in the Marcellus Anti-Fracking Movement

A Stronger Steelworkers’ Voice Is Needed

in the Marcellus Shale Anti-Fracking Movement

By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue

There’s a specter haunting Western PA. It’s the prospect of a working class divided by a fear of water pollution destroying the property values of small homeowners on one side, and on the other side, by the promise of new wealth from the exploitation of natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica shale deposits.

A similar fear divides West Virginians over ‘mountaintop removal’ mining. Little towns are split between those who want food on the table and those fearful of poisoning their children.

Steelworkers can certainly see the problem in our own terms. It takes a lot of steel pipe to drill down two to four miles, then drill out a horizontally for another mile in a dozen directions. The tube mills are getting the orders and steelworkers are back to work. On the other hand, steelworkers know the dangers of poisoning the ground and the rivers better than most.

Everything goes somewhere. When the drillers lace 6,000,000 gallons of water with a ton of poisonous chemical brine, pump it underground to break up shale and release the natural gas, a lot of the water comes back up with the gas. A lot also stays underground. The poisonous brine that comes back up is caught in plastic-lined ponds that often leak. Some is reused, some spilled, some carted away in tankers. Some of the tankers leak or dump the brine along the way. A lot is partially treated by a few water treatment plants. Then it goes into the local rivers heavy with salt. Already the Ohio downstream has growing percentages of toxic brine. To repeat, everything goes somewhere.

Is there a way to protect our jobs in steel and our way of life? I think so. Ban drilling within a specified distance from the Ambridge reservoir and the watershed of Service Creek that feeds it. This is a valuable and irreplaceable source of potable water for 30,000 customers. Similar sources of good water around the state also need protected.

We need a beefed-up DEP/EPA to enforce new and enhanced safety regulations. A third step would be hiring local union labor at all the drilling sites. Local workers have a stake in clean water, and a union worker is more likely to blow a whistle on illegal or dangerous practices.

Naturally, all these cost something. That’s why the crucial first step is a hefty extraction tax. Pennsylvania’s current failure here is an outrage that makes us a laughing stock even among other states where fracking is underway. I would make the tax high enough to make two pots—one to pay for the expenses above, the other for a Green and Clean Energy Fund to finance the transition to renewables. Gas is a bit cleaner than coal, but it’s still a fossil fuel that takes carbon from beneath the earth and puts it in the air. It’s not good for us in the longer run, and we need to start now funding the transition from one to the other.

All these measures are consistent with USW policy, its Blue-Green Alliance and the steelworkers' overall strategy for a green industrial revolution. A progressive view from the unions needs a louder voice in a broad coalition around the Marcellus shale issue.

‘Good Jobs, Green Jobs’ Conference 2011:

Green Jobs Organizers Collide with

Neoliberalism’s War & Austerity Plans

By Carl Davidson

Beaver County Blue

Nearly 2000 people gathered at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel over three bitterly cold days in Washington, DC Feb 8-10 for the 4^th Annual ‘Good Job, Green Jobs’ conference. The attendees were a vibrant mixture of seasoned trade union organizers, representatives of government agencies and young environmental activists waging a variety of battles around climate change and the green economy.

“We want everyone to work at a green job in a green and clean economy,” declared David Foster, executive director of the sponsor, the Blue-Green Alliance, opening the first plenary. “But what stands in our way?” The answer was a new Congress stalemated by neoliberal resurgence centered in a bloc of the GOP and the far right. “It’s not going to be easy. We’re going to have to fight for it the old-fashioned way, from the bottom up, brick by brick, and floor by floor.”

The Blue-Green Alliance today is a coalition of hundreds of environmental groups, trade unions, and green business enterprises. It was founded less than five years ago, largely by the efforts of Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, one of the largest U.S. environmental nonprofits, and Leo Gerard, international president of the United Steel Workers, one of the country’s largest industrial unions.

“We’ve come a long way,” said USW’s Leo Gerard, the next speaker up. “Today we have dozens of affiliated sponsors and members with a combined membership of 14.5 million. Those fighting harder against us are going to meet some serious resistance.” The participants at the conference represented more than 700 organizations and came from 48 of the 50 states.

Still, attendance was down from the past two years. The solid core of trade unionists and environmental youth were present, but wider allies like the Hip-Hop community mobilized by Green For All were absent or only had small representation.

Gerard went on to explain the core idea of the alliance. The old notion that one had to chose between job growth and environmental protection was dead wrong. “Rather than ‘either-or’ we’ve come to see that’s it’s ‘both or neither.’ We will have both good green jobs in a green and clean economy, or we will have neither. That’s what it boils down to.”

“I also want to raise a new idea,” Gerard continued. “Sustainable development is something we hear a lot. But what about ‘restorative development’? It’s not enough simply to build sustainable new things, we have to repair and recover the damage we’ve done with the old ones. He went on to describe the ‘Smart Grid,’ the need to deliver clean electric power to the same high standards as the internet and telecommunications, retrofitting the old grids in the process. “In the process, we create an abundance of new high-skilled green jobs that pay for themselves by saving energy and cleaning the environment at the same time.”

Labor Opposed to Austerity Solutions

Along with other labor leaders, Gerard spoke several times throughout the conference, often on panels with Obama’s cabinet officials. Even though they greeted each other warmly, there was a noticeable distancing from officialdom on the part of labor. However valuable any proposals made in Congress, the labor officials were astute enough to know that an anti-deficit ‘austerity’ was still the watchword of the period, and any gains would have to be fought for at the grassroots and in the streets.

Gerard symbolized the problem when he introduced Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and part of Obama’s cabinet. Noting that it was her birthday, he presented her not only with a card from the BGA, but also a huge pair of boxing gloves as a gift ‘for going into the battles ahead of us.’

Jackson’s speech was an effort to turn the tables on the rightwing effort to gut or neuter what they termed “the job killing EPA.” “When people turn of the water to cook their oatmeal or take a shower,” she explained, “they don’t want to worry whether toxic wastes or sewage sludge is going to come out of the faucet. Our regulations enhance markets and create economic benefits, with a $2 savings for every dollar invested.” Regulations in health and safety, in the end, created far more jobs than they eliminated by creating confidence in products, safety for workers, and stability for markets in clean-up equipment.

“Winning the future also means winning the race for innovation,” explained Jackson... ‘The history of environmental protection has been a history of innovation. Innovation made everything we do cleaner, healthier and more efficient – and led to the creation of good jobs. The catalytic converters that are manufactured to reduce toxic air pollution from our cars, the invention of more effective water treatment mechanisms to free our drinking water of lead, or smoke stack scrubbers that are installed to keep sulfuric acid pollution out of the air we breathe mean new orders for American companies and jobs for American workers.”

All the speakers from the administration hammered away on the ‘win the future’ theme from President Obama’s State of the Union speech--likewise with the phrases about ‘out-innovating’ and ‘out-performing’ against all contenders in every critical sector of the economy. But given the relation of forces in Congress and even his own Cabinet, and the slashing of programs that the deficit-cutters had already launched, the participants tended to take it all with a grain of salt.

Frustration with Resistance at the Top

If one key word popped up in nearly every workshop, it was ‘frustration.’ The participants, after all, had been working steadily for nearly four years researching, designing and organizing for solutions to a range of critical problems—jobs, clean energy, toxic waste, youth entrepreneurship and so on. The first two conferences were full of hope and energy, especially with Obama’s victory and the appointment of Van Jones to head up green jobs. The third year was marked by going deeper into practical solutions, and growing concern about the political climate.

But now, armed with an array of practical programs, the young people especially seemed to conclude that they were banging their heads against a brick wall created by Blue Dogs, neoliberals and the far right. One option was discussed repeatedly: stop wasting too much time in DC and return to the base. Build organization at the county and state level, and try to win some local victories, even if done piecemeal, and gather more strength.

A case in point was an early workshop on ‘Building a Movement to Change America: Strategies to Forge Ahead to Create Good, Green Jobs.’ It asked participants to step back and assess their alliances, their adversaries and their tactics. It’s worth examining in some detail to see the overall problems facing the conference.

“We took a beating in the 2010 elections,” said Cathy Duvall of the Sierra Club, opening up the subject. “Our campaign for a comprehensive climate change bill with a cap on carbon got turned around into the ‘job killing energy tax.’ We learned that we simply don’t yet have the power to do what we want to do.”

Duvall’s answer was to go back to localities, and focus on setting standards and regulating markets “in favor of Main Street over Wall Street.” She summed up with three points: 1) the need for industrial policy with high domestic content, 2) the need for broader coalitions with people who don’t always agree, and 3) to mount head-on challenges to the oil-military complexes preventing productive investment. “But most of all, we need new coalitions at the local base.”

Ron Collins, a vice president of the Communications Workers of America, picked up where Duvall left off. “We have to do things differently,” he said, “or we have to turn off the lights.” The ‘One Nation’ rally in October, he continued, was a good start, but not much has happened at the local or state level. “‘We need to be building ‘One Maryland’ or ‘One Virginia’ or ‘One Baltimore.’ We need a deeper unity at the base, or the right is going to take us out, one by one. As for some of our fair-weather friends, we have to say, ‘If you’re not with us on the issues, then we’re not with you’, and then act on it.”

