Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

TREATMENT 255Social enterprises in Germany are generally not run as worker cooperatives, butefforts have been made to create partnerships between workers and management.The main objective of these enterprises is to provide permanent full-wage workfor people with psychiatric disabilities. They also employ non-disabled workers atcompetitive salaries. There are more than a hundred social enterprises inGermany, employing over 1,000 people. These nonprofit companies are usuallyspecialized firms producing foods (often health foods) or technical products, orproviding domestic services, such as moving, painting and repairs and offeringoffice services and printing. Often about 30 per cent of the company’s net incomeis derived from government subsidies in the form of wage supplements that areawarded for each disabled worker at a diminishing rate over three years. Unlessnew disabled workers are hired, subsidies dwindle until the company has tosurvive on earnings alone. With careful planning this is feasible, and only a smallnumber of the social enterprises established in Germany have been forced to shutdown. 32Social firms have also proven viable in Japan. In Obihiro in northern Japan,consumer-employing businesses include a vegetable farm, a coffee shop and ahotel kitchen. In Okayama mentally ill workers provide milk delivery to 250households, operate a meals-on-wheels service and run a café.Can mental health agencies in North America and the British Isles developnon-profit consumer-employing enterprises similar to the continental Europeanmodels? There are some successful examples. Monadnock Family Services inKeene, New Hampshire, has established a consumer-owned and managedcooperative with projects that began by buying, renovating and selling houses 33and has now moved on to building garden furniture. 34 An Asian-American mentalhealth clinic in Washington state established a successful consumer-run espressobar in 1995. 35 Aspen Diversified Industries, based in Colorado Springs, is arecently formed enterprise offering construction, assembly and janitorial servicesthat contracts with Colorado mental health centers to provide rehabilitation andemployment for their clients. The Americas Group of Workability International(www.americas-group.org), a federation of American affirmative businesses, listsseveral similar enterprises in ten states among its members. Virtually all of thevocational programming for mentally ill people in Toronto, Canada, has beenconverted to the social enterprise model. One such program is a consumer-runcourier business, AWay Express, which operates city-wide. The employees arepeople with mental illness who use the public transportation system to pick upand deliver packages all over the city, communicating with their dispatch officeby walkietalkie. 36 In Dublin, Irish Social Firms has operated a restaurant, a lunchcounter, a wool shop and a retail furniture store, but one-by-one these businessesare being closed due to cost overrun. There is considerable interest in social firmsin the United Kingdom. The Edinburgh Community Trust is networking withEuropean social firms and has a second-hand clothes and dressmaking business.The Richmond Fellowship has set up a printing business in Cambridge as aconsumer-employing cooperative. St James House in London is involved in