Sewa demonstrates how crucial it is that all co-op members – whether professionals or grassroots workers – share the values that the federation represents, and think not just of personal benefits but benefits for the collective and all its members.
Fasten your seatbelts
"We are organizing a sustainable and profitable farming model to provide an alternative for these indigenous farmers to the stranglehold of multinational corporations and their mono-crop and chemical-based farming schemes.”
The labor movement once built 40,000 units of low-cost co-op apartments for working class New Yorkers. Those units are embers of a vision that once fired the labor movement: Build for human need, not for profit. Labor can build it again.
In 2008, Morganton native Molly Hemstreet organized Opportunity Threads to fill the need for ethical labor opportunities for the local community and to produce textiles for companies across North Carolina.
When maximizing profits isn't the only goal, companies can actually work better. Under worker-run management structures, co-ops might avoid the usual friction between bosses giving orders from above, and staff misunderstanding or disputing decisions or resisting unfair work burdens from below. Fusing the workforce and management streamlines operations and saves energy otherwise sunk into training and monitoring the workforce.
Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, but the US needs its own version, not Denmark's. Socialism, on the other hand, historically has gone far beyond progressive welfare state measures by asserting that a democratic society can be achieved only if it includes democratic ownership of the economy. The steadily evolving localist forms of democratic ownership confront the traditional socialist questions and begin to answer them in novel ways.
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