Brooklyn Friends School (BFS) is a pre-K through 12 Society of Friends school in Brooklyn that was founded in 1867 by a community long recognized for a courageous commitment to the abolition movement. While diversity is a value of Quaker education, antiracism, or the contestation of power and privilege at the structural level, has not necessarily been part of that tradition.
In 2000, a student of color and a white student were both caught in the same infraction. By all accounts, the white student got a slap on the wrist, while the school was attempting to suspend the student of color. Parents in the community said, “Enough is enough,” and initiated a walkout from the school.
Beginning his job at BFS as psychological consultant in this climate, Jeffrey Cox stepped in and announced that the students needed affinity groups—safe spaces for students of color and spaces where white students can learn to become allies. Cox was shocked that the call for segregated spaces was met with outrage from the teachers. Quaker culture has long struggled with a belief in the universal human community and internal tensions around racial identity and class power. The school culture reflected this larger dynamic: although embracing diversity was a schoolwide value, some teachers, staff, and administrators viewed the implementation of structures to support students of color as a departure from the traditions of the Quaker community. He said, “They rode on the laurels of—we have such a diverse population—a diverse school community—more than any other private school, therefore racism doesn’t exist—we’re racially tolerant of each other. The denial was based on the belief that being a faith-based institution took care of any racism.” The implementation of diversity programs was seen as the admission that the school was falling short of their Quaker values.
Looking for ways to address the internal challenges, Cox attended the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s (PISAB) Undoing Racism (UR) training where he had an epiphany: “I thought, oh, yes—this is an institutional thing—a systemic thing. It’s not individual and one person can’t fix it.” Wanting to share this perspective, Cox convinced three colleagues to attend the UR training and convinced the head of school to make this training available to all faculty and staff who wanted to go. This is how Jesse Phillips-Fein, a white middle and upper school teacher, engaged in antiracist work and became an ally in the struggle to implement affinity groups and hire a diversity director. Out of those who attended the UR workshop over the next several years, a core group developed who held monthly meetings in their homes, usually over dinner. This multiracial group, the “cofacilitators,” currently numbers around fifteen and has become an important piece of a structure that sustains community as it challenges the leaky dynamics of power and privilege at BFS.
Wishing to engage a larger community in dialogues about race, power, and privilege, Cox enlisted the help of one of the PISAB trainers to facilitate a “privilege 101” workshop at BFS that included a discussion of Tim Wise’s book White Like Me (2007). While participants appeared positive during the workshop itself, several teachers after the session expressed anger at having to read the book. The head of school also kicked off the school year by having the faculty read an article about black boys and the achievement gap, meaning that dialogue has been opening up in a variety of spaces even as there continues to be resistance.
Phillips-Fein was on both the all-school diversity committee, the group that was asked to make a recommendation about whether to hire a diversity director, as well as the committee that made a final recommendation to the head of school to hire Eddie Moore Jr. for the position. The committee, which represented faculty and staff from the various divisions of BFS, used the consensus process to reach a hiring decision. This process is used for all decision making in the Quaker school and was seen as being extremely important to the culture of the organization. It ensures that dissenting voices are heard, and it seeks to find unity among the members of the organization as a guiding force for the head of school to act on. The head of school took up the committee’s recommendation and hired Moore.
Hiring Eddie Moore Jr. constituted a decisive shift in organizational values. Moore is the founder of the White Privilege Conference, an annual antiracist conference in its fourteenth year where educators and activists get together in order to share material to try to get to the roots of racism. Putting Moore at the helm of the school’s diversity initiatives indicated a transformation from thinking simply about diversity to reframing the school’s mission to encompass social justice and civil rights. While hiring a diversity director had been on the table for more than five years, the decision to hire occurred only after a critical mass of faculty had become engaged in antiracist work, shifting their perspective on what diversity should be to a social justice and civil rights focus. This new social justice orientation made the selection of Moore as the diversity director logical; it would not have been had the groundwork been laid through the involvement of faculty in trainings and conversations around power and privilege. Individuals and structures both within and beyond the school led to Moore’s becoming the head of diversity, and together these structures and individuals provide the infrastructure for antiracist work at BFS.
Moore does not characterize his work as addressing inequality gaps, which he considers “too monumental and entrenched in our society” to possibly address. The gaps that he hopes to close fester in the space between potential and actual performance for children of color. “I want to get little Eddie from a 2.5 to a 3.8,” said Moore, indicating the type of achievement gap that is often discussed in US schools.
