October 10, 2012

— The highly anticipated new documentary film, SHIFT CHANGE (www.shiftchange.org), will be shown at Local Sprouts Café in Portland, Maine on October 22nd after having its world premiere in Oakland, California, on October 18, 2012.  Filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin will be coming to Portland to share their film and will present after the screening.    At a time when many are disillusioned with big banks, big business, and growing inequity in the United States, employee ownership offers real solutions for workers and communities. SHIFT CHANGE visits thriving cooperative businesses in the U.S. and Spain; sharing on-the-ground experiences, lessons, and observations from the worker-owners on the front lines of the new economy.

SHIFT CHANGE filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin gained unprecedented access to the world’s oldest and largest network of worker cooperatives in Mondragon—in the Basque Country of Spain—where 60% of local residents are employee-owners. With high job security and competitive salaries, the Basque Country boasts half the unemployment rate of the rest of Spain, and the Mondragon Corporation is the country’s 10th largest. SHIFT CHANGE explores many of Mondragon’s diverse production facilities; along with its network of cooperative infrastructure, education, and social services agencies, highlighting the qualities that have helped to drive Mondragon’s business success while also perpetuating the democratic, socially responsible, community-oriented principles upon which it was founded.

Here in the U.S.—where a long decline in manufacturing and a brutal economic crisis have led to millions of Americans being thrown out of work—many are looking to Mondragon as a model. Worker-owned businesses are on the rise, with hundreds of coops in the U.S. today, representing thousands of individual worker/owners. SHIFT CHANGE highlights some of the vibrant worker-owned companies across the nation: from bakeries to solar energy to manufacturing and engineering. Through in-depth interviews with worker-owners, attendance at coop meetings, and visits to the factory floor, the film conveys the promise that these businesses offer to reinvent our failing economy, provide a pathway to long term stability, and nurture a more egalitarian way of life.

Local Sprouts Cooperative is Portland’s only worker-owned cooperative and through this showing organizers hope to inspire more worker-owned cooperatives to develop.  On Thursday October 25th from 1-7pm Local Sprouts Cooperative, the Southern Maine Workers Center and Community Building Collaborative will host a workshop on Creating Worker Co-ops in our Community that will provide more an in-depth look at how to create cooperatives and how the lawyers, financial people, and small business developers can support new co-ops.

This showing of SHIFT CHANGE occurs during national Co-op Month (October) and the U.N.- declared International Year of Cooperatives (2012.coop).

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