In today’s economically class-cleaved America, ideological resistance continues unabated to the deployment of government as a force for good especially in contentious change scenarios such as solving growing wealth and opportunity divides and the future of organized Labor (to name just two). Too often, progress is facilitated mainly through the prism of trickle-down tax code […]
A new worker-ownership evolution-revolution featuring more virtuous capitalism communities of practice is demonstrating that doing well can realistically and profitably be based on doing good. This brave new economic world is emerging from green-shoot, “made in America” antidotes to structural unemployment and income inequality, sprouting ubiquitously among increasing absentee-owner-plagued urban and rural geographies. Hybrid home, […]
By Don Spatz Reading,PA — Reading could get its first workers cooperative next year in its push to foster an alternative business model that competes with Wall Street. The co-op would be an employee-owned firm composed mostly of apprentices being trained in building demolition, deconstruction (razing all or some of a building, but reusing its […]
A new socio-political populist movement is sweeping America in reaction to the 2008 financial tsunami of deregulated, greed-based causes and massive wealth transfer effects or receipts to the financial one-percent. Based purely on the numbers seen to date, this movement is and will be composed of rising and current Millennials and the “Net Generation” or […]
Paper submitted by Michael Peck (Mondragon USA), Steve Dubb (The Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland), and Rob Witherell (United Steelworkers Union) for the “Corporations in a Great Transition: Visions, Models, and Pathways for Transformation” event hosted by the Tellus Institute & MIT Sloan School of Management, in Boston on October 31st & November 1st, 2013. Capitalism […]
A long-term plan to renovate the American dream begins at the local level and scales up. This article is adapted from Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? (Chelsea Green). by Gar Alperovitz Everyone knows the United States faces enormous challenges: unemployment, poverty, global warming, environmental decay—to say nothing of whole cities that have essentially […]
By Frank Islam and Ed Crego The American jobs machine is broken. To fix this, we need to bring more cooperation to capitalism and make it a team sport. In our previous two blogs we looked at the condition of labor and workers in the United States and recommended worker cooperatives as a means to […]
For Release: Wednesday, September 4, 2013 Laboral Kutxa (the Mondragon Bank) and National Cooperative Bank (NCB) to Partner in Growing Domestic Worker-Owned Cooperatives NCB & Laboral Kutxa Form Precedent-Setting USA Collaboration Memorandum of Understanding Signed on Wednesday, September 4th, 2013 The world’s largest industrial, worker-owned and run cooperative, Mondragon, founded in the Basque region of Spain over […]
By Chris Mackin In this 1987 MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour report, Paul Solman reported on workers’ attempt to buyout the General Dynamics shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, and spoke with Chris Mackin, a leader in the worker ownership movement. Paul Solman: Worker ownership: When I joined the labor force in 1970, it was the dream of many an […]
The debate over who lost Detroit and how to fix it rages on while Politico reports in “Break-up-the-big-banks fever hits the states” that legislators from “at least 18 states have introduced resolutions this year calling on Congress to split up banking giants by putting back in place a wall between commercial banking, taking deposits and […]