Phillips-Fein attributes these achievement gaps in part to the dominance of white culture in schools: “School is a place of white culture—it’s not just going to school in a culture that’s different from your own, but it’s also that the dominant culture is built to serve white people and white supremacy, necessarily at the expense of everyone else.” Addressing power and privilege in the school context takes the form of curriculum that begins in the pre-K classes and extends through high school. Today Moore and Phillips-Fein are central to a schoolwide commitment to rigorous antiracism training for educators, curriculum for youth, and culture for the community. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
In interviews with Moore, Phillips-Fein, and Cox, we asked about the extent to which Quaker culture created fertile grounds for systematic interrogation of privilege, power, and diversity. We were initially confused and then delighted when both Moore and Phillips-Fein referred to Quakerism as being synonymous with whiteness, and Moore proceeded to explain that “white privilege allows people to feel as if they can do something to address inequality gaps” (whereas Moore, as an African American does not) “and that’s a beautiful thing about whiteness.” White people tend to expect justice. Moore contends that whiteness, a form of power from which antiracist activists often distance themselves, is actually a resource that enables people to have a greater impact.
While Moore was unclear about what motivates white antiracists, Phillips-Fein felt that with a provocative awareness of injustice, “they can see that this is messed up (how unequal things are) and it is really eating people up inside.” This ethical sense that things should be and are not just leads to anger, which can be a powerful motivator to act. She continued:
Anger—having a certain attitude about what’s justice. The ability to be deeply self-reflective—in public, I think that’s what helped me—to make horrible mistakes and not wanting to see it and having people walk me through seeing it. It’s brutal, but whiteness is such a blind spot, really. Yeah, I think uh—Anger, I think is a crucial, crucial emotion—I think rage really propelled me for a long time, but it’s not sustainable.
These emotional reasons for committing to action connect closely to those hypothesized in recent research looking at motivations for solidarity (e.g., Iyer and Ryan, 2009), but they do not complete the picture as there are many in the same position who have not become engaged in antiracist work (Phillips-Fein estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the te
achers at BFS are), a proportion that is no doubt well above the rest of the population, which gives hope that the actions of individuals within organizations can lead to significant social change. She also described her own motivation for the work coming out of a place of love—love for both marginalized and dominant groups—as well as a belief in the possibility of a different world. It is this belief in the ability to effect change that fuels faculty and administrators’ commitment to the work. While all acknowledge that there is still much work to do, Cox, Phillips-Fein, and Moore vacillate between hope and despair, but so far, the hope is still winning.
Praxis Consulting Group: Building Employee-Owned Cooperatives by Addressing Inequality
Social psychologist Ginny Vanderslice (president) and Alex Moss, cofounders and principles of Praxis Consulting in Philadelphia, provide organizational consultation to employee-owned companies (through employee stock ownership plans) and worker cooperatives, for profit and nonprofit, to help redesign organizations or their internal processes toward increased worker participation control and greater economic equity. Providing some history, they explained that worker-owned organizations in the United States are modeled in part after Mondragon, the “embodiment of the co-operative movement,” launched in 1956 in the Basque region of Spain and founded on the principles of cooperation, participation, social responsibility, and innovation. Vanderslice and Moss then referenced research on worker cooperatives that workplaces where employees share ownership and participate significantly in decision making are healthier organizations in terms of return on equity, low employee turnover, growth in revenue, job retention in economic downturns, and organizational sustainability.
A 2012 survey of restaurant employees conducted by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, for example, found that restaurants that treated their employees, particularly undocumented employees, with respect and job security had higher profits and lower employee turnover than restaurants rated as having poor management-employee relations. The report states:
The restaurant industry is one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the national economy. In 2009 it accounted for $277 billion of U.S. Gross Domestic Product and employed nearly 1 in 12 private-sector workers. While the industry has grown rapidly, its long-term stability is threatened by poor job quality. Restaurant workers have the lowest wages of any occupational category, and 90% of restaurant workers do not receive paid sick days, paid vacation, or health insurance through their employer. Moreover, there is often little career mobility and racial segregation keeps people of color disproportionately in the lowest paid positions. These factors increase employee turnover and decrease employee loyalty and productivity, which in turn reduce the quality of food and service. Moreover, restaurant patrons are exposed to contagion when workers cannot afford to stay home when sick.
Illustrating the direct link between job quality and the long-term success and stability of a restaurant, this report provides concrete examples of restaurateurs who have created “win-win-win” solutions for workers, diners, and employers alike. Other restaurant employers can learn from the experiences and insights of these successful business owners.
Studies place the cost of turnover between $4,000 and $14,000 per employee turnover, and the National Restaurant Association has placed the cost at $7,000, in current dollars. (ROC United, 2012)
When asked. “Why would a CEO try to steer a hierarchical organization toward employee ownership?” Vanderslice and Moss provided a range of responses:
Some CEOs or managers really want to flatten an organization and move away from organizational hierarchy. Often these are people of some privilege, with progressive politics, who are dedicated to equalizing power among workers or members and who believe workers ought to have the right to share in the wealth they are creating through their work.
