The Erosion of Collective Bargaining Has Widened the Gap Between Productivity and Pay

To understand the growth of income inequality—and the disappointing increases in workers’ wages and compensation as well as middle-class incomes—it is crucial to understand the divergence of pay and productivity. By?David Cooper?and?Lawrence Mishel?in ... Read more

Our Harvest: Growing a New Type of Food Business

Part farm, part food hub, Our Harvest is the first union worker-owned food cooperative in North America — and it’s based here in Cincinnati’s College Hill neighborhood. The idea for an aggregated food distribution hub that pays workers livable wages was put into motion in 2010 by union organizer ... Read more

Against the Odds Four NYC worker-owners talk co-ops, family, and jobs with justice

Today we present testimony from four worker-owners, delivered at the the New York City Council Committee on Community Development hearing this past February. the hearing was to consider a proposal for a city budget line devoted to cooperative development. Given ... Read more

It Takes an Ecosystem: The Rise of Worker Cooperatives in the US

As the traditional job market deteriorates, the number of worker cooperatives in the United States is growing as people seek more stable and rewarding work. An ecosystem of worker cooperative development organizations is emerging to accelerate this trend. What's a worker ... Read more

Economy slumps, Wall Street booms

Alongside the massive diversion of social wealth to the financial elite, the IMF, World Bank and Fed continue to demand the gutting of past social reforms and protections for workers, in the name of “job creation” and “competitiveness.” Calling for cuts in government subsidies that hold down food and energy ... Read more

Rank-and-File Environmentalism

That the emergence of ecological consciousness among coal miners was intimately linked to a union democracy movement isn’t a coincidence. Fighting for democratic, rank and file-run unions is necessary for both opening the space for energy workers to discuss how to confront ecological destruction and to build the ... Read more

Workers and environmentalists of the world, unite!

Breaking out of the multiple crises that afflict the world today — both in the domains of the economy and work as well as in the domain of ecology and public health — requires no lesser effort than completely abandoning the “treadmill of production”, including the politics, economics and ... Read more

A General Without an Army

The irony is that for all Piketty’s reasonableness and respectableness, it is only the radical left and the labor movement that will push his program, if anyone is going to. However much his book has changed the conversation on inequality within economics and in the media — and it is really too soon to tell whether ... Read more

Walmart Moms’ Walkout Starts Friday

In 2008, political commentators made a lot of fuss about “Walmart Moms,” a demographic that was supposedly key to the election. The Walmart Mom was an updated, service-economy version of the blue-collar worker: Someone without a college degree, working and raising a family, usually white, possibly religious. ... Read more

Enthusiasm High for a New Economy for Baltimore

With growing recognition that the economy fails to serve the interests of most people, alternative institutions and processes based on economic democracy are beginning to pop up everywhere. This movement points to what is called by some as “the New Economy.” Throughout the country people are ... Read more