In this context, the issue of immigrant rights was rising as a difficult wedge issue, and was taken up by Ali Noorani of the Immigration Forum. “People don’t like to move from their home countries lightly,” he said, “but only do so for compelling reasons of survival.” Noorani gave the example of U.S. agribusiness dumping corn in Mexico at prices below its cost of production, thereby bankrupting Mexican farmers and driving them to border town factories. When those factories closed, many had little choice but to move across the border. “Look at every player in this drama,” he continued. “There is only one beneficiary, the crooked employer. We need to stop pointing fingers in the wrong directions, and start finding solutions. Our method in the past has been to mobilize our base, persuade the middle and isolate the opposition. If we can combine that with a view that the pie can grow bigger, then we can all win.”

Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation closed up the panel. “I think we have to be mad and strategic at the same time,” she declared. She went on to observe some lessons from the Tea Party, nothing that while they had considerable differences, they were able to come together to fight. “But what did we do after the ‘One Nation’ rally? Too many of us just went back to our separate silos.”

Need for ‘Street Heat’ from the Bottom Up

In the discussion, one participant offered a critical point from the floor: “For our strategy to work, we need some cracks at the top, but with Obama’s ‘bipartisan’ center-right bloc, all the cracks have closed up, at least for now. It seems we need more organized strength from the bottom up, more street heat to break things open again.” “Exactly,” said Collins from CWA. ‘We need to be drawing some lessons from the people in Egypt.

There was a lot of discussion about the need to build new alliances.  This was not just a search for common ground.  Rather it was recognition of the necessity for respecting the traditions, the work, and the sacrifice of potential allies in a situation in which conditions, for them, are changing. 

A good example is the attitude expressed toward coal and miners.  “We have to recognize that without coal miners we would not have the standard of living that we have, the technology that we have, that makes it possible to talk about a sustainable economy with good jobs and a rising quality of life,” said one workshop speaker.  “These men and women, the coal miners and their communities, should be our heroes.  They are not our enemies.” There were also warnings to stay away from language that stimulates a fear reaction about what those organizers are trying to win.  Examples from coal: solar power and wind that are presented as if they will replace the jobs of miners, with not enough attention given to conversion and re-employment.

Other workshops over the two-day period covered a wide range. Topics included wind manufacturing opportunities, workforce training for solar industries, women in the green economy, sustainable agribusiness, inner city school reform, protecting workers and their families from toxics, high speed rail, and fighting rightwing science-deniers in elections, among many others.

One Tuesday afternoon workshop, entitled ‘Building the Wind Energy Supply Chain: Moving from Rhetoric to Reality,’ brought together a number of issues—job creation, domestic productive capacity, and industrial policy. Wind energy as a vital part of a clean energy economy was taken as a given. The key question was whether it would lead to new manufacturing and green jobs in the U.S., since the more mature technologies and factories had been developed in Spain, the Netherlands and China.

Dillep Thatte of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a federal agency, was optimistic. “Anything you need for wind energy can be competitively obtained domestically; the problem is simply in making the connections and relationships.” He was particularly strong on smaller businesses with less than 500 workers: “These are the innovators creating new jobs today.”

Rob Witherell of the United Steel Workers was skeptical. “High speed rail is in the news today; Obama wants to spend some major money on it. But how many plants in the country right now can actually build high-speed train cars? Only a handful. Can we do it? The answer is, ‘Yes, but…’ It will take some time and investment to get domestic firms up and running.” Helping to form supply chains of small component manufacturers, however, was something the USW could do fairly easily, he added, since the union was connected with some 6000 firms.

As for the quality of production, Dee Holdy of the Global Wind Network explained how her group’s task was to sort out who could effectively be in or out of global competition. “We take a lot of surveys and analyze a lot of reports, but some of it is done by walking around production facilities to find any duct tape or C-clamps holding equipment together.”

Taking on the Neoliberal Alliance with the Far Right

Another following workshop narrowed the target on the far right. Entitled ‘Confronting Science Deniers: Lessons from Minnesota’s Sixth District,’ it featured Tarryl Clark, the former assistant majority leader on the Minnesota State Senate. Clark had run and lost against Tea Party firebrand Michele Bachman, who got 52 percent of the vote.

“Michele Bachman was perhaps the only member of Congress to stick up for BP during the Gulf Oil spill crisis,” Clark started off, “but she’s more widely known for calling on people to become ‘armed and dangerous’ against legislators working for Cap and Trade and Climate Change laws.” She explained that the race became one of the most expensive in the state’s history, with Bachman raising over $13 million, largely from wealthy rightists, while she raised some $5 million in smaller contributions and from labor unions.

“We did well in televised debates,” Clack continued, “but there was no way we could match her massive direct mail operation, which were filled with falsehoods. They were not above absolutely fabricating information while being very good at playing the victim.” One example of a bold headline from a Tea Party website: ‘Tarryl Clark…Backed by Foreign Contributors Who Murder Irish-American Korean War Veterans in U.S. Healthcare Facilities!”

Despite the lies and wackiness, Clark explained that despite her crafted persona of being slightly unhinged, “Bachman is very smart; she knows exactly what she’s doing, and she knows that most of her claims are misleading at best. The truth simply doesn’t matter to her; it’s the results that count.” Clark concluded that the only alternative was to keep organizing and keep fighting, for “otherwise the Darth Vader side wins.”

The final plenary on Wednesday morning focused on green transportation. The session was opened by AFL-CIO vice president Arlene Holt Baker, who noted the prevalence of clean energy manufacturing and high-speed rail in Europe and China, and the need to promote it here:

“What brings us together here,” Baker explained, “is the commitment to make those jobs green jobs and to make them good jobs. Good jobs that provide the wages and benefits needed to sustain families and enable them to buy the products we will be making. Good jobs that can put our economy back in working order. Good jobs that afford workers the opportunity to choose for themselves whether to join a union to have a strong voice on the job for quality American-made products and services.”

Baker went on to give the examples of several new high-design battery plants, including one near New Castle, PA, that had been aided by stimulus money from Obama initiatives. “We are opposed to the idea that the only way out of this crisis is through austerity; we have to invest in the ways to build our way out.”

Baker was followed by Deputy Secretary of Transportation John Porcari. A strong advocate of high-speed rail, he noted that our current transportation system consumed one-third of our oil and produced more than one third of harmful emissions. “Modern high speed trains can operate at one-third less energy per mile than either planes or trucks. For decades, we have blindly refused to invest in our rail system, and we have to turn this around.”

The Need for ‘Industrial Policy’ of a New Type

The case for Obama’s current economic policies was presented next by Jared Bernstein, the chief economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. “Let me start by declaring that neither five-year planners nor lassez-faire ideologues are going to get us what we want.” The former, he explained could never get pricing right, while the latter ignored ‘externalities’ like pollution and waste. No single firm or cluster of firms could rise to the task of basic research, less than 20 percent of which was privately funded. Nor was a major and vital infrastructure project like the ‘smart grid’ even conceivable without a role for government in public-private partnerships.

The conference organizers prepared a summary panel on stage to take off from these final presentations, guided by talk show host Kojo Nnamdi. Panel participants included Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), Lawrence Hanley of the Transit Workers Union, Kathy Gerwig of Kaiser-Permanente and Clark Manus of the American Institute of Architects.

“Good jobs, clean energy, sustainable communities—everyone wants these things,” said Nnamdi, posing a question to the group. “But how do we get there? That’s where we differ, isn’t it?

“Some mean it, and some don’t,” replied Congressman Ellison. “The fact is, we have no urban policy; we have no energy policy. We need a multi-city campaign of town meetings, culminating in a national rally in DC. We need to organize and strengthen the progressive Democratic base, and we need to expand the Progressive Caucus.”

Hanley added that where there’s no will, there’s no money. In mass transit, people were facing massive fare increases along with cutbacks in service and mass layoffs. “Yet we have money for wars and the military,” he noted. “There no way out of this without taking on the War Lobby.

“We are living on our grandparent’s infrastructure,” added Ellison. “The rich got tax cuts while we got school cuts.”

The prospect of hard struggle against a recalcitrant neoliberal dominated Congress, and key parts of the White House as well, were duly taken as a challenge. For many, it also suggested the shift to more local base-building that was a common theme of many panels and workshops.

The issues that seem best suited for local focus were diverse:

· Green building codes for new construction.

· Mass transit investment and lower fares.

· Local tax credits/deductions for green capital investment for companies, and  for individuals (homes, cars, etc.).

· Local renewable energy goals and requirements.

· Local vehicle fuel economy standards.

· Incentives for local/urban agriculture.

In the last round of workshops, there were some hopeful signs for the future. One panel on partnership for technical education and green jobs was presented by Erica Swinney of the Center for Labor and community Research and focused on the Austin Polytechical Academy, and innovative neighborhood public school on Chicago’s West Side. Swinney, who serves as the school’s communications director, started with a PBS News Hour clip on the school’s achievements, bring together unions and dozens of manufacturing firms to create both a high school and an engine for community economic development. Another workshop following hers focused on a high school in a low-income West Philadelphia neighborhood, with a unique after school program designing and build hybrid gas-electric “X-Cars” getting over 150 miles per gallon, and winning in design fairs over teams from MIT and industry groups.

