Employee ownership, through which businesses share assets and agency with the. For many people, the pandemic has ripped off the sunglasses that masked the true colors of our political economy. The question now is whether we will settle for a superficial and ephemeral recovery of the old system or use our capacity to build a new system. COVID , an epochal event, has made the case for reimagining the ownership and governance of our economies on both sides of the Atlantic more urgent than ever.
An agenda to extend democratic public ownership is essential. A recent survey by the Employee Ownership Foundation and the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing shows that employee-owned firms during the current economic crisis have laid off fewer employees than comparable conventionally owned firms. Employee-owned firms were. Ownership is the engine of our extractive economy.
Capital and debt are its servants. No one knows more about this than Marjorie Kelly. Thomas Hanna, director of research at. Perhaps the most stimulating experiences during hours of confinement can be found by clicking onto. They emphasize one defining purpose: protecting workers. A new report from Common Wealth and the Democracy Collaborative to which the authors contributed presents several bottom-up and top-down proposals to fundamentally change the ownership structure, values, governance, and orientation of platforms and data, and gain control over the commanding.
With so many firms already begging for bailouts, governments could simply demand equity in exchange for aid, making full use of the powers that the Obama administration wilfully abandoned when it bailed out the auto industry in Digital platforms have proven indispensable to how we live, work, and play.
The challenge is to liberate the democratic and enlivening potential of the platform from the logic of concentrated corporate ownership and profit maximization.
This week expect to see political pundits once again coalesce, based on a superficial reading of the electorate, around the narrative that the election results are a mandate for center-rightism, a cautionary tale against progressive aspirations for a dramatic reshaping of our market-based political. It would be. Just when Americans most need consistent and equitable access to high. The U. But with that many Americans are awakening to both the value of the USPS and the manifest dangers of privatization.
The crisis has also sparked renewed interest in postal banking, a win-win approach that could both make the USPS more. Yes, socialism. When Republicans try to scare our communities into believing. Ee must work to ensure that the response to the COVID crisis ushers in a new era of community wealth building as the basis of new local economic transformation plans to create the kinds of democratic, inclusive, and community-based economies we need.
In an article by Jon Stone, a Community-Wealth. The researchers. Dawson suggests something like the strategy outlined the Democracy Collaborative for bringing the oil and gas sector into public ownership. A statement released Thursday by a group that includes Next System Project director Dana Brown calls for redesigning our pharmaceutical sector so that it is accountable to the public to meet public health needs, rather than to the profit demands of corporate shareholders.
The Democracy Collaborative proposes a publicly owned pharmaceutical industry, the purpose of which would be to develop lifesaving medication for all rather than maximizing shareholder profits. Decisions that put people first would make sure medications were developed to treat rare diseases and that.
As some recognize, internet access in the U. The documentary features the exciting trajectory of a new model of inclusive, democratic local economic development in what had. COVID has created economic hardships that have created severe business challenges for local small businesses, but broad based participant ownership structures could be the solution to supporting these local businesses.
The global spread of Covid has shone a bright spotlight on both the vital need for reliable high-speed internet and the inadequacies of the for-profit, corporate model in delivering it. This paper, the first of four modules on democratic public ownership in the United Kingdom and the US , explores. The COVID crisis has demonstrated that public services and the people who operate them are truly the foundation of healthy and resilient societies, This book explores a growing international re municipalization movement that is helping redefine public ownership for the 21st century.
The COVID pandemic could become a moment of crystallization, with communities and governments working together to build a genuinely inclusive economy. But to do so, we need ambitious interventions, both at the national level and at the level of a new common sense, built upward from community.
Vaccines are critical to safeguarding public health as one of the most effective ways to prevent disease, including highly contagious diseases that can cause pandemics. But the for-profit pharmaceutical industry is neither prepared for nor incentivized to tackle growing public health challenges, like global pandemics. The Democracy Collaborative and Common Wealth is undertaking a project to explore the frontiers of public ownership in the 21st century, particularly in the areas of digital infrastructure, data and platforms, intellectual property, and land and natural resources.
Introduction Climate change is an unprecedented global social, political, and economic crisis. Without drastic action, the United States will likely experience rising sea levels that will regularly flood major cities, more intense weather patterns that will destroy homes and businesses, longer and.
Introduction The information technology sector broadly defined is now at the leading edge of the capitalist system. Material production and distribution, enterprise and professional management, finance, insurance and real estate are all increasingly dependent on digital technology.
In the second. Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical development, production, and distribution in the U. One hundred years ago July 28, a bank in Bismarck, N. This would have been an unremarkable event. The Making of a Democratic Economy is a clarion call for a movement ready to get serious about transforming our economic system.
