recently published a book on employee ownership – OWNERSHIP: Reinventing Companies, Capitalism and Who Owns What. In his book he refers to cooperatives as member organizations: Co-ops … ”The owners remain owners only as long as they remain members….” (17) He further quotes Margaret Lund, with the University of Wisconsin Center of Cooperatives, saying that “… cooperatives offer their members the advantages of a democratically governed enterprise directed toward meeting the needs of participants [ie, the members].”(144)
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A careful reader will realize that I say nothing about Uptima, the group that Berkeley’s OED referred ML to for advice. I know nothing about Uptima beyond what I learned speaking to ML members and visiting their website. They are not listed as a worker cooperative support organization in the comprehensive report California Cooperatives: Today’s Landscape of Worker, Housing and Childcare Cooperatives (38)
(Thanks to AF for assistance with this text)
March, 2023
Comments welcomed: Bernard < info@ztangi.org >
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After several inquiries to NoBAWC, over a three month period, requesting more information on their current activities to include in my report, the NoBAWC Board wrote the following after posting my report to the NoBAWC listserv. It highlights their recent activities.
NoBAWC response [their Bold]
short & sweet — We believe the “Report on a worker cooperative closure” report’s outside assessment of our co-op network, NoBAWC, is incomplete and often inaccurate. We do our best, below, to spell out how our members and leadership are mobilizing our available resources toward building an organizing-centric NoBAWC with deep community trust and the ability to contest real power with and for our whole cooperative ecosystem. We invite you and our broader membership to tap into their network’s activities to continue improving and scaling our movement for a more-democratic society.
• • • • • • • • •
Bernard, and to our NoBAWC member peers —
Thanks for your thoughtful and detailed report on the demise of Missing Link. We believe it adds valuable contributions to the historical chronicling and diagnosis of the Bay Area’s co-op tradition; your commitment to and care for the co-op movement here is self-evident.
Unfortunately, we also think that your reporting demonstrates a lack of engagement with NoBAWC’s current organizing and associated communications. Your report’s public reckoning with NoBAWC distracts from your ultimate goal of trying to improve the co-op ecosystem; instead, it polemicizes a worker formation you have not participated in or deeply engaged with in its current iteration.
We strongly contend that the work our network has taken over the past year at NoBAWC has been deeply invested in an organizing model that prioritizes deep relationships and mobilization of our members — but creating the type of mobilization capacity capable of staving off the demise of worker-owned businesses in the Bay (especially ones who have opted out of our network, like Missing Link) takes time and trust, and that our current activities reflect that.
We wanted to provide a more complete list of NoBAWC activities for your review, which we think challenge many of the conclusions you’ve come to in your report. We’ve provided similar information to our members in our end-of-year letter, our social media platforms, and through our listserv. We’re committed to continuing to communicate them — and to expanding the scope and frequency of that communication. For now, we’ve undertaken re-spelling them out here:
• Our network now maintains —
° A new Peer Support tool specifically designed to help co-ops connect with other co-ops offering skills and support at nobawc.org/peer
° A survey and list-building practice — a method pioneered by Wobbly organizers — by which we can build our network of co-op worker-owners and supporters who can be called upon for mobilization and deeper organizing. We’ve used this list to do phone-banking of our individual worker-owner members ahead of every program we’ve undertaken this past year.
• Regular gatherings — which have only been socials in part —
° Our April 2022 mobilization around the Oakland Progressive Business Tax, which featured members of the Oakland Firefighter’s Union, Oakland Rising, and the Oakland Indie Alliance, attempting to connect our members with our local labor movement and social movement organizations.
° Our July 2022 mobilization with the WORC Coalition, which was a phonebank around statewide legislation to expand support for worker cooperatives, which passed in part due to our mobilization.
° Our September 2022 delegation to the National Cooperative Conference in Philadelphia, including our presentation there on member-led cooperative organizing.