Students from both schools stressed a common theme: “We are problem solvers, not test takers,” voicing opposition to a one-sided and undue emphasis on standardized testing, rather than most creative approaches to schools required for a clean energy and green economy future.

The final day, Feb. 10, was “Advocacy Day,” where attendees headed for Capitol Hill. David Foster estimated that there were more people participating in this event than last year.  Several delegations were very large, mainly from the Steelworkers, Teamsters, and Electrical Workers. They flooded the House and Senate Office Buildings for meetings with Congress people and Senatorial staffs. 

“Large groups of workers roaming the halls of Congress were an inspiring sight,” said Ted Pearson, a national committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism from Chicago, who was attending the conference. “Union members and other activists from Illinois, for instance, met with 5^th CD Representative Mike Quigley and his legislative aide, who pledged support for all the Blue-Green target issues.  Other meetings were held with staff for Jerry Costello (D-12^th CD, Southeastern Illinois), and Chicago’s Bobby Rush and Danny Davis.”

Whether it will all amount to a winning campaign for a new clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy to replace the old oil-military industrial policy remains to be seen. But the ongoing works of the Blue Green Alliance and its annual conferences have clearly contributed to drawing clear and informed lines of demarcation in the battlefield.

[Carl Davidson is a USW Associate Member now living in Aliquippa, Pa He is a national board member of the Solidarity Economy Network and a National Co-Chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. In the 1960s, he was active in the civil rights movement, a national leader of student new left and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Together with Jerry Harris, a former Chicago steelworker, he is author of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age and editor of Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet. He is the author and co-author of several other books and lectures on the topic of the Mondragon Cooperatives, a network of 120 worker-owned factories centered in Spain, and writes for the Beaver County Blue website. If you like this article, make use of the PayPal button HERE ]

***

Follow Carl Davidson on Twitter .

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.

There are differences in the wage ratios between the worker-owners who do executive work and those who work in the field or factory and earn a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in his/her cooperative. Mondragon worker-owners at the lower wage levels earn an average  13% higher wages than workers in similar businesses outside.

The Many Advantages of a Worker/Owner Enterprise

*   *   *  *   *

American unions have the money and can raise additional capital if they can become convinced that producer cooperatives  are one of the best ways to promote their growth and influence.  We have a lot more people and resources than did the residents of Mondragon who had the courage and imagination to develop their “miracle.”
We can select states to establish producer cooperates and train managers to perform the duties of business executives. If done properly and over time, we can establish economic models that can serve workers and consumers far better than our current corporations. The cooperatives can advance new technologies, based on what is good and useful, besides their profit value

It is clear that American workers and their unions are in deep trouble, and their labor leaders have not come up with solutions to their problems. I an suggesting that the Mondragon model can be one part of the answers we are looking for.  Has anyone anything better to propose?—Harry Kelber

LaborTalk (95) will be posted here on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 and on our two web sites: (www.laboreducator.org <http://www.laboreducator.org/> ) and (www.laborsvoiceforchange.org).

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.

“Tracy has single-handedly become one of the experts in the region on renewable energy—and not just the pros and cons of renewable energy, but the installation specifics and the technical aspects of how you build and install solar systems and wind mills,” said Howard Fink, the town administrator of Merrillville, Indiana, where Hall installed solar panels on the town hall building.

Hall’s story shows the positive impact that one determined individual can have on the adoption of clean energy practices by his workplace and local community. He convinced his labor union, Local 697 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), to offer a journey-level class in solar photovoltaics and then set about obtaining the skills he would need in order to be able to teach the class. Hall attended workshops offered by the Illinois Solar Energy Association, studied LEED green building standards at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago, participated in online courses offered by Solar Energy International and graduated from solar installation classes at the Midwest Renewable Energy Association. He also went to an IBEW training-the-trainer course on photovoltaics so that he would be prepared not only to do installations but also to teach about them.

“We’ve got to start making changes if we want our children to have a future,” Hall said. “It’s become a passion for me. I just want to leave this world knowing that I did something that was meaningful.”

After attending so many courses and workshops, Hall had the training and the passion, but he still lacked one thing: hands-on practice installing a solar PV system. When he found out about an Indiana Office of Energy Development (OED) grant program designed to support the purchase and installation of alternative energy systems, he decided to apply. He approached the town administrator of Merrillville about a project that would begin with Hall teaching a solar PV installation class to journey-level electricians and apprentices through his labor union and culminate with the trainees installing solar panels on the roof of the Merrillville town hall. The trainees would donate their work, and, if approved, the grant would help the city purchase the solar PV system.

“We wanted to do the project as a training opportunity with the local unions so the building trades had the opportunity to get accustomed to installing these systems,” said Howard Fink, Merrillville’s town administrator. “We also did it as an educational tool for residents to learn about the environmental benefits of renewable energy.”

As soon as Hall and Fink got word that their project had been approved for a $23,500 Alternative Power and Energy Grant, Hall began training 12 of his union members in solar photovoltaics using the IBEW’s national curriculum. In March 2009, the trainees installed a small five-kilowatt solar PV system on the Merrillville town hall building. It was the first commercial photovoltaic installation in Lake County.

Since then, Hall has continued to be a tireless advocate for renewable energy in Northwest Indiana and throughout the state. He applied for and received another OED grant, this one for $73,500, to install solar panels on the roof of Local 697’s new union hall, which they hope will achieve LEED gold certification. Hall also trained electricians at IBEW Local 531, whose hands on experience came from installing solar panels on a parochial school in Porter County.

Hall says he prefers to work within labor unions, because “it’s important that people earn a living wage and have health benefits and retirement benefits. When you get work outside of the local union, you don’t have those benefits in the construction industry.”

Despite Hall’s successes, his effort to promote renewable energy has not been without its challenges. Demand is slow for renewable energy systems in Indiana, which means that Hall hasn’t been able to find full-time work in his new area of expertise. In part, this is because Indiana has few policies to spur local demand for renewable energy. According to Laura Arnold of the Indiana Renewable Energy Association, several attempts to pass a state-level renewable energy standard have failed. Another challenge, Arnold said, is the economy. “There is a strong interest in renewable energy in our state, just like there is in most other states, but with people’s uncertainty about the economy, they are just not making a lot of discretionary purchases.”

Hall is hoping that if Indiana state legislators won’t act to create a renewable energy market in the state, Congress will. The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, but the Senate has yet to pass a similar bill. “A federal renewable energy standard would be very helpful,” Hall said. “And if we could put a cap [and price] on carbon, that would help fund these kinds of projects.”

Regardless of what happens at the federal level, Fink believes renewable energy use will increase in Indiana. “The public attitude toward renewable energy is strong … As time goes on and costs go down and as more people are certified in installing the systems, you’re going to see them installed in homes and businesses in our region and around the country,” Fink said.

In the meantime, Hall plans to keep pursuing his passion for clean energy. “My family respects me for what I’m doing,” he said. “When I did the Merrillville project, when I came home that day, my wife was just glowing. To me, that was really worth putting a lot of effort into this work.”

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.

--  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.

Corporate executives have not done much better.  In response to this crisis, corporations cut pay, laid off workers, and closed operations - too often as the first option rather than the last.  Year after year, shedding jobs and shuttering plants has become an all too familiar pattern in what remains of our manufacturing sector, as production, investment, and jobs are shifted to other countries with the fewest amount of labor and environmental protections possible.

The result of years and years of neglect have left us an economy that is rotting from the inside out.  Our manufacturing sector has been hollowed out and our standard of living has at best stagnated, or worse, declined.  Under the added weight of the financial crisis, our economy nearly collapsed.

Due to decades of decay, we no longer have an economy capable of a quick recovery.  The "good" news announced yesterday was that we "only" lost 36,000 jobs last month.  If last year's stimulus bill has been effective as economic triage, and most likely it has been, then there is still a long, uncertain road to rehabilitation and recovery.

So what are we to do?

Maybe we need to rebuild from the ground up.  But how?  What should our blue print look like?  What historical examples might we look to?

Let's imagine the situation in the Basque region in 1943.  Still devastated from the Spanish Civil War, most notoriously the bombing of Guernica in 1937, the Basque region continued to be punished by Franco's regime, which forbid use of the Basque language and repressed Basque culture.  Thousands were murdered for supporting the Republican forces, including the priest that Father Arizmendi replaced two years earlier, and nearly Father Arizmendi himself.

High unemployment.  No social safety net.  No pensions.  Little access to capital and investments.

It is in this context that Father José María Arizmendiarrieta started up a small polytechnic school that was the seed for the phenomenon we know today as the Mondragon cooperatives.  In 1956, five graduates of that school, with the assistance of Father Arizmendi, started the first Mondragon cooperative, Ulgor.  A little over 50 years later, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation employs over 100,000 people, with nearly all of them worker owners, and over $20 billion dollars in annual revenue.

