Worker Ownership for the 99%

[TheGoodNews]

This is a video is from 2012. It seems to be a good idea, bringing United Steelworkers, Mondragon and OEOC together to form worker coops. As the OEOC director said, studies suggest that worker coops are more productive. You can contact them to see what progress they may have made in the past two years here:

USW:

http://usw.org/our_union/contact

The Ohio Employee Ownership Center:

http://www.oeockent.org/resources-events/selling-to-your-employees/worker-owned-cooperatives/

And Mondragon:

http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/language/en-US/ENG/Contact-us.aspx

[jtuck004]

1. Workers will never have any security until they control, or own, the means of production.

That's what the priest that started Mondragon taught them, Rochdale cooperative principles, math, junior college level engineering/manufacturing. And after finding out that trying to "control" the means of production was fruitless they bought a paraffin stove manufacturing company, and now have their own university, hospital, manufacturing facilities and the satellite businesses that come from manufacturing like no other source. The unemployment among the Basque during this global downturn has been decidedly better than the rest of Spain.

Not problem free, and it's not the utopia of egalitarian operation, but it's owned by employees who are doing better than many in Spain right now.

We will never be able to get rid of greed, and barring another deep depression and a decade or two of hunger and misery, I doubt there will be much success in organizing against wealth for at least another 30 or 40 years. I think the only real hope is organizing to operate and gain assets, and I think groups who pursue that might do better than average.