capitalism
April 9, 2012
From Moral Hazard to Virtuous Cycle
If events of the last three years have taught us anything, it’s that America needs a new business plan. Main Street has suffered outsourcing, foreclosures and pink slips, while Wall Street has secured a taxpayer-financed lifeline and awarded its executives mega-bonuses. This doesn’t pass civic decency muster or the economic patriotism smell test. Fortunately, more enlightened national leaders are showing us another way.
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. (more…)
April 3, 2012
Reconstructing America’s Economic System Is Within Reach | Truthout
Excerpt from the introduction to the new paperback edition of “America Beyond Capitalism”:
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. (more…)
April 2, 2012
Cooperative businesses provide a new-old model for job growth | Christian Science Monitor
Co-ops worldwide represent much more than hippie grocery stores: They’re a fast-growing way to do business better in fields from finance to agriculture to industry. (more…)
March 27, 2012
Worker Ownership For the 21st Century? | The Nation
By Laura Flanders
It may not be the revolution’s dawn, but it’s certainly a glint in the darkness. On Monday, this country’s largest industrial labor union teamed up with the world’s largest worker-cooperative to present a plan that would put people to work in labor-driven enterprises that build worker power and communities, too.
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.
March 26, 2012
The New “Union Co-op” Model | Gar Alperovitz
From Gar Alperovitz’s blog:
The new model for a “union co-op,” one which combines principles of worker ownership and labor solidarity—jointly announced by the United Steelworkers, the Ohio Employee Ownership Center and Mondragón on March 26, 2012—represents a major and positive historic advance in community wealth-building. Their work is helping to forge the building blocks of a new economy.
The late John Logue, who founded the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, would have been thrilled by this news. John long viewed cooperative worker ownership as a critical tool to defend workers against the ravages of a globalized economy.
The proposed model, however, does more than establish worker ownership. The involvement of the Steelworkers revives the American tradition of union participation in cooperatives, which began with the Knights of Labor more than a century ago. At Mondragón co-ops, a “social council” makes sure that the “primacy of labor” so central to their values is in fact honored in practice. Here the Steelworkers union will play this crucial role, repurposing the traditional collective bargaining agreement in a new framework, one designed not around conflict, but around balancing the imperatives in a cooperatively owned workplace.
Read the full blog post here.
March 26, 2012
Worker Ownership for the 99%
The United Steelworkers, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center Announce a New Union Cooperative Model to Reinsert Worker Equity Back into the U.S. Economy
Pittsburgh (March 26, 2012) – Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers (USW), together with representatives from Mondragon International, S.A., the global worker industrial cooperative leader, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC), announced today that a new “union co-op” model template 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.
Titled “Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model”, this new public domain template (available at www.usw.coop and www.union.coop) offers a road-map primer for competitive and equitable employment creation based on fifty-five years of Mondragon principles put into marketplace practice. (more…)
March 19, 2012
MUPPETEERED
Whether acting in or out as Miss Piggy, Big Bird, Oscar, the Cookie Monster, Kermit the Frog, Animal, Gonzo the Great or Fozzie Bear, according to Goldman Sachs, we, the 99%, are all Muppets in waiting. Those pulling our strings in the name of their own unalienable rights to unearthly wealth creation at our working class expense should be sued by Jim Henson from his grave for breach of contract with the cultural heartbeat and soul of a country that is still a great deal more than the sum of its markets. (more…)
March 6, 2012
Reasons to Believe
There is a new heartland heartbeat of hope and inspiration making its way across America providing freedom, sustenance, fulfillment, sustainable progress and community-recycled profits. Following English 101 guidance where our teachers taught it was far better to “show, not tell;” actual place-based economic models are starting to transform foreclosed, outsourced and “creatively destroyed” industrial and residential wastelands. Showing through working mainstream bipartisan parables instead of broadcasting via predictable and disheartening partisan political discourse, a new American reality is emerging just below the surface of decay, abandonment and despair where the eye that sees comes up short against the entrepreneurial mind that perceives and acts while the working class soul prospers.
We need to see, touch, and feel what’s possible, to immunize ourselves against the campaign “Super Pac” induced message viruses coming our way. Trapped by “the worst politics money can buy,” anonymously-funded campaign sloganeering turns the pros and cons of vulture versus virtuous versus crony capitalism practices and excuses into a futile and infertile debate. We only know what’s real in our lives, what we aspire to and how we have no choice but to calibrate and try to heal the suffering at home, next door and down the street. Surrounded by decades of premeditated economic devastation that grows stagnant ugliness as an annual metropolitan and rural mutant harvest, we need reasons to believe, reasons to transform moral hazard (over the top risks without bearing any consequences) into stakeholder “friends with benefits.”
While still micro-sited and not yet everywhere, and without falling into the delusional narcissistic trap of wishful thinking, there is a whole new economy struggling under America’s crusty, polarized skin, trying to break free and go to scale. (more…)
January 13, 2012
The Bane of our Existence
“Sometimes people need to be fired, and sometimes they shouldn’t be hired at all. That’s reality.” So states Washington Post columnist, Kathleen Parker (“Romney’s rivals serve up a heaping helping of pious baloney”, published January 11, 2012). If only it were that simple…the gospel according to job creators.
Surviving the Great Recession with undisputable income inequality now the American norm, unfortunately not the un-American exception; too many unemployed, under-employed, foreclosed, and socially abandoned voters on all sides of the political spectrum are ready for something more useful from our political leaders this election year than a predictable and useless zero-sum debate placing all of the blame either on Wall Street or Washington D.C. In fact, the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent “occupy our public squares” protest-context frames this stand-off as the elites against the rest of us, fingering the collusion between big money and big government as the principal barrier to a more democratic prosperity. Extending this perception means that the powered and monied-up in both principal political parties are in the “peoples’ docket” with the “get out of jail free” verdict going to the most credible, the healers, the ones who lead by example, who turn their backs on trickle down and trickle up, who roll up their sleeves and get down in the ditch dregs with the rest of us as we dig our way out in ways we can believe. (more…)
January 1, 2011
Creating Shared Value | Harvard Business Review
by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer
The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.
Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent history. This diminished trust in business leads political leaders to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle.
Read the article and watch the interview with Michael Porter from the Harvard Business Review.
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