Private equity firms and their investors from Taft-Hartley and state pension funds offered compelling accounts of their success in securing profitable returns on investment in U.S. manufacturing — especially in the Midwest — at the Heartland Capital Strategies fourth and final Responsible Investment Forum, organized in collaboration with the Blue Green Alliance.

Read the post, including a section of some of MAPA’s work, from the Huffington Post.

America’s manufacturing revival is being hailed by a growing chorus of voices. Manufacturing jobs increased at their fastest rate in almost a year, according to data from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). The Boston Consulting Group is forecasting the creation of between two and three million new manufacturing jobs by 2020, which will contribute an estimated $20 to $55 billion in added economic output per year. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics is less bullish, projecting just 357,000 new manufacturing jobs will be created over the next decade).

A Brookings Institution report released earlier this week charted the geographic concentration and clustering of manufacturing across the United States, noting that “the Midwest had the fastest manufacturing job gains over the last two years.”

Read the entire article from The Atlantic Cities.

They note, “the report begins by situating the present moment of U.S. manufacturing. It continues by reporting a series of often surprising descriptive trends affecting the nature and location of American production. Finally, it concludes by proposing geographic high-road policies for American manufacturing. These policies require a federal platform that is sensitive to the ways in which manufacturing differs geographically. They require state and local decisionmakers to take the lead in adapting the high-road approach to their specific needs. This policy prescription differs from the general business attraction incentives that have dominated state and local economic development policy. These incentives (which cost state and local treasuries $70 billion annually) are problematic because they reduce the revenue available to fund investments in training and technology—investments that are essential to a high-road approach.”

Find the report along with an interactive map and metropolitan profiles here.

The factory initially will consist of a 50-MW crystalline silicon PV module assembly line. Isofoton expects a shortterm ramp-up to a 100-MW assembly line, with plans then to add a 100-MW cell line. American Municipal Power, Inc. (AMP) has agreed to purchase up to 200 MW of solar panels over five years from Isofoton’s Napoleon factory, which also has been selected by the Turning Point Solar project in Noble County, Ohio, and American Electric Power (AEP) to supply photovoltaic panels for 49.9 MW of solar energy to be erected on reclaimed mine lands.

Isofoton has been refitting a building formerly occupied by an automotive supplier. Equipment is being installed and hiring is under way. Peck says the goal is to have at least 120 people working in the factory by the end of the year. Napoleon and Ohio offered the right mix for the company, he says.

“Toledo is one of the most important solar manufacturing clusters in the country,” Peck says. “It’s where thin film was invented and has an important group of companies and investments. None do exactly what Isofoton does, so it fits in without competing against any one.”

Read the rest of the story from the Industrial Asset Management Council‘s Site Selection.

At an event in Pittsburgh in October 2009, United Steelworkers International President, Leo Gerard, announced that his union was taking a historic first step to partner with Spain’s famed Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, the world’s largest worker-owned industrial cooperative, to transform manufacturing practices in North America.  Mondragon is Spain’s seventh-largest corporation and among its most profitable. By embracing its worker empowerment principles, the USW hopes to make union cooperatives a viable business model that can create good jobs, transform workers and support next generation manufacturing communities throughout the United States and Canada.

On March 26, 2012, the USW, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) announced that a new “union co-op ”model template (www.usw.coop and www.union.coop) is available for organizations wanting to combine worker equity with a progressive collective bargaining process. This template was created as follow up to the original USW-Mondragon framework agreement launched in October 2009 to collaborate in establishing Mondragon-like industrial manufacturing cooperatives that adopt collective bargaining principles to the Mondragon worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote” within the United States and Canada. You can view the announcement ceremony held at the USW headquarters in Pittsburgh here.

Titled “Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model,” this new public domain template offers a road-map primer for competitive and equitable employment creation based on fifty-five years of Mondragon principles put into marketplace practice. Aimed at creating an economy that can work for everyone who works, the union co-op model shows how “doing well by doing good” reflects core American values of self-reliance, community solidarity, and ownership as an ineluctable component of the American dream based on competitive business practices.

The underlying union co-op principle is that this model will result in improved, self-reinforcing, virtuous cycle worker and customer satisfaction through higher accountability, productivity, and efficiency because all workers will have an equal equity stake in the company, will share common goals, and adhere to common principles and practices that broaden the definition of value beyond the “bottom line.” Additionally, union coops through this model are structured to benefit from lower overhead costs while potentially accessing higher impact union benefit plans, such as healthcare and pensions. Simply put, union co-ops are a better way of doing business.

On a moral and spiritual level, we are seeing a national ecumenical movement to inspire congregations and faith-based practitioners to shift their funds from mega-bonus-paying Wall Street banks to local community banks and credit unions, proclaiming a new era of values-investing. President Barack Obama, during his first White House Jobs Summit which included a field trip to Pennsylvania, referred to “virtuous cycle” job creation strategies. These measures engender both employment and economic growth in ways that reinforce each other’s upward tendencies where the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

Indeed, the very structure of how we produce and reward needs to be reset and resold. As current unemployment figures and backed-up lending patterns prove, trickle-up and trickle-down strategies have lost all credibility. “Too big to fail” has become shorthand for socializing local losses while privatizing profits somewhere else.

We know firsthand on Main Street that global outsourcing has reached its tipping point — that supposed cost efficiencies and profits realized by U.S. global corporations overseas are overly offset by lost domestic opportunities and structural unemployment affecting generations of our neighbors. If we want to revive the polluted and betrayed American Dream, we need to build a more enlightened social compact, an equal-opportunities equation based on workers and communities as stakeholders equal to shareholders.

