Andrew Foltz-Morrison speaks English with a Midland accent, studies philosophy at Rutgers University, and writes this blog's posts. His favorite contemporary political thinkers are David Harvey and Noam Chomsky.
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Steelworkers Partner With World’s Largest Worker-Owned Co-Op
Big news from last week largely overlooked by the mainstream media: The United Steelworkers will join forces with MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A., the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, to start worker-owned factories in Canada and the United States.
“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,” USW International President Leo W. Gerard said. “We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”
Under the historic agreement, signed October 27, USW and Mondragon will try to integrate collective bargaining with Mondragon’s collective practices. The two sides have also pledged to explore new approaches to bargaining in order to encourage worker participation and labor/management cooperation.
Finally, USW and Mondragon will investigate co-investment strategies for integrating the cooperatives into the larger community. Worker-owned cooperatives just might offer a solution to the conundrum of manufacturing in North America.
Exterior- bottom rotated for readability
Interior
I only got to go to a very small portion of this, but it was great.
oppositional architecture urbanization architecture geography space David Harvey
Karl Marx, Capital, volume III, chapter XV.
I hope that someday all these polls asking “who is to blame for the current recession?” will offer multiple choice options that extend beyond simply “Democrats? Republicans? Or both?”.
(via langer) (via jhnbrssndn)
My meeting with the undergraduate director of the geography program went very well. He told me that I’d have no problem with a double major, and even said I should consider honors in geography. According to him, I would fit in very well with the social theory side of geography.
I also learned the rather frustrating fact that David Harvey very nearly came to be a professor at Rutgers, but he of course ended up at CUNY instead.
The economic downturn has produced an explosion of popular anger against bankers’ “greed” and their “obscene” bonuses. This has accompanied a wider critique of “growthmanship” – the pursuit of…
There can never be an adequate answer to the title question in a capitalist economy. The article is a good read.
I have a meeting today with the undergraduate director of the Rutgers geography program to discuss a double major.
abcsoupdot:think4yourself:soupsoup:rillawafers:brianglidewell
I like the idea here, but as a former resident (and current admirer) of the North Star State, I resent the implicit assumption that Minnesotans are crazy.
Is Marxism Relevant Today - Panel Discussion with
Duncan Foley - Professor of Economics
Department of Economics
The New School for Social ResearchDavid Harvey - Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
City University of New YorkPrabhat Patnaik - Professor of Economics
Department of Economics
Jawaharlal Nehru University
How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise.
In the old-fashioned kind of recession decades ago, big companies laid off people with the expectation of rehiring them when the economy turned up. Then a few recessions back, companies started laying off people for good, never rehiring them even when the economy recovered.
In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, companies are going a step further. They’re using this sharp downturn to cut payrolls even below where they were when times were good. Outsourcing abroad, setting up shop in China and elsewhere, contracting out, replacing people with software and automated machines – they’re doing whatever it takes to get payrolls down so earnings bounce up.
I find it very interesting that nobody has yet been arrested or charged with anything, much less convicted, and everyone has assumed that the union is, in fact, corrupt.
Unions aren’t what made the US manufacturing sector non-competitive with the rest of the world- it was business leaders who wiped out America’s industrial base when they realized that outsourcing would be more profitable for their firms in the short term. Before 1980, the US was the largest exporter of finished goods and largest importer of raw materials; today it is the opposite.
I’ve noticed that concern about employees driving up the cost of goods is highly selective. Whenever the unions want a better deal for themselves, economists argue that they’re just driving up the price level. When the managers want to pay themselves more, economists start talking about optimum wage theory. There seems to be a double standard.
My comment on a New York Times story on a corruption investigation in a paper delivery union. The comments section turned into an anti-union free-for-all.
My brother is giving a presentation tomorrow in his advanced accompaniment repertoire class on Hanns Eisler, a composer and one of the first people to be blacklisted by the House Un-American activities committee, and his librettist, Bertolt Brecht. A very nice overlap between his areas of interest and my own.