Maybe there's hope for us after all.

So, what can we learn from them?

To start with, let's always remember that these cooperatives were started and supported not out of some utopian ideal, but rather a very pragmatic means of helping people put a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food on their tables.  The goal was, and remains, to create jobs that can support their families and their communities.

The success of the Mondragon cooperatives comes from putting people first.  Prioritizing people before profits - imagine that.  We have become so conditioned to think that companies must prioritize profits above all else, usually for the sake of some group of unnamed, unknown shareholders, that's is hard for us to imagine any alternative.

Now keep in mind that this is no utopia, this is a highly competitive, for-profit business - just organized differently than most .  As the saying goes at Mondragon: "This is not heaven and we are not angels."

At its best though, Mondragon could be a better way to run a business.  A business that is sustainable, supports jobs, supports families, and supports communities.

So how has Mondragon been able to put people first and still be competitive, growing, and profitable?

The first thing we might want to consider are the ten Basic Principles of the Mondragon cooperatives:

--    Education

--    Sovereignty of labor

--    Instrumental and subordinate nature of capital

--    Democratic organization

--    Open admission

--    Participation in management

--    Wage solidarity

--    Inter-cooperation

--   Social transformation

--   Universal nature

How many corporate mission statements are out there where you can find ideals like "sovereignty of labor" and the "instrumental and subordinate nature of capital"?  Not many, I'm sure.  Yet these principles are why job creation and sustained employment are top priorities.  Even during economic downturns, when unemployment is high, as it is now, the amount of layoffs within MCC are few and limited in duration.  As noted by Judy Schwartz in a recent article, "During the 1980s, when Spain's unemployment hit 27 percent, Mondragon's hovered below 1 percent."

As a worker owned cooperative, ultimately all profits are kept by the workers.  Although some portion of profits are pooled with other coops and used for finance, education and R&D, a significant piece of the pie is distributed directly to workers in the form of profit sharing or put into the workers' individual capital accounts.  Shared risks become shared rewards.

Another key differentiation for Mondragon is the principal of democratic organization with "one person, one vote".  Every worker-owner owns an equal share and has an equal vote through "one class" ownership.  All worker-owners can participate in the General Assembly to elect its Board of Directors, which is comprised of fellow worker-owners in the cooperative.  The Board appoints management within the cooperative for a limited term.  Workers also directly elect a representative, internal Social Council to advise the Board and management on a range of employment issues, including wages and benefits.

Mondragon cooperatives also subscribe to a principle of wage solidarity.  In most cases, the highest paid worker in the cooperative makes no more than 5 times the lowest paid worker in the cooperative.  In contrast, CEO's at many multinational corporations take over 400 times the pay of the lowest paid worker.  Wage solidarity means there is less disparity among workers and the communities in which they live, reinforcing the equality, and quality, of ownership.

Finally, the principle of social transformation means that a key part of the coops' mission is to support and invest in their communities by creating jobs, funding development projects, supporting education, and providing opportunity.  Their communities, in turn, support the coops.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is plenty we can learn from Mondragon.  If we are going to dig ourselves out of this recession, we need every good example we can find.  A business model that makes employment a priority and solidarity a principle would certainly reflect some of the key values of our Union.

I had the opportunity to visit Mondragon in September 2008.  I was in nearby Bilbao for a different meeting when a good friend, who also happens to be Mondragon's North American Delegate, suggested I go meet with the President of Mondragon Internacional at that time, Jesus Herrasti.  In a good conversation, we found our organizations shared many key principles and ideas.

Over the year that followed, more conversations involving more people began to turn to specific ideas on how we might work together on projects in the U.S. and Canada.

In the context of the severe recession, we ultimately thought this was an idea and a partnership that shouldn't be kept under wraps until we figured out all the intricacies of launching a specific union co-op project.

The USW and Mondragon announced our alliance on October 27, 2009, with little more than a common set of principles and a general framework of how our alliance would work.  Risky?  Absolutely.  Success is by no means guaranteed.

How do we define success though?  Is success only the physical manifestation of a USW/Mondragon affiliated coop?

Despite still being in the preliminary stages of this alliance, I would argue that it has already been a success.  Since our October announcement, we've gotten interest from people in all corners of the U.S. and Canada, plus the UK, France, Australia, and of course, Spain.

Maybe success is shining a spotlight on a really interesting idea, at a time when it is desperately needed.

But can it work here?

I've heard a number of people wonder openly about whether such an idea could really take root in an American culture steeped in individualism.  I would reframe such questions in a slightly different way though.  In the midst of economic devastation and oppression, the people who originally formed and supported the Mondragon cooperatives did so out of necessity to feed and provide for their families.  They started their own schools, created their own jobs, provided their own health care and met their own banking and financing needs.  Theirs is a story about self-reliance and pragmatism, not just idealism.  Shared values such as self-reliance and ownership have deep roots in our culture and history.  In the middle of this economic crisis, people are desperate for answers.  Since our announcement, I've gotten email and phone calls almost every day from people asking, pleading, for help.

We have a real opportunity to rebuild our economy from the ground up, in a way that is sustainable and creates good jobs.  We cannot afford to wait for someone else to do it for us.

So, what is the Union's role in this?

There are natural and historical alliances between the cooperative and labor union movements.  Where those have diverged, we believe now is an important opportunity to bring them back together.

With Mondragon's assistance, we will seek to closely implement their worker-owner model in combination with our collective bargaining model in a way that makes the workplace more participatory and more accountable to the workers, but also protects the interests of the workers and establishes guidelines to ensure that all workers are treated fairly.

We must ensure that ownership means more than just the value of a share.

A core part of this hybrid will be to transform the role of the Social Council into a Union Bargaining Committee.  To sustain this model, we must also ensure a dynamic labor-management relationship rooted in partnership, understanding the needs of both the business and the workers, and respect for the advocacy roles each must take on.

Now some of you may be wondering why the USW is spending this much time and effort trying to develop coops.  Well, we are indeed probably working outside of our comfort zone, but to me, that's one of the aspects of my Union that I'm most proud of.

Leadership means taking risks.

My Union is undertaking this effort, like so many other things we do, because we know we cannot afford to rest on our heels.  We cannot afford to insulate ourselves in the ongoing work of negotiating contracts and processing grievances.  We must do more.  For our members and for all workers.

We fight to protect the jobs we already have and the industries in which we work, but we also believe that our Union can play an important role in creating new jobs, developing better business models, and growing new industries.

We are in this alliance with Mondragon because we believe there's got to be a better way to run a business that is sustainable and accountable to its workers and its communities.

We know change is hard.

While we must understand and learn from the past, we must not be beholden to it.  We cannot simply tell ourselves "that's just the way it is" or "that's the way it's always been".  We must set our own course for the future.  Our children, our grandchildren, and everyone else that comes after us depend on it.

I have a small poster hanging above my desk with this quote from Margaret Mead:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Father Arizmendi and five of his former students started a small co-op in the Basque region in 1956.

Imagine what we can do.

We have the power to change the world.  The people right here, in this room, have the power to change the world, in ways both big and small.

What are we going to do with it?

We cannot afford to sit on our hands, we must act.  We have the power and the responsibility to act.  We can create good jobs.  We can create jobs with justice.  Now let's go do it!

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.

1. We caravan to Mexico City to require the president to defend the right to work of workers of Flaskô, but so far nothing.

2. We've been several times in recent years, especially in 2009 with the Ministry of Labour (with the previous Minister Lupi), the Ministry of Welfare, the Ministry of Finance, with BNDES, the Civil Cabinet, the Ministry of Institutional Relations, Attorney in the National Treasury, as Chairman of the INSS, the National Secretariat for Solidarity Economy (SENAES), but the poll workers was not complied with.

3. In 2009, we conducted a hearing in the House of Deputies in Brasilia, in which Paul Singer (President of SENAES), representing the federal government and the presence of several lawmakers and more than 200 employees, said he did not know what to do about Flaskô, but that the government was committed to the struggle of workers for jobs.

4. Each time we went to Brasilia, in each of the scheduled meetings, formal protocol requests for help, clarifications, explanations, proposals, etc.. But so far nothing has been done.

5. With the testimony of a delegation of 100 workers on November 10, 2009 filed, again, a letter requesting a meeting with President Lula to seek a solution to the flask.

6. We tried to reach the presidency, and although they have been sent more than seven thousand postcards by workers from all over Brazil at the end of 2009, containing the meeting request, again were not met. Reported that the responsibility on the issue would be the Ministry of Labour and we sought that court. That is, the maximum that the federal government has done is pass the buck to the Ministry of Labour (and did it, as we explain, even with the support of the Central Workers Union). This response protocol given on November 22, through a fax, demonstrates that the letter was not read or, as we said a week ago we had been meeting with the Ministry of Labour and SENA (who even met with a representative Flaskô's headquarters, and the presence at the hearing mentioned), and said they did not know what to do, but that still would agree with some referrals. Finally, they were only on the promise, back to "square one" with this "play to and fro, leaving workers adrift.

7. Thus, it is true that we had not received any official response from the President, until we were surprised with a public response in his weekly column ("The President Responds"), and circulates in more than 175 newspapers in the country, beyond the page Internet's own Plateau Government.