° Our October and November 2022 site-visits, which were conducted not by a “paid director” but a coalition of worker-owners from NoBAWC assembled through an open call from our network, the WORC statewide coalition, and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, identifying and documenting our members’ biggest needs, leadership, and feedback on their networks’ activities through deep organizing.
° Our December 2022 Holiday Party, which prominently featured a gathering to discuss recent member-cooperative activities.
° Our open call for worker owners to join other small business owners to discuss cooperative issues in the city of Oakland in our collaborative organizing series with the Real People’s Fund, which has helped develop our core Board’s municipal organizing capacity to be able to lead mobilizations to contest power in support of worker cooperatives.
It’s true that we didn’t have the time or capacity to comment on your report while it was in the making. This is because, as separate business owners and managers ourselves, our time is extremely limited; this extends to our staff coordinator as well, who is only paid for 8 hours of weekly work. Our priorities lie in our organizing, and we regret that media/press/reporting inquiries can’t always be prioritized. Your correspondence mentioned “If I don’t hear from you I will simply report that NoBAWC has been more active in the last few years but a timely update on specific activities and programs has not been forthcoming.” This sentiment does not seem reflected in the piece.
We’re excited to debrief your piece with you — and our membership — in greater depth — our email and phone correspondence since your piece was published has gone unresponded as of March 22nd, 2023. We also want to encourage you to participate in your network’s activities and programming — including April 25th’s event at Understory Oakland mobilizing Bay Area worker-owners around statewide cooperative legislation and May 16th’s job fair and membership meeting at Omni Commons, and the more formal membership meeting that we’ll have at the end of spring.
To our members: your network leadership is dedicated and committed to deepening our structured cooperative organizing, following both the brilliant cooperative organizers and leaders participating actively in your network — and the broader spirit of Bernard’s report. We’re also committed to — in our April-May site visit series — inviting you all explore meeting up with former worker-owners from closed businesses to more fully debrief what steps we as a network can take to stave off local cooperatives from closing.
We want robust conversation, healthy disagreement, and member leadership in our network; that’s not only what makes our network stronger, but is also the lifeblood of the more-democratic world we’re all struggling to build together.
We hope, Bernard — and our entire membership — you’ll continue actively organizing with us toward that world.
In solidarity, The NoBAWC Board of Directors – info@nobawc.org
J. Noven, Lilly Alvarez, Adrionna Fike, amber hilton, Jameelah Lane, Cam McCuskey
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Bernard’s response:
The following paragraph in NoBAWC’s response to my report seems to ignore my efforts to secure an update from them:
Unfortunately, we also think that your reporting demonstrates a lack of engagement with NoBAWC’s current organizing and associated communications. Your report’s public reckoning with NoBAWC distracts from your ultimate goal of trying to improve the co-op ecosystem; instead, it polemicizes a worker formation you have not participated in or deeply engaged with in its current iteration.
NoBAWC failed to communicate with me after repeated efforts and then accuses me of “lack of engagement.” Furthermore, they attribute this “lack of engagement” that they are responsible for as leading to my polemicalization of NoBAWC.
My pivotal question re the current role of NoBAWC, as opposed to its historic activity that I documented, is not explicitly dealt with: given the proliferation of professional support to develop worker cooperatives, what is the role of NoBAWC in that situation? Some of the activities that are listed seem to be worthwhile and relevant to that question. And while I have misgivings about “mobilizing” for government aid on the State level, it could be relevant on the municipal level, not for its financial reward (Oakland is practically bankrupt), but for its political impact, that is, in building solidarity in the community of democratically run enterprises. It seems that the activity centered on Oakland could be an argument for having an East Bay section and a SF Bay section of NoBAWC. Maybe a sectional divide would entice more co-ops to join. Of the 90+ worker-cooperatives (and allied groups) listed on NoBAWC website map of co-ops, less than half are dues-paying members of NoBAWC.