A combination of concentrated wealth, the primacy of shareholder interest in shaping company behavior, and the institutional weakness of labour has helped turn many companies into engines of wealth extraction for external owners, institutional investors, and senior management, often at the expense. Mission-led employee-owned firms embody a powerful model of enterprise design for a new era of environmental sustainability and social equity.
This report shares the story of this emerging model, embodied in plus firms that are employee-owned B Corporations and benefit corporations, plus dozens. We outline the major provisions and legal changes necessary to enact this right, and the ecosystem of. Across the world, communities have initiated campaigns to shift from investor-owned utilities to publicly owned and operated utilities, increasingly taking on the perspective and language of energy democracy. This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the scope and scale of U.
Energy democracy—a new idea from the ranks of community organizers, labor, and renewable energy advocates who see our current energy system as broken and destructive—seeks to take on the political and economic change needed to tackle the energy transition holistically.
Matthew J. In his article, Burke highlights the thought leadership and guidance of the Democracy Collaborative: Energy democracy is an emergent social movement. A personal introduction In the interest of full transparency, this essay is personal. In all that time, regular people have never had more communications capacity than we. Their observable and felt harm to our civic and economic life is corroborated by research. A new report by Mary Ann Beyster, president and trustee of the Foundation for Enterprise Development FED , published by the Fifty by Fifty initiative of The Democracy Collaborative, examines the investing landscape for potential opportunities in employee ownership.
The report, Impact Investing and Employee Ownership, reports on the results from six months of research, showing that the opportunities for impact investors to support employee ownership are limited, but that an investing infrastructure is beginning to emerge across asset classes. This report by Mary Ann Beyster, president and trustee of the Foundation for Enterprise Development FED , discusses the investing landscape for potential opportunities in employee ownership. While employee-owned businesses have historically used a wide range of financial tools, the role of private equity and impact investors has been limited to date.
In a meeting convened by the Fifty by Fifty Initiative, the Foundation for Enterprise Development, and the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, participants took a deeper look at barriers, opportunities and resources for connecting the gaps between investors and employee-owned firms.
In this blog for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, our Executive Vice President and Senior Fellow Marjorie Kelly delves into some of the groundbreaking models for inclusive ownership that are increasingly making an impact on the lives of workers and community members.
Kelly offers these. This report from The Democracy Collaborative explores ways in which impact investors can help build an inclusive economy by accelerating the growth of broad-based ownership models — worker cooperatives, social enterprises, employee stock ownership plans ESOP s , hybrid enterprises, and municipal enterprise.
Originally published in Rooflines: The Shelterforce blog on July 7, Since , 60 percent of new cooperative worker-owners are people of color and more than two thirds of total worker-owners are women. The purpose of the session was to discuss how to achieve unprecedented scale of employee ownership by focusing on achieving an audacious goal: 50 million U.
This report summarizes and expands upon the meeting. The Democracy Collaborative completed this study in February , which documented the incredible potential for the project, a high degree of community support including local Anchor Institution buy-in, as well as several potential business niches for future worker-owned businesses. How can cities redeploy their economic development resources to focus on building a more inclusive economy grounded in broad, local ownership?
How can policymakers get strategies like worker cooperative development the support and resources needed to reach truly meaningful scale? How can. This blog post highlights groundbreaking municipal involvement in worker cooperative development. In Next City, Oscar Perry Abello looks at how our new report Educate and Empower highlights key strategies for building stronger community wealth building initiatives. In the years since the financial crisis and Great Recession of the late s, growing numbers of people in the United States have come to the realization that the current economic and political system is profoundly dysfunctional.
Public concern continues to grow over increasing disparities of wealth and income, deteriorating social and environmental outcomes, and the dangers of vesting power in large hierarchical organizations — whether private corporations or government agencies.
CERO is a five-member worker-owned cooperative on a mission to encourage composting and create jobs in the hard-up Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Boston.
This report showcases some key emerging best practices in state and local policy-making to support community wealth building — designed to support economic inclusion goals, create quality jobs with family-supporting wages, address generational poverty, stabilize communities and the environment, and address growing wealth inequality. How can we scale up the cooperative movement without losing our cooperative values?
That is the question contributors seek to answer in this collection of essays. Earlier this month, the small city of Somerset, Kentucky drew national attention when it opened a municipally-owned and -operated fuel center in an effort to drive down gas prices for local residents.
As a result of its proximity to Lake Cumberland, a popular tourist destination, the city of 11, residents has long struggled with high fuel prices—especially during the summer months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The report is authored by. But there are still many challenges ahead. Cooperative development is one tool in the community wealth building strategy toolbox that can help lift low-wage workers, and especially women, out of poverty.
