A Capitalism alternative? The Mondragon Cooperatives with Professor Fred Freundlich

[99th_Monkey]

3. Richard Wolff - author of Democacy at Work, is onto this as well

I've been advocating this ever since the mid 80s, when I did my masters
thesis on examining the relative performance of 1) absentee owned, 2)
locally (w/in 50 miles owner lives), and 3) WORKER-OWNED businesses.
Both in terms of employment stability, rate of pay, and the amount of
profits that STAY in the LOCAL economy to turn over again and again,
worker ownership was THE most effective model.

Here's Richard Wolff:

We are at a juncture in History where Labor needs to make an abrupt LEFT hand
turn on a dime, to focus like a laser beam primarily on leveraging worker buyouts
of "distressed" business (the ones that vultures like Bain Capital prey upon); and
secondarily focus on both retaining extant collective bargaining contracts and on
incubating and supporting worker-owned startup businesses.

The workers can take back what's been stolen, but this is the ONLY means by which
they can; because history illustrates clearly that at the end of the day OWNERSHIP
is EVERYTHING, i.e. including that it ultimately trumps any collective bargaining
"victories" of the past, before the 1% figured out how to buy off 1/2 of the workers
to begger and bugger the other 1/2.

http://www.workerscontrol.net/authors/worker-cooperatives-united-states-historical-perspective-and-contemporary-assessment
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/08-6
http://www.nceo.org/
http://www.usworker.coop/front