Well, those remarks about the workers Flaskô, which were widely publicized just coming to our attention, but not the form and content that we asked. Consider:

The student Camila question directly to the President if it is possible the nationalization of factories to save jobs. She says

“There are many workers who struggle for nationalization of factories that went bankrupt. This applies to employees of Flaskô of Sumaré / SP. It is possible this achievement in our country?”

Firstly it is necessary to give some historical and factual to start the discussion. Let them:

We occupy the Flaskô on June 12, 2003, after a meeting held with the workers of Cipla and Interfibra who had occupied these facilities in October 2002 in Joinville, and returned from Mexico City after meeting the day before the president himself. The goal of the occupation and the meeting was to save our jobs, since three months ago the factory was abandoned by their employers, without operation and with more than four years without entitlements such as wages, retirement fund and Social Security. The conclusion of this meeting was the President's commitment to finding a solution that would save all the jobs in the occupied factories. The president said the nationalization was not "on the menu, but that would be a committee of the ministry to review and to make an exit”.

We kept organized and producing while waiting the response of our president. Again and again charge official answers. We caravan to Mexico City to collect the solution, and more than that, we began an important experience that led to the conclusion on the need to defend all jobs and duties and industrial park that was still being attacked. Hopeful that our worker president would change the course of our history of 500 years of oppression and exploitation continue to produce and fight for our jobs.

In February 2005, by meeting with the Minister Luiz Dulci, a committee was formed of experts from BNDES, BRDE BADESC and to study the viability of enterprises. The report to the President states that "enterprises are viable" and directs that "their claims are transformed into actions, which would be put as BNDES capitalization and one of the agents of State Development, or BRDE BADESC" (excerpts from the opinion of BNDES).

We put the plant in full operation, increasing production and sales, taking up hundreds of customers and suppliers. More than that, not only guarantee the jobs and generate new jobs, and organize production in order to reduce working hours to 40 hours initially, and since April 2007 to 30 hours, showing that workers can run the factory better than the bosses parasite. In addition, an organized according to the Labour Court, where we pay 1% of monthly turnover of factory labour to pay off debts left by employer management, showing that only workers helping workers, causing hundreds of former workers to receive their rights, because the factory remains open and the revenue guarantee payment of entitlements once lost (the same application - based on Article 28 of the Law Enforcement Tax - the tax authorities do, knowing that 80% of the debt is Flaskô with the State . But, as we shall see, it was accepted today).

However, suffered more than 200 threats of withdrawal of machines, through auctions wishing to pay off debts left by their employers. In all areas where we explained that the previous owners have properties capable of enforcing such debts. Thus it was necessary to check the goods and allow workers Flaskô merely follow working as proposed. This can be done through deconstitution legal personality and the grant of powers to the management of workers. However, the government acts to the contrary. If the auctions were not enough and not acceptance of the unification of foreclosures, more than 250% of the revenues pledged to request the National Treasury. So what happens is that was never adopted any measures toward the maintenance of defence jobs. Currently, if nothing else, the Lula government itself in criminalizing the blame for the debt management employer.

So we ask: how can read the response from the president who does not want to forget the "old bankrupt company? How to read the response from the President that we want to divide society with all the losses from mismanagement of previous owners? No, our position is not that. On the contrary, everyone knows they are government policies that socialize the losses of the bosses (remember the various measures taken by the government during this crisis). We always say that unpaid debts are taxes that serve our people, health, education, safety, housing. We therefore advocate a search for the debt in the vast heritage of the former owners, as provided by the Brazilian legislation.

What we see is an option the government, because what we saw in those seven years were attempts to settle the experiences of workers' management. The most aggressive of these was the intervention of the Federal Court in Cipla / Interfibra in Joinville-SC, at the request of the INSS and performed by about 150 heavily armed federal police, attacking the management of workers fighting for their jobs, treating us like criminals. What we see is the option to continue threatening us with the auctions and foreclosures billing, criminalizing the social movements and their leaders, blaming the management of workers due to the harm caused by the breach of the employer's management and inefficiency of governments to fulfil merely the Constitution Federal. What we ask is the law, but to date the option was to adopt the interpretation of the law in favour of capital, focusing on former employers at the expense of workers.

Despite these facts, it is clarified another aspect of the President's reply, saying that "the workers demand the nationalization, staying with the old bankrupt company. For me, nationalize means to share with all of society damages for the mismanagement of the former owners. "It is necessary to point out some recent facts to clarify who want to split the damage from the bosses. Consider, and make its conclusions:

1. Lula authorized the Federal Savings Bank to socialize the debt of the group Silvio Santos, buying 49% stake in “Banco Panamericano”. Keeping control with the old bosses that administered during all these years. This nationalization is good? For whom? Or, indeed, it is to socialize the losses?

2. Lula authorized the “Caixa Economica Federal” to buy (for $ 4.2 billion) 50% of the share capital and 49.5% of the voting capital of “Banco Votorantim”, helping to save the Votorantim family. And even with half the capital remained in control in the hands of employers. This nationalization is good for whom? Or, again, the people are who pays the private injury?

3. Lula authorized the BNDES to lend R $ 5 billion network Globo, one of the largest debtors Brazilian INSS. This is not socializing the losses?

4. Lula authorized the BNDES to buy for $ 2 billion 20% of shares of JBS, the largest Refrigerator World, this soon after the announcement of several layoffs and closing of several stores. Credit for the rich people?

5. Claiming equalize recovery procedures with the creation of the Super Net, the government revoked an article from the Social Security Act to prohibit the ownership and distribution of profits when the company was due to the INSS. This is not socializing the losses?

6. Lula signed Law No. 11,945, on June 4, 2009, which exempts companies to present Certificate of Good Standing (CND) for loans and refinancing. That is, to present this document to the federal banks, it is certain that private banks will not accept to put their money at risk, lending money to employers swindlers. But the public banks can lend money to the swindlers of the people. Once again the government attend to the bosses.

The list could go on for many pages. Contrary to the Lula administration has demonstrated, we do not want the workers' pay the bill "by the economic crisis promoted by employers. Our proposals are very different from those given by the government.

Thus, we can not accept the answer given by Lula, to ignore two key aspects. First, it ignores the entire history of the Movement of Occupied Factories and resistance of workers Flaskô seven years that require government solutions, but only receive negative responses and attacks by government institutions. Moreover, we can not fail to point out the contradictions of the Lula government. A government elected by the working class, but favors the employers, as we have seen with some examples, rather than defend the workers, especially those who struggle against unemployment and the "scum" employers, and workers of Flaskô.

Is also worth mentioning that this answer did not come at any time. At the end of November 2009 we conducted a successful seminar, with several political representation, unions and the community as a real tool for front, and discussed the urgent need to save the Brazilian people. Discussed that the policy of tax exemption, the credit bubbles that are created are only used to prepare a disaster ahead. A true and lasting output, according to the interests of workers is to break with the bosses and take concrete steps to meet the workers. Therefore, we endorse the campaigns for Nationalization of Occupied Factories, Embraer's re-nationalization, re-nationalization of the railways, re-nationalization of Vale do Rio Doce, Nationalization 100% of Petrobras and the entire pre-salt, as some concrete demands. This is the challenge of entities and organizations of the working class, and a government that says it has aimed to defend the exploited.

For all these reasons, we reaffirm our position that only the nationalization under workers' control can ensure the continuity of industrial activity and the maintenance of sustainable jobs. However, as we have said in those seven years, and as the BNDES's own report, made at the request of Lula, we deal with the government and seek solutions. However, what we see is that the government "too much talk and act ... much, but against the workers", as an employee of Flaskô said after read your answer in the newspaper.

We understand that there is still time to save the workers' struggle of Flaskô. We want to solve the problems. The intransigence of the government has always been that never gave us a real prospect, and use criminal action against the workers themselves. We want dialogue. In this sense, it is worth highlighting a section of the answer: "With our offer of technical assistance and credit, the way will be open for the complete recovery of the company." For years, we are asking for such help. The last time was the non-receipt of the staff by the president, despite seven years of struggle and the seven thousand postcards sent in late 2009, which called for the meeting. And now the government says so publicly. Great. Now came the reply, saying they can provide advice, we apply it specifically. Let us apply and discuss these proposals. And therefore, we ask again, a meeting with President Lula.

President Lula, you, Sr., was elected by the workers. Mr President, we want your help. We are workers and fought for our jobs. We fight for our dignity and livelihood of our families. We strive to demonstrate that management of workers is more beneficial to the entire population, which meets a real social function. We fight for a free and egalitarian society, and therefore run counter to the employer. And this begins with amnesty for leaders of the occupied factories of the crimes they are blaming us for the debts of the bosses, we immediately send technicians and credits, that will help us to sell our products because our production is used by several state enterprises and other controlled by BNDES.

Long live the struggle of workers Flaskô!

Long live the resistance of the working class!

Sumaré, January 22, 2010.

