Workers buying the factory where they work - a new trend in job protection in US?

[Adele Edisen]

This is really good Adele. Workers are the only thing needed to produce good or deliver services. And this way they get all the profits, no cut for parasites, and can set their own pace and working conditions and expand in ways that suit them.

Thank you, Magda, and for that video. Not many in the US, and elsewhere, may know of the origins of the cooperative movement in the US. I am no expert in this field, but this much I do know. From what I have learned is that the idea pf creating cooperatively owned manufacturing plants and many other forms of businesses, including banks, came from immigrants from Finland. Finns settled in northern parts of the United States where they found the climate to be much like that of their original homeland. Finland was a poor country having survived under Swedish rule for many centuries and then under Russian Czars for an additional century. Finns learned to make do by coming together to own and to work in industries and businesses that would benefit themselves and their countrymen. When some of them left for the United States in the pre-World War I era, they brought these ideas with them. In some cases they were met with hostility from their American neighbors who believed in capitalistic private enterprise and banished Finns from their towns. In Michigan there were signs that read, "No Finns or Indians allowed."

My uncle homesteaded in northern Minnesota, creating a productive dairy farm. He organized his dairy farmer neirghbors to form a dairy cooperative to market their milk and cheese products. He also organized an electrical cooperative so that this farming community would have electricity in this very wild rural place, and he also organized a grocery cooperative so that these families, and others, could obtain their food at modest prices. All of this was done long before the rural electrification program of President Roosevelt came into effect in the early 1930s.

In the United States we have Credit Unions for banking purposes. Credit Unions are cooperatives owned by their members who use their services. Grocery cooperatives existed mostly in midwest northern cities. A few industries exist as cooperatives - a bakery in California, a hi-tech computer company in Wisconsin, I believe, according to Michael Moore's film, "Capitalism: A Love Story." In Spain's Basque country, an entire city, Mondragon, began its manufacturing system as cooperatives, and in 50 years grew from a rural village to a modern city with its many cooperative businesses, its own bank, public school system and a university. People in South America are creating cooperatives to solve their economic problems as others have before them. It's an idea that is not exclusively owned by any one group of people.

Adele