Archive for the 'Trade Unions' Category

Why Not Add Another Weapon in Our Arsenal? Labor Veteran on Mondragon

by @ Saturday, August 28th, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Trade Unions

Why Can’t  American  Labor  Build

Its Own Cooperative ‘Mondragon’?

By Harry Kelber

SolidarityEconomy.net via Labor Talk

If you are looking for a model where  workers in a company are also the owners of what they produce, the finest example is the   Mondragon Corporation, a federation of  worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of northern Spain.


Founded in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon, the cooperative, now the largest in the world, has developed a new way to organize a company’s production that  is based on   workers’ rights and needs. It now has 40 enterprises employing 100,000 worker/owners,  manufacturing a large variety of products, from  washing machines to microchips,  from world-class bicycles to bullet trains, to building the titanium-covered Guggenheim  Museum in Bilboa, the Basque Country’s largest city.


The  Mondragon cooperatives  have developed a humanist concept of business, and a belief in worker participation and solidarity. There is no discrimination of any kind toward workers who are or become members.  In the General Assembly,  all workers take part in  policy decision, with each person having one vote.

(more...)

email2friend

There’s a Lesson Here: Union Workers, New Skills and a Green Energy Future

by @ Sunday, August 8th, 2010. Filed under Economy, Education, Trade Unions

The Power of One: Tracy Hall

Brings Renewable Energy

to Northwest Indiana


By Andrea Buffa
Apollo News Service 

 

July 22, 2010 - Tracy Hall of Munster, Indiana has been an electrician for 30 years. He is among the thousands of construction trades workers hit by the current recession, who have seen unemployment in the trades rise to almost 25 percent nationally. But Hall hasn’t had time to sit around getting depressed about the state of the economy. Instead, he’s spent the time when work has been scarce developing a new expertise. As the only union worker in Indiana who is certified as a solar photovoltaic installer by the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners, and a LEED Accredited Professional by the U.S. Green Building Council, he has become one of Northwest Indiana’s most knowledgeable renewable energy technicians.

(more...)

email2friend

Steelworkers Elaborate on Worker-Ownership Effort

by @ Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Trade Unions

Photo: Worker-Owner at MCC Coop

The Mondragon Alliance:

The Goal Is to Create Jobs

By Putting People First

 

By Rob Witherell

United Steel Workers


Keynote Speech at Western Mass.

Jobs with Justice Conference March 6, 2010

--  An official unemployment rate of 10%
--  A real rate of unemployment and underemployment of 17%
--  Millions of good paying jobs lost, including 2 million manufacturing jobs in the past year alone
--  Stagnating wages
--  Frozen pensions and inadequate 401(k) plans
--  Sky rocketing health insurance costs
--  Millions of people without health insurance
--  Millions of people falling into poverty
--  Millions of people receiving food stamps to feed their families
--  Millions of people homeless and millions more struggling to stay in the homes they have

In the middle of the worst recession we've seen in the past 70 years, conservative politicians in Washington, DC are defiantly putting the purity of their ideals before the reality of the painful consequences.  Congress is not a high school debate club.  People need help, not talking points.

Wall Street executives, who were part of creating this crisis, were the first ones with their hands out, asking for help from Main Street taxpayers.  We gave them billions and billions of dollars.  As panic began to recede, they gave some of those billions back rather than have to live with the few strings attached.  These fat cat executives are trying to avoid accountability and transparency, regardless of the cost.  The millions of dollars in bonuses being paid again to executives, while insulting to the rest of us, are less harmful to our economy and our communities than the fact that little has changed in how Wall Street works.  Years of increasing deregulation have left us with a Wild West of finance where anything goes.

(more...)

email2friend

Who Is To Be Master? What Happens When Workers Occupy Factories

by @ Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010. Filed under Economic Democracy, Socialism, Trade Unions

Photo: Flasko workers in Brazil

[Note from CarlD: Following are two articles on what debates break out when workers occupy or take ownership of factories. The first is from a single case in Brazil, the second from an earlier regionwide meeting on the topic in Venezuela. I think these are examples of the unity and tension in what Gramsci called 'wars of position' and 'wars on maneuver'. The solidarity economy concept is both supported and contested.]