Pedro Santinho
Coordinator of the Works Council of Flaskô

--------------------

First Latin American gathering

of worker-recovered factories

-

Written by Jorge Martin in Caracas -

www.handsoffvenezuela.org  
Tuesday, 08 November 2005

More than 400 people from 235 worker occupied factories and 20 different national trade union centres participated in the “First Latin American Gathering of Worker Recovered Factories” in Caracas on October 27-29 This was truly a historical meeting, the first time that workers involved in factory occupations in different countries met to discuss their problems, share their experiences and draw political conclusions from their struggle. And such a meeting could only take place in revolutionary Venezuela where it had the support of Chavez’s Bolivarian government. “This is an historical gathering. For the first time workers from occupied factories from across the continent are meeting together” (Serge Goulart, United Workers’ Council of Brazilian group of occupied factories)

“We have shown how the workers can run the companies, and this means we can run society as well” (Ricardo Moreira, PIT-CNT, Uruguay)

More than 400 people from 235 worker occupied factories and 20 different national trade union centres participated in the “First Latin American Gathering of Worker Recovered Factories” in Caracas on October 27-29.

This was truly a historical meeting, the first time that workers involved in factory occupations in different countries met to discuss their problems, share their experiences and draw political conclusions from their struggle. And such a meeting could only take place in revolutionary Venezuela where it had the support of Chavez’s Bolivarian government.

In the opening rally, which took place at the Teresa Carreño Theatre, with 3,000 worker activists present, president Chávez explained how it is capitalism that closes down factories and that these “must be recovered by the workers”. He compared the struggle of the occupied factories movement to the struggle for independence from Spanish rule in the 19th century and underlined the “potential of the workers in our continent to break their chains and leave capitalism behind”. The platform of the rally included a number of Venezuelan ministers, trade union leaders from across the continent and workers from occupied factories (including Edgar Peña, leader of the Invepal workers).

The factory take-overs that are taking place across the continent are part of the struggle for true sovereignty and liberation from the domination of the US, Chávez stressed. But at the same time he made clear that “the people and the workers of the US also have their part to play in this battle”.
Credit: Prensa Presidencia
Credit: Prensa Presidencia

Chávez also explained his views regarding the trade union movement and its relationship with the Bolivarian government. He started by greeting the formation of the National Workers’ Union, UNT, but added that the new trade union confederation “is not and should never be an appendix of the government, it must be autonomous and free” from it. The old bureaucratic trade union model of “unions which ended up negotiating behind the workers’ backs, of leaders like those in Venezuela who ended up enriching themselves while negotiating about workers’ lives with the bosses” must be rooted out of the trade union movement.

Chávez proposed the creation of a network of worker-recovered companies so that they could collaborate and exchange experiences. Finally, he announced the expropriation of two more companies, Sideroca, and the Cumanacoa Sugar Mill. This was received with an enthusiastic standing ovation by the 3,000 workers present who shouted “asi, asi, asi es que se gobierna” (“this is the way to rule”). The Sideroca factory in Zulia makes metal pipes for the oil industry and had been abandoned by its owners six years ago. On September 6, a group of former workers and people from the local community had taken over the plant to prevent the owners from taking away the machinery, and since then had been demanding expropriation under workers’ management. The Cumanacoa Sugar Mill in Cumaná, had been running at half its capacity since its privatisation back in 1992, and more recently this situation had worsened to a point where it was operating at 20% capacity. Workers and the local sugar cane producers had demanded expropriation.

Chavez announced that he would sign the expropriation decrees before going to the Mar de Plata summit in Argentina this week. He said others would follow and mentioned the tomato processing plant Caigua in Guarico. This was taken over by the workers on July 7 after a conflict over non-payment of wages, when the workers realised that the owner wanted to sell the raw materials (tomato paste) stored in the plant. Once again, the workers demanded the plant be expropriated and handed over to the workers.

But the president also added that the idea was not to expropriate the companies so that their workers could “become rich overnight”, but rather that production should benefit the community as a whole. Along the same lines, during the “Encuentro”, workers from Caigua declared that: “We do not want to create 57 capitalists, we are on the path to socialism”.

As Serge Goulart said: “this is a president that sides with the workers, not in words, or with statements, but with the concrete facts of these two expropriations”.
Debates on factory occupations

The Encuentro then broke into a number of separate meetings, one for trade union organisations, another for workers from occupied factories and one for members of parliament and government representatives.

There was debate on the forms of property that worker-recovered companies should take. The comrades from the Cipla-Interfibra-Flasko-Flaskepet group of worker-managed companies in Brazil (http://paginas.terra.com.br/noticias/cipla/) insisted on the demand for nationalisation under workers’ control.

Serge Goulart, the coordinator of the United Workers’ Council, was adamant: “We are against the idea of a “solidarity economy”. In fact this would mean turning the workers into capitalists, weakening the working class and, in competing in a capitalist market, they would only succeed by making other factories bankrupt. We are for nationalisation, but nationalisation under workers’ control in order to prevent a new bureaucracy from emerging”. He added that this struggle could only be seen as part of the general struggle for the “nationalisation of the banks and the multinationals in order to plan the economy in the interests of the people”. “There cannot be socialism in one country, even less in a single company!” he said emphatically.

Encuentro Asked about the debate president Chavez has opened up on “socialism of the 21st century”, Serge Goulart replied: “The Venezuelan Revolution is extraordinary in that it confirms what the Marxists had always said. It started as a struggle against imperialism and for national sovereignty. But then we saw the working class entering the scene in the struggle against the sabotage of the oil industry and the revolution went further, as it did with the nationalisation of Venepal on January 19 this year. It started as an anti-imperialist struggle, but it either becomes socialist or it will be crushed. (…) The question will be posed of the nationalisation of the banks and the multinationals and that can only be carried out by the workers”.

Orlando Chirino, National Coordinator of the Venezuelan UNT explained the context in which these factory occupations were taking place: “This is a symptom of the degeneration of capitalism which leads to a process of deregulation, flexibilisation and increased exploitation of the workers. Capitalism no longer plays the progressive role it once played.” The whole process is not without contradictions or difficulties. In the case of Venezuela particularly, most of the workers involved in these occupations have no previous experience of trade union organisation or struggle and they will face many problems. But to Orlando, in order to save jobs and livelihoods, the task of the trade unions is to give this instinctive movement of factory occupations “a conscious expression, with the final aim of socialising the means of production.”

Both Chirino and the trade union representatives of Venezuela’s state-owned electricity company CADAFE, stressed that worker-management was enormously progressive and was “the only way of defeating bureaucratism and corruption which are threatening the Bolivarian Revolution”.
Cooperation agreements

assembl_brasilia2.jpgAs part of the meeting, representatives from different worker-managed companies gathered to discuss and reach mutually beneficial agreements. They insisted however, that these were not merely commercial agreements, but rather that they were based on different principles of mutual cooperation, transfer of technology, etc.

Among the agreements signed was that between Venezuela and the Cipla-Interfibra-Flasko-Flaskepet group of worker-managed companies in Brazil. On the one hand, the Venezuelan state-owned petrochemical company Pequiven will sale raw materials to Cipla at preferential prices and on the other hand PDVSA will buy finished pipes from Cipla. But at the same time, the workers at Cipla-Interfibra will provide the technology and the know-how for Venezuela to set up a number of factories making PVC frames for windows, doors, and other construction materials. All this will allow Venezuela to by-pass the domination of the market for these types of plastic products by a handful of US multinationals.

The importance of this is that in reality the Venezuelan government is giving direct assistance to a group of factories in Brazil that have been occupied and managed by the workers and that have been threatened on a number of occasions with eviction and jail by the Brazilian judiciary. This cannot but serve as an encouragement for workers in Venezuela and throughout Latin America to take over their own factories.
Internationalism and anti-imperialism

The Encuentro also had a marked internationalist character. The presence of a delegation from the Bolivian COB brought a breath of the revolutionary traditions of the Bolivian miners and workers. Jaime Solares, secretary of the COB, underlined the “key role of the proletariat internationally” and added that “socialism has not died, it is still relevant”. He also warned of the threat of international intervention against the Bolivian revolution, particularly the threat posed by the recently created US military base in the Paraguayan Chaco region, on the border with Bolivia.

The situation in Haiti was also discussed. Julio Turra, from the Brazilian CUT said in no uncertain terms “Brazilian troops in Haiti are at the service of the empire”. The final declaration of the trade unions present at the meeting called for the “withdrawal of occupying troops from Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan”.

There was also strong opposition to the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement, promoted by the US administration. As Ricardo Moreira from the Uruguayan PIT-CNT explained, “the only real integration is not trade integration, but the integration based on the working class, which is the most revolutionary class”. Argentinean trade union delegates announced a nationwide work stoppage on November 4 against Bush’s presence at the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata.
Closing meeting and conclusions

Finally, after three days of hard work and discussions, of sharing of experiences by different groups of workers who had been forced to take over their factories in order to save their livelihoods, 500 workers, trade union representatives and Venezuelan government officials (including Minister of Labour María Cristina Iglesias and a number of other Ministers) gathered for the closing meeting.
los obreros sin patron
los obreros sin patron

The mood was one of enthusiasm, and the before the meeting could start, all the workers rose to their feet shouting the slogan popularised by the Argentinean factory occupation movement: “aquí están, estos son, los obreros sin patrón” (“here we are, we are the ones, the workers without a boss”). Nearly 200 workers had travelled from Argentina to participate in this event, and the Argentinean National Movement of Recovered Companies (MNER) had played a key role in its organisation.