The past few weeks have seen a flurry of impressive activity at the level of city government, all around policies designed to build community wealth and encourage the growth of cooperative local economies. Today, corporate profits are at an all-time high and employee wages are at their lowest ever as a percent of GDP. Worker cooperatives embody the hope that we can reverse the downward spiral in wage stagnation, wealth distribution, and concentration of ownership to build an economy that truly serves people and communities.
But what will it really take to create a more cooperative economy? This paper aims to help build the field of U.
Although informed by the cooperative giants in Europe, this analysis highlights lessons learned through the development and growth of worker co-ops in the U. Worker cooperatives are an important part of the community wealth building toolbox, and our new report Worker Cooperatives, Pathways to Scale, authored by Hilary Abell, assesses the state of worker cooperative development in the United States and suggests key strategies and policies for scaling up its impact.
Through the continued efforts of an informed, engaged, and environmentally conscious citizenry, Boulder is moving closer to its goal of significant emissions reductions through local control of its energy system. The authors discuss economic institutions, alternative economic system designs, and forms of. Community land trusts are a key strategy for helping low-income communities build assets through home ownership while mitigating the destructive consequences of irrational, speculation-fueled housing markets.
Our new infographic highlights the mechanism behind the community land trust. They outline the history of the economic democracy movement, highlighting community wealth building strategies such as community development finance institutions and cooperatives. She is also a founding director of the nonprofit Democracy at Work Institute, which provides technical assistance resources to worker cooperatives.
On November 5th, residents of Boulder, Colorado went to the polls to decide whether or not the city should continue on its path towards a locally controlled public utility devoted to expanding renewable energy and reducing carbon emissions. Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz and community development associate Keane Bhatt provide 10 concrete action steps that individuals and groups can take to foster democratic economies and build community wealth.
Using on-the-ground examples, they show how to engage credit unions, build employee-ownership structures, work with hospitals and universities to forge community partnerships and more. Bush, December 17, At the heart of the present debate on how to address the continuing political stalemate and economic decay in America are some fundamental misconceptions.
Rob Witherell works for the United Steelworkers union at its headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition to working on contract. To understand emerging ownership alternatives, Marjorie Kelly reports from a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical in Denmark, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built.
Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work. How thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises are beginning to democratize the deep substructure of the American economy, with a new introduction by the author, Gar Alperovitz, and a new foreword by James Gustave Speth.
More info and ordering at www. This report provides the first comprehensive survey of community wealth building institutions in the green economy. The United Nations General Assembly has declared as the International Year of Cooperatives, highlighting the contribution of cooperatives to economic development, in particular recognizing their impact on poverty reduction, employment generation and social integration.
Resources do not represent community wealth unless communities own and control them. This handbook looks at various kinds of shared ownership, including cooperatives, employee ownership, community land trusts, municipal ownership, local and tribal ownership, mission-controlled ownership, and.
Aligning finance with people and planet Centering community and place Demanding racial equity Expanding democratic ownership Fighting for a new systemic vision Mobilizing anchor institutions Redesigning the enterprise Transitioning to ecological sustainability. November 9, November 2, October 22, October 15, September 27, Two leading Socialist elected officials share examples from both sides of the Atlantic of how they are advancing democratic ownership and community wealth building.
September 22, September 9, Burlington, Vermont is in the process of consolidating its fractured, inefficient, carbon intensive waste collection system. Centrists on the city council are advocating for the new system to be semi-privatized.
Progressives are pushing back with an effort to bring the consolidated system into. September 8, August 25, August 11, July 30, July 29, July 23, July 21, We support a call on the Biden administration to use the Defense Production Act to keep the Morgantown, West Virginia drug plant open, and to adopt an industrial strategy that prioritizes public health over private greed.
Co-determination ; collective bargaining ; consultation in the enterprise ; coordination of collective bargaining ; management prerogative ; participation ; right of collective bargaining ; social dialogue. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work , 15 May. Eurofound, Wyattville Road, Loughlinstown, Co. Eurofound is an agency of the European Union. Skip to main content.
Definition Eurofound defines industrial democracy as a participatory and democratic process which encompasses the participation rights of employers and employees in the governance of employment relationships, either directly or indirectly, via trade unions, works councils, shop stewards or other forms of employee representation at any level shop floor, establishment, company, sectoral, regional and cross-industry.
Industrial relations index Eurofound has developed a composite indicator to measure how countries perform across four dimensions: industrial democracy, industrial competitiveness, social justice, and quality of work and employment. Related dictionary terms Co-determination ; collective bargaining ; consultation in the enterprise ; coordination of collective bargaining ; management prerogative ; participation ; right of collective bargaining ; social dialogue. Tell us what you think. Hide comments.
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