In this election year, Americans are yearning for something real, for trustworthy institutions, leaders who start and finish with their own examples, companies that put people and neighborhoods before profits, and financial institutions that are free of myopic, self-serving greed and who exist to serve our common society, instead of the reverse.

The change we need can be dramatic and effective. We have seen how the coming together of progressive labor and environmental movements transformed the energy and climate debate during the last national election cycle. Now, we anticipate another national movement emerging where unions and cooperatives, perhaps joined by faith-based organizations, form new collaborative models that adapt collective bargaining principles to cooperative models and worker ownership principles, that combine local investments with the promotion of locally-owned credit union strategies, and that add affiliated benefit packages as a technique to lower overhead and induce more competitiveness and shared prosperity.

Structuring finance in this way could set up a reoccurring, multiple bottom-line win (quality, innovation, empowerment, competitiveness, profitability, community enhancement) for a new generation of stakeholders holding local economy jobs that stick and sustain.

The United States is not hardwired to endure poverty, either politically or socially. We will never be able to compete purely on a basis of lowest cost (nor should we want to), because lowest cost usually means lower safety, health-care, environmental, and compensation standards and has little to do with actual productivity. But, we can compete on a basis of highest quality through innovation, where cost, while always important, becomes secondary and where local rejuvenation becomes the norm, not the exception.

Only Wall Street believes its model will self-perpetuate — the rest of us are moving on so that no community is left behind. We need to reactivate the winning aspects of our culture to bring forth the widening and deepening benefits of democracy when competing against other more top-down and rigid national models.

There is a new playing field to construct coming to your neighborhood that is altruistic, symbiotic, transparent, equitable, meritocratic, profitable, and above all – local – for the people, by the people.

The primary theoretical and strategic argument of America Beyond Capitalism is that an “evolutionary reconstruction” of the system is not only necessary but well within the range of long run possibility. The argument rests on three challenging assessments:

The first and foundational judgment is that (quite apart from other considerations) with the radical decline of organized labor as an institution from 35 percent of the labor force to 6.9 percent in the private sector (11.9 percent overall, and falling), a new progressive politics must ultimately build new institutional foundations to undergird its fundamental approach, or it will continue to remain in an essentially defensive and ultimately declining posture.

Read the full excerpt from Truthout.

By Jessica Reeder, Sharable Magazine

What do coffee growers in Ethiopia, hardware store owners in America, and Basque entrepreneurs have in common? For one thing, many of them belong to cooperatives. By pooling their money and resources, and voting democratically on how those resources will be used, they can compete in business and reinvest the benefits in their communities.

The United Nations has named 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, and indeed, co-ops seem poised to become a dominant business model around the world. Today, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are cooperative member-owners. That’s one in five adults over 15 – and it could soon be you.

Read the entire article from the Christian Science Monitor.

In Pittsburgh, PA, on March 26, 2012, BlueGreen Alliance founding members the United Steelworkers (USW), together with the global worker industrial cooperative leader Mondragon International, S.A. and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) announced a new union co-op model for organizations wanting to combine worker equity with a progressive collective bargaining process. This template was created as a follow up to the original USW-Mondragon framework agreement launched in October 2009, in which the parties agreed to establish Mondragon-like industrial manufacturing cooperatives that adopt collective bargaining principles of the “one worker, one vote” ownership model within the United States and Canada.

“To survive the boom and bust, bubble-driven economic cycles fueled by Wall Street, we must look for new ways to create and sustain good jobs on Main Street,” urged Leo W. Gerard, USW International President. “This union co-op model, created through our partnership with Mondragon and with the assistance of the OEOC, provides a viable road map on how we might begin fielding these sustainable jobs. Worker ownership can provide the opportunity to figure out collective alternatives to layoffs, bankruptcies, and closings in hard times, rather than having the rug pulled right out from under struggling communities to the benefit of a few at the expense of the many.”

Read the post from the Blue-Green Blog here. 

Titled “Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model,” the organizational proposal released at a press conference on March 26 in Pittsburgh, draws on the fifty-five year experience of the Basque-based Mondragon worker cooperatives. To quote the document:

“In contrast to a Machiavellian economic system in which the ends justify any means, the union co-op model embraces the idea that both the ends and means are equally important, meaning that treating workers well and with dignity and sustaining communities are just as important as business growth and profitability.”

It might not sound like big news to members of their local food coop but it’s revolutionary stuff in the context of industrial production. The United Steelworkers represents some 1.2 million members; the average steel plant requires millions of dollars of investment, and there’s history here when it comes to worker ownership—some of it painful.

Read the entire article from The Nation here.

In a world where bankers and executives often argue that high pay is directly correlated with success and talent, Mondragon, the Basque workers co-operative, is proud to offer an alternative model.

Founded in 1956, with its roots in a technical college set up by a Catholic priest, the Mondragon Corporation is one of Spain’s top 10 largest companies by sales, with worker-owned businesses including the Eroski supermarket chain, banking, electrical domestic products and car parts manufacturing.

José María Aldecoa, Mondragon’s chairman, earns no more than eight times that of the lowest paid workers within the co-operative, making him probably one of Europe’s lowest paid corporate leaders weighted against sales.

At the same time, more than 90 per cent of Mondragon’s collective workers have salaries that are the same, or higher, than those working in equivalent companies.

Read the entire Special Report from the Financial Times here.