The conclusions from the different workshops were read out and approved, and then a joint document, called “The commitment of Caracas” was read by a leader of the workers of the Caigua tomato plant and approved by acclamation. The workers from worker-managed companies had also passed their own political statement which explained the importance of the Encuentro. “We are here to push our movement forward, to defend it, to help each other and to strengthen our struggle against the common enemy of the peoples, capitalism, which brings war and plans misery throughout the planet”. It also strongly defended the right to occupy factories: “The capitalists, the financial speculators and the multinationals are to blame for the bankruptcy of the companies. Every factory closed is a graveyard of jobs. (…) Therefore the workers in the countryside and the city have the right to occupy the factories and the land to defend their jobs and the sovereignty of our countries. This is why we occupied the factories and started production.”

The statement greeted the announcement of more expropriations by president Chávez: “In Venezuela, which is living through a revolution, the workers have put on the agenda expropriation with workers’ control of these companies in different ways. We greet the announcement of comrade president Chavez during the opening of this Encuentro, of two new expropriations of companies and that they should be under workers’ control. This is what we all need in our countries.”

It also explained the character and final aims of the movement: “We wish to advance to an economy under the total control of the workers so that it can be planned in the interests of the people as a whole. Our movement is anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. It is a clarion call and an organised movement of the working class against the regime of private property of the large-scale means of production that is only capable of surviving through war and the exploitation and oppression of the peoples”.

The statement warned of the dangers facing the movement: “Our resistance has not gone unnoticed by the bosses, by Capital and their international institutions, which attempt to prosecute and crush us. But they are also seeking ways of destroying our resistance by enmeshing the workers in different forms of class collaboration, tempting them with possibilities of individual integration within the capitalist system”. To resist these attempts it was agreed to set up an international network of occupied and worker-managed factories. “From now on, we will rise as one if in any country the governments attack us or threaten to close down the companies we control”.

Finally the statement concluded with an inspiring call: “They steal the land, we occupy it. They make war and destroy nations; we defend peace and the integration of the peoples’ with respect for their sovereignty. They divide; we unite. Because we are the working class. Because we are the present and the future of humankind. We call upon all to continue this struggle, to broaden it and to meet again next year to strengthen the unity and the struggle we are carrying out together with the working class as a whole and the peoples against the common enemy of humanity. Venceremos!”

The Encuentro undoubtedly will encourage the struggle of workers across Latin America and beyond. In the opening meeting Julio Turra from the CUT described how “when the Chavez government declares war on the latifundia, this is a source of encouragement for the comrades of the MST [Landless Peasant’s Movement]. When it expropriates the bosses who organised the coup it is a source of encouragement for the comrades from Brazil who have been fighting for three years demanding that the government expropriates their abandoned companies”.

In Venezuela the meeting was not closed off within the four walls of the meeting halls, but went beyond. Reports of the meeting and documentaries on the occupied factories in different countries featured prominently on both state TV channels. Workers from the occupied factories were present and spoke on the weekly “Aló Presidente” programme hosted by Chávez. Now it is up to the workers and the trade union movement in Venezuela to take up the call, and get a list of the 700 factories that have been closed by the bosses and start recovering them. Here the workers so far have found a president who is sympathetic to their cause and has even encouraged them.

Without doubt, this was a meeting that will go down in the history of the Latin American trade union movement. In the words of Ricardo Moreira from the PIT-CNT, already quoted above, “we have shown how the workers can run the companies, and this means we can run society as well”.

Photo: Coop Bakeries in California

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

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.

Several nonprofit and medical institutions in Cleveland have turned to the Mondragon model for a consortium of businesses that will provide needed services and bolster an impoverished community. Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, a state-of-the-art commercial launderer designed to be LEED silver–certified, opened for business this fall in Cleveland's University Circle, an area where the average annual household income is $18,500. Rather than just bringing home wages, its eight employees will gain equity through "patronage accounts," a portion of earnings put aside to both build personal assets and reinvest in the company.

Another company within the Evergreen Cooperative group, Ohio Cooperative Solar, offers weatherization services and will soon embark on solar-panel installations — the first a 100-kw system on the roof of the Cleveland Clinic. According to CEO Stephen Kiel, Ohio now has 2 solar megawatts of the 60 the state requires by 2012. "Most installations in Ohio are small," he says. "One hundred kilowatts is a pretty significant system."

Kiel, who as a business owner and management consultant has worked with nearly 200 companies of varying scale, says he has already seen advantages to employee ownership. "Since the business belongs to the workers, my job is expos[ing] them to how to run a business," he says. "In addition to the technical training, we're training in administration and managerial skills — how to obtain work orders, track profitability, read a financial statement." Unlike the typical workplace, here employees know exactly how much a company — and each individual — is making. "There's a value in dealing with an informed workplace," says Kiel. In terms of problems that can arise, including safety, production and theft concerns, "if people feel a part of it, that makes solving the problem a lot easier."

He adds that the spread between the high and low salaries is limited so that the CEO earns no more than five times the lowest-earning entry-level employee. This follows the Mondragon template, which keeps the ratio down to 1 to 4 or 5 (though in a few cases of specialized positions, it's as high as 1 to 9).

One hallmark of the Mondragon model is its use of capital. Rather than flowing into the pockets of executives and outside investors, a company's profits are distributed in a precise, democratic way; set aside as seed money for new cooperatives; distributed to regional nonprofits; or pooled into shared institutions like the university and research center. In other words, each individual cooperative gains long-term benefits from the financial assets of the whole. (How this would play out in the context of U.S. tax rules remains to be seen.) In Cleveland, the Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund, managed by ShoreBank Enterprise Cleveland, provides low-interest, long-term financing. In the future, a financial institution more aligned with Caja Laboral, which also handles consumer saving and lending, might be developed.

The "Cleveland model," as Evergreen has already been dubbed, creates "a way to stabilize jobs in an area as well as democratize ownership," says Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founding principal of the Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that has advised Evergreen. He says part of the strategy has been to address growing sectors of the economy, such as health care and energy. To have a major impact on the regional economy, manufacturing has to be brought in, says Alperovitz. "We're thinking about similar approaches with bullet trains and mass-transit vehicles, asking the question, How can some of that production be organized according to this model?"

In late October, the Mondragon Corp. and the million-plus-member United Steelworkers (USW) union announced an alliance to develop Mondragon-type manufacturing cooperatives in the U.S. and Canada. Says USW's Rob Witherell: "Initially we are looking to convert an existing manufacturing operation." As for financing new ventures, he adds, "There's a significant amount of infrastructure already in place in the U.S. to assist in the development of cooperatives, such as the National Cooperative Bank and the National Cooperative Business Association. It's possible the NCB could function in a Caja Laboral ... role for us here."

Witherell stresses that the union aims to implement the basic principles of worker ownership and democratic governance rather than precisely replicate the Mondragon model. Still, he says, success comes down to well-run companies that meet a need. "The people who formed these co-ops did not do so because of some egalitarian ideal — they did it out of the necessity to feed and provide for their families."

The Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, the umbrella organization for a group of four (soon to be six) worker-owned bakeries in the San Francisco Bay Area, took its name as well as its business plan from Mondragon. The companies share technical and financial resources — as well as proprietary recipes — and a portion of profits goes to funding new enterprises. The notion of cooperative artisan bakeries sounds quaint, but the group is thinking beyond the breadbox. "We consider this the very beginning phase," says Melissa Hoover of Arizmendi, who is also executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. She says the companies plan to develop more businesses and are researching possibilities "along the supply chain": trucking, retail, health and wellness, as well as a funding vehicle like Caja Laboral.

Arizmendi now employs 125 workers and annually generates $12 million in sales. Despite the economic downturn, the businesses remain strong and poised for growth. This in part owes to the collective decision-making model, says Hoover. "Worker-owned cooperatives are an innately conservative form. We didn't overleverage ourselves."

    * Find this article at:
    * http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1947313,00.html

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.

"We see today's agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada," said USW International President Leo W. Gerard.  "Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants.  We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities."

"This is a wonderful idea," said Rick Kimbrough, a retired steelworker from Aliquippa, Pa, and a 37-year-veteran of Jones and Laughlin Steel. "Ever since they shut down our mill, I've always thought, 'why shouldn't we own them?' If we did, they wouldn't be running away." J&L's Aliquippa Works was once one of the largest steel mills in the world, but is now shutdown and largely dismantled. Much of the production moved to Brazil.

The USW partnership with Mondragon was a bold stroke. While hardly a household word in the U.S and little known in the mass media, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) has been the mother lode of fresh ideas on economic democracy and social entrepreneurship worldwide for 50 years. Started in 1956 with five workers in a small shop making kerosene stoves, MCC today has over 100,000 worker-owners in some 260 enterprises in 40 countries. Annual sales are pegged at more than 16 billion Euros with a wide range of products--high tech machine tools, motor buses, household appliances and a chain of supermarkets. MCC also maintains its own banks, health clinics, welfare system, schools and the 4000 student Mondragon University--all worker-owned coops.