Workers from Occupied

'Flasko' Factory Repond

to Brazil's President Lula

 

On 12/01/2010 President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva said publicly in his weekly column "The President replies”, a question of journalism student (Camila Delmondes) on the struggle of the workers occupied the factory Flaskô.
The response given (which can be read http://imprensa.planalto.gov.br/download/Informe_da_Hora/PRR120110.doc) believe it is essential that the workers' management of Flaskô respond to Squid and the entire working class which was said the President. First of all, it is worth noting that since 12 June 2003 when we occupied the factory and resumed production to ensure our jobs, we await a response from the President. During these seven years almost non stop fighting for the maintenance of Flaskô open under the control of workers and always demanded that the federal government.

(more...)

email2friend

Mondragon, Solidarity Economy Get a Peek in Mainstream Media

by @ Thursday, December 24th, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Trade Unions

Photo: Coop Bakeries in California

In Cleveland,
Worker Co-Ops Look
to a Spanish Model

By Judith D. Schwartz
Time Magazine

Dec 22, 2009 - While officials, pundits and the everyday folks who have to pay bills lament unemployment rates that won't go down and wages that won't go up, some Rust Belt planners and union leaders are feeling optimistic: they're taking inspiration from the Basque region of Spain, where a network of worker-owned cooperatives launched amid the rubble of the Spanish Civil War has grown to become the country's seventh-largest corporation, and among its most profitable.

The Mondragon Corp. (MCC), based in northern Spain, is a multilayered business group with 256 independent companies (more than 100 of which are worker-owned cooperatives) that employs more than 100,000 people. It has long been legendary among scholars and activists seeking to bolster workers' rights. (See the top 10 everything of 2009.)

The Mondragon story began in 1941, when a Catholic priest, Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta (often shortened to Arizmendi), found in the Basque town war-torn devastation where there had been a thriving manufacturing base. He opened a polytechnic school, which in 1956 spawned its first cooperative, a stove factory. Half a century later, the Mondragon enterprise encompasses firms making everything from machine tools to electronics to bicycles, along with a retail division, a university and a significant financial sector, with the large cooperative bank Caja Laboral at its core.

While many think of cooperatives as a small-scale hippie mainstay, the Mondragon Corp. is huge, hard-nosed business-wise and successful; in 2008, with Spain's economy in the doldrums, MCC's income rose 6%, to 16.8 billion euros. The Mondragon Corp. maintains its commitment to one-worker, one-vote democratic governance through a complex, carefully honed organizational structure in which the corporation serves as a kind of metacooperative for the individual companies. Through representatives and resources drawn from the larger network, it provides support for planning, research and generation funding for new businesses.

(more...)

email2friend

Steelworkers Aim at Job Creation with Worker-Owned Factories

by @ Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009. Filed under Economic Democracy, Organizing, Socialism, Trade Unions

Photo: High-tech Machine Tools from MCC

‘One Worker, One Vote:'

US Steelworkers to Experiment

with Factory Ownership,

Mondragon Style


By Carl Davidson
SolidarityEconomy.net


Oct. 27, 2009--The United Steel Workers Union, North America's largest industrial trade union, announced a new collaboration with the world's largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon International, based in the Basque region of Spain.


News of the announcement spread rapidly throughout the communities of global justice activists, trade union militants, economic democracy and socialist organizers, green entrepreneurs and cooperative practitioners of all sorts. More than a few raised an eyebrow, but the overwhelming response was, "Terrific! How can we help?"
The vision behind the agreement is job creation, but with a new twist. Since government efforts were being stifled by the greed of financial speculators and private capital was more interested in cheap labor abroad, unions will take matters into their own hands, find willing partners, and create jobs themselves, but in sustainable businesses owned by the workers.

(more...)

email2friend

[SolidarityEconomy.net is proudly powered by WordPress.]