Some cooperatives, like artist cooperatives or farmer cooperatives, are initiated by individuals who seek to build nonhierarchical organizations rooted in economic, social, and political interdependence in which consumers (food co-op) or producers (artist or dairy co-ops) become the shareholders.
Some CEOs find themselves running an organization that has a 100 percent employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), which legally pays no taxes on profits, and are eager to learn more about how to manage such an organization with economic interdependence, but begin with little knowledge about worker ownership or participation.
Vanderslice and Moss explained that while the traditional corporation is driven primarily by a profit motive, today a growing number of corporations and organizations are driven by commitments to the three Ps: people, profit, and the planet. Careful to avoid a romantic interpretation of the proliferation of organizations dedicated to the three Ps, they were generous in describing a variety of organizational strategies for narrowing inequality gaps, fostering a sense of collective ownership, and facilitating broad-based participation:
So we got a call a couple of weeks ago from the CEO [of a hybrid ESOP] and he said, “You know, we’ve just come to the end of a one-year compensation design process and we’ve done the market studies and we’ve figured out what I as CEO ought to be paid relative to my workers because we’ve benchmarked this against a lot of other companies and the Board thinks we’re done, but I don’t think we’re done and the reason I don’t think we’re done is because we haven’t asked the question, is this fair? What does pay fairness mean? . . . Should I have a ratio of four-to-one? Four hundred disgusts me. Four to one probably ties my hands—and I’m not worried about me, I’m worried about hiring these guys [gestures toward leadership team on diagram] who will become me. Can I attract and retain people with the kind of experience and talent? . . . The board is saying fair is market—you’ve got market comp.” And the CEO said no, market is market—that is not fairness. We’re not going to define fairness as market. But they don’t know what [fair] is and so they’re arguing about it.
They sketched a fuller model of shared ownership, economics, and participation when they described the Cooperative Home Care Association (CHCA) in New York City, a cooperative initiated by a Latina woman and Anglo man committed to organizing home health care workers, primarily low-wage-earning black and Latina women, into a for-profit collective for workers’ rights, quality home care, and community development. Over almost thirty years, the association has built a strong infrastructure of shared governance, quality care, and strong advocacy for increased pay and benefits. For the first fifteen years, CHCA was funded through support from philanthropic foundations. It has been financially self-sustaining for the past ten years. Dedicated to quality care through quality jobs, one of the founders transitioned out of his management role and launched a 501(c)(3) organization for organizing and coordinating high-quality services for persons with disabilities. CHCA and this organization, working for disability justice, invited the health care workers’ union, 1199, to organize their workers in order to help them address grievances, pay disputes, and benefits and to participate in worker-management initiatives to improve working conditions.
Clear that worker participation and protection do not derive automatically from shared ownership, Praxis encourages organizations to pursue organizational strategies that simultaneously address structural and economic change in ownership and financial interdependence and practices that support the psychological participation and well-being of the workers. “Being an owner doesn’t protect your worker interests,” says Moss. “It doesn’t give you a right to make grievances.” With insight for organizations and movements working on structural change, Vanderslice and Moss are clear that any strategic design to narrow inequality gaps must deliberately and explicitly address both the material conditions of organizational life (economics and structure) and the social psychological dynamics (participation and engagement).
Reciting studies that link high worker engagement with high organizational effectiveness, the Praxis consultants explained that ESOPs, which now comprise more than 10 percent of the US workforce (a
lthough this is usually a minute percentage of total ownership, especially in publicly traded companies), serve as an economic platform on which conversations about joint ownership, participation, and justice can be launched. Building and leading organizational cultures of shared ownership, strong participation, and authentic inclusion, however, requires dedicated leadership, as we saw in BFS. Vanderslice explains that ESOPs are increasingly popular; given the financial incentives of 100 percent ESOPs paying no taxes on profits, the ranks are swelling. But in an ESOP, employees who have been granted additional economic rights develop heightened expectations for participation and involvement in governance. Vanderslice explained that the leadership challenges are great for maintaining a relatively equitable and participatory organization across status and hierarchy.
Finally, Vanderslice and Moss described an emergent social movement of certified B Corporations—for-profit corporations that have earned a recognized certification for social responsibility based on workforce and social and environmental metrics. Essentially these corporations replace the dominant bottom-line-only-focused organizational mission with high standards of purpose, sustainability, and transparency. The inclusion of social responsibility in the organizational mission constitutes a radical shift in business philosophy. Fourteen states now have laws that recognize benefit corporation status, which requires that boards of directors have an obligation to consider not only the stakeholders’ well-being and profit maximization but also the well-being of employees and the environment.
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