Over the past decade, there have been a handful of efforts to apply the model and methods of MCC to projects in the United States. Almost all are on a small scale--several bakeries in the Bay Area, some bookstores, and most recently, an industrial laundry and solar panel enterprise in Cleveland. In Chicago, Austin Polytechnical Academy, a new public high school in a low-income neighborhood, was inspired, in part, by Mondragon, and a group of its students recently took part in a study tour of MCC in the Basque region.

But the USW initiative, and the potential clout behind it, puts the Mondragon vision on wider terrain. An integrated chain of worker-owned enterprises that might promote a green restructuring of the U.S. economy, for instance, would not only be a powerful force in its own right. It would also have a ripple effect, likely to spur other government and private efforts to both supplement and compete with it.

The USW is proceeding cautiously. "We've made a commitment here," said Rob Witherell during a recent interview at his Organizing Department's offices in the USW Pittsburgh headquarters. "But for that reason, we want to make sure we get it right, even if it means starting slowly and on a modest scale."

What this means at the moment, Witherell explained is that the USW is looking for viable small businesses in appropriate sectors where the current owners are interested in cashing out. The union is also searching for financial institutions with a focus on productive investment, such as cooperative banks and credit unions.

"It can get complicated," Witherell continued. "Not only do you have to fund the buyout, but you also have to figure out how to lend workers the money to buy-in, so they can repay it at a reasonable rate over a period of time, and still make a decent living."

The core Mondragon model was developed in the 1950s by a Roman Catholic priest, Father Jose Maria Arizmendi. It starts with a school, a credit union and a shop--all owned by workers who each had an equal share and vote. The three-in-one combination allows the cooperative to rely on its own resources for finance and training. The worker-owners cannot be fired. In regular assemblies, they hire and fire their managers, as well as set the general policies and direction of the firm. The workers themselves decide on the income spread between the lowest paid worker and the highest paid manager, which currently averages about 4.5 to one. (Compared with more than 400 to one in the U.S.) As the worker-owners accumulate resources, they can encourage the formation of new coops, indirectly through their bank and directly through their firms, and bring them into the overall structures of MCC governance. This is how they grew from one small shop to 260 enterprises in the past 50 years. Finally, if a worker-owner retires, he or she can 'cash out,' but the share cannot be sold. It is only available for purchase by a new worker-owner at that firm.

This last crucial point was developed by Arizmendi during the course of deep study of Catholic social theory as well as the works of Karl Marx and the English cooperativist Robert Owen. A worker-owner's ability to sell his or her share to anyone was a flaw in Owen's approach, Arizmendi decided, since it enabled outsiders to buy the more successful coops, turning their workers back into wage-labor, while starving the other less successful coops of resources. With Arizmendi's new approach, only four out of the several hundred MCC coop ventures have failed during the half century since Mondragon began.

The difference between worker-owned coops Mondragon-style, and ESOPs, or Employee Stock Ownership Programs more prevalent in the U.S., has to do with legal structure and control. In an ESOP, a portion of the companies stock, ranging from a large minority bloc to 100 percent, is owned by workers but held in a trust. Its value fluctuates with the stock market and workers can get dividends as they are paid, buy more stock, or "cash out" when they retire. If they do "cash out," they pay taxes on the closing amount, unless they roll it over into an IRA. By and large, ESOPs are financial instruments and do not automatically lead to worker control over the workplace or a role in shaping the firm's capital strategies. Managers are hired by the firm's board of directors, in turn, connected to the trust.

"We have lots of experience with ESOPs," said Gerard, "but we have found that it doesn't take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control.  We see Mondragon's cooperative model with 'one worker, one vote' ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street."
The USW, however, will insist on at least one modification of the Mondragon model: the worker-owners will be organized into trade unions, and will sign collective bargaining agreements with the management team. This sets up a unique situation whereby unionized workers reach an agreement with themselves as a workers' assembly and with the management team they hire.

This is not as big of a problem as it may sound. "’This is not heaven and we are not angels’ is a common phrase heard by visitors to Mondragon," said Michael Peck, MCC's North American delegate. Within the structure of each MCC enterprise is a 'social committee' of the workers, which looks to their broader social concerns. But, it has also come to play the role of settling day-to-day disputes with the management team, thus serving as a de facto union. Class struggle surely continues, even in a modified form in a worker cooperative.

There are also other features unique to MCC that may or may not apply to its replication in the U.S. Father Arizmendi developed his plan as a community-based survival mechanism following the devastation of the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. He was imprisoned under Franco. The Basque region, a center of anti-Franco resistance, was not only in economic ruin, but was also punished by the Franco government by being denied resources. MCC evolved through self-reliance.

Under Spanish law, because the MCC worker-owners are not technically wage-labor, but get their income from a share of the profits, they are excluded from much of the country's social welfare safety net pertaining to workers. MCC responded by organizing and funding it's own 'second degree' cooperatives--health care clinics, retirement plans, schools and other social services, all cooperatively owned with their own worker assemblies. Much of this integrated second-degree structure may not be required in the U.S. Here, it may make more sense for worker-owned enterprises to form local or regional collaboratives and stakeholder arrangements with county government, credit unions, community colleges and technical high schools, and other nonprofit agencies.

What's in the partnership for Mondragon? Josu Ugarte, President of Mondragron Internacional declared: "What we are announcing today represents a historic first--combining the world's largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world's most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America. We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first."

Along with its core values and unique ownership structure, MCC is still a business producing goods and providing services in markets, anchored in Spain but reaching across the globe. It seeks to sustain itself and grow, although it is not driven by the same 'expand or die' compulsion of traditional corporate or privately owned firms. Adding more worker-owners simply gives each worker a smaller slice of a bigger pie. There's no removed batch of nonproducing stockholders raking in superprofits, or trading their stock speculatively as it rises or falls.

MCC firms still compete with traditional rivals for customers in the marketplace, and thus are always seeking a competitive edge. MCC enterprises, for example, are mainly known for high quality products. But when this is combined with a fact of self-management, that they have far fewer supervisory layers on the payroll, the higher quality products hit the marketplaces with a lower price. This puts MCC on the leading edge of Spain's economy.

MCC also looks for other advantages, such as horizontal integration and securing competitive sources of supply. This is why it has cautiously been expanding abroad, buying up supply firms or other complimentary businesses, and seeking to reshape them into the MCC cooperative structure. Often, however, they run into difficulties, where another country's laws treat cooperatives with disadvantages.

That is not the case in the U.S., where even though industrial coops are not common, there are few undue restrictions on their formation. "As we look for firms to purchase," said Witherell, "MCC is not just interested in buying up companies and having the workers as employees. It's the MCC rep that's always pushing on how readily we can convert to worker ownership."

The Mondragon initiative is not the first innovative project of the Steelworkers seeking wider allies. With the encouragement of International President Leo Gerard, following on the anti-WTO street battles in Seattle in the 1990s, the USW helped found the Blue-Green Alliance together with the Sierra Club and other environmentalists.  It has worked closely with Van Jones and 'Green for All's jobs initiatives and the union plays a major role in the ongoing annual 'Good Jobs, Green Jobs' conferences. Most recently, the USW was a major participant in the week-long series of events making the oppositional case at the G20 events in Pittsburgh.

For Gerard and the USW, these alliances are matters of utmost practicality and survival. Gerard points out that 40,000 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. have closed since the onset of the 2007 economic crisis, throwing 2 million people out of work. His answer is structural reform in the economy along the lines of a 'green industrial revolution' and to fund it with a tax of speculative capital's financial transfers, known as the 'Tobin Tax.'

"Americans going green--manufacturing windmills and solar cells--would benefit both the economy and environment," said Gerard in a Campaign for America's Future article. "As the Wall Street debacle that pushed this country into the Great Recession last year showed, the United States cannot depend on trading in obscure financial products to support its economy. To survive, America must be able to manufacture products of intrinsic value that can be traded here and internationally." He often notes that there are 200 tons of steel and 8000 moving parts in every large wind turbine--a concept that is never lost on the unemployed and under-employed manufacturing workers that hear it.

The same point is not lost on small and medium-sized businesses looking for orders from new endeavors. This is where green entrepreneurs can form alliances with worker-owned cooperatives, trade unions, living wage job advocates and the global justice movement. The key question is whether the political will and organizational skill can be brought together to make it all happen in a way that most enhances the strength and livelihood of the working class.

Here is where the ball returns to the court of left organizers and solidarity economy activists. Lending a helping hand to the new initiative entails a good deal of investigation into the state of local businesses and conditions, plus building alliances, generating publicity, and contributing educational work among all those concerned. It’s not crowded, and there’s a lot to be done.

[Carl Davidson writes for Beaver County Blue and SolidarityEconomy.Net. He is a national board member of the Solidarity Economy Network and a national co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. If you like this article, make use of the PayPal button on http://solidarityeconomy.net ]