Among the people who advised Matthew Brown in Preston was an American named Ted Howard. The founder of a nonprofit called the Democracy Collaborative, Howard was a believer in the power of cooperative companies to create jobs at livable pay, even in the face of Davos Man pushing wages lower. He and his colleagues had launched a series of cooperatives in the United States, among them a laundry service based in a low-income neighborhood in Cleveland. The company paid wages that were adequate to finance a middle-class standard of living, including health care and profit sharing. It had secured a
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