Worker Ownership For the 21st Century?

By Laura Flanders
The Nation via commondreams.org
March 27, 2012

 http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/27-2 .

It may not be the revolution’s dawn, but it’s certainly a
glint in the darkness. On Monday, this country’s largest
industrial labor union teamed up with the world’s largest
worker-cooperative to present a plan that would put people to
work in labor-driven enterprises that build worker power and
communities, too.

Titled 'Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union
Co-op Model,' the organizational proposal released at a press
conference on March 26 in Pittsburgh, draws on the fifty-five
year experience of the Basque-based Mondragon worker
cooperatives. To quote the document:

"In contrast to a Machiavellian economic system in which the
ends justify any means, the union co-op model embraces the
idea that both the ends and means are equally important,
meaning that treating workers well and with dignity and
sustaining communities are just as important as business
growth and profitability."

It might not sound like big news to members of their local
food coop but it’s revolutionary stuff in the context of
industrial production. The United Steelworkers represents
some 1.2 million members; the average steel plant requires
millions of dollars of investment, and there’s history here
when it comes to worker ownership- some of it painful.

Thirty-five years ago, when local steelworkers and a
statewide religious coalition put forward a plan to transfer
the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel mill to worker and
community control, the USW’s attitude was very different. As
recounted by Gar Alperovitz in his (recently updated)
"America Beyond Capitalism:"

"In the late 1970s the union saw worker-ownership as a threat
to organizing, and it opposed efforts by local steelworkers
to explore employee-owned institution-building in cities like
Youngstown."

This Monday, Leo Gerard, forward-thinking president of a very
new kind of international USW, had this to say:

"To survive the boom and bust, bubble-driven economic cycles
fueled by Wall Street, we must look for new ways to create
and sustain good jobs on Main Street.... Worker-ownership can
provide the opportunity to figure out collective alternatives
to layoffs, bankruptcies, and closings."

"The union’s gone through a huge transition," Alperovitz told
me when I reached him at his office shortly after the press
conference. "This is a real declaration of a new direction
for labor."

It’s been a few years since the USW first became curious
about the Mondragon cooperatives after they had a good
experience working with GAMESA, a co-op friendly Spanish wind
turbine outfit that opened up three plants in Pennsylvania.
In 2009, with their Spanish colleagues' help, Gerard sent a
delegation to the Basque region of Spain to investigate
Mondragon, now a $24 billion global operation. Since then,
the USW has worked slowly with Mondragon and the Ohio
Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) a university based coop-
outreach center founded by one of the organizers of the
Youngstown initiative, to fine tune the US version presented
Monday.

For the details of the proposal, check out the model for
yourself. The full text of the union co-op model is available
at www.usw.coop or www.union.coop. The template is intended
to be a living document, write the authors, "subject to
continuous revision and improvement based on user feedback
and applied experiences."

The key elements of the plan are open membership, democratic
organization; jobs trump profit margins, and worker
participation in management. Also, social transformation: "A
key part of the co-op’s mission is to support and invest in
their communities by creating jobs, funding development
projects, supporting education, and providing opportunity."

However the details are applied, the point is to get more
experiments up and running. "The more we can do, the better,"
says Alperovitz. "We'll learn and along the way legitimate
the idea."

There are political implications, says Carl Davidson,
national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for
Democracy and Socialism and a Pittsburgh local, who has
studied Mondragon and attended the press conference Monday.
"It’s a radical structural reform that produces not just a
better contract but alters relationships of power."

In an era of high unemployment, low levels of union
membership and attacks from all sides on the political power
of labor, US workers have less ability than ever to "check"
corporate power through mass mobilization and traditional
labor tactics. The worker-ownership model presents another
way to exercise power. If workers can raise sufficient
investment capital and find stable markets they can do better
than "check" corporate power, they can (to use Alperovitz’s
word) "displace" corporations.

At the very least, the USW/Mondragon move puts a new idea on
the table. Will it change the equation the next time the
federal government is bailing out an auto company, for
example? What if, instead of pumping public money into the
same-old private enterprise, public money powered up a new
worker-owned operation, run by new rules for different
outcomes? (Labor and community welfare, say, instead of
profits to be skimmed off by top-level shareholders?)

The opening up of that question to serious public dialogue is
a major step, but Monday’s announcement introduced more than
a concept. The organizers also introduced workers involved in
a new industrial laundry they’re calling the Pittsburgh
"Clean and Green Laundry Cooperative" modeled in part on
similar projects in Cleveland. Plans are afoot for union co-
ops in Cincinnati, too. The Pittsburgh laundry’s slated to
open in the beginning of June.

© 2012 The Nation

[Laura Flanders was the founder and host of GRITtv and is the
author of the books BUSHWOMEN and Blue Grit. She's the editor
of At the Tea Party]

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