Democratic Ownership and the Pluralist Commonwealth: The Creation of an Idea
Whose Time Has Come
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
By Gar Alperovitz, Routledge | Book Excerpt
An abandoned facility of the defunct Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company.
The following piece by Gar Alperovitz forms one of the guest "interludes" in
Welcome to the Revolution.
On September 19, 1977 -- a day remembered locally as "Black Monday" -- the
corporate owners of the Campbell Works in Youngstown, Ohio, abruptly shuttered
the giant steel mill's doors. Instantly, 5,000 workers lost their jobs, their
livelihoods, and their futures. The mill's closing was national news, one of
the first major blows in the era of deindustrialization, offshoring, and "free
trade" that has since made mass layoffs commonplace.
What was not commonplace was the response of the steelworkers and the local
community. "You feel the whole area is doomed somehow," Donna Slaven, the wife
of a laid-off worker, told reporters at the time. "If this can happen to us,
there is not a secure union job in the country." Rather than leave the fate of
their community in the hands of corporate executives in New York, New Orleans,
and Washington DC, the workers began to organize and resist. And they joined
with a new coalition of priests, ministers, and rabbis -- headed by a Catholic
and an Episcopal bishop -- to build support for a new way forward. I was called
in to head up an economic team to help.
Working together, the steelworkers, the ecumenical coalition, and our team put
forward a bold proposal to re-open the mill under worker–community ownership.
With support from a creative Carter Administration official, a study was financed
that demonstrated the feasibility of a plan to put the old mill back into
operation with the latest modern technology. A worker–community-owned facility
could operate efficiently, re-employ 4,000 people, and generate a profit.
Peace activist, civil rights advocate, and labor lawyer Staughton Lynd worked
with me and the coalition to develop the transition effort. Lynd subsequently
wrote:
What was new in the Youngstown venture was the notion that workers and
community residents could own and operate a steel mill. ... Employee–community
ownership of the Campbell Works would have challenged the capitalist system on
the terrain of the large-scale enterprises in basic industries. ... This was
the ownership model the workers themselves chose.
The coalition knew that their only chance against big steel was to build a
popular political base around the state of Ohio and even around the nation.
They understood it was important to universalize the idea, to make it clear
that the problem of Youngstown was a problem many communities would face. One
of their themes was: "Save Youngstown, Save the Nation."
They also had to overcome the opposition of the national leadership of the
United Steelworkers union which, in 1977, had no interest in the idea of
workers owning a mill (or young activists getting ideas about organizing
power!). A major victory of Youngstown's local, state, and national campaign
was the 1978 decision by the Carter Administration to support the plan with
millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees.
Perhaps not surprisingly -- given how innovative the plan was in the 1970s --
the coalition did not win the battle of Youngstown. After the mid-term
elections of 1978, the Carter Administration withdrew its loan guarantees
amidst pressure from industry lobbyists and antagonistic government officials.
Without the loan guarantees, the effort collapsed.
The story, however, does not end there. The steelworkers and the ecumenical
coalition knew they were up against some of the most powerful players in the
country. They were fully aware they might well lose the battle. They also knew,
however, that they were on to a very important idea, one whose time would come.
A centerpiece of the strategy was an all-out effort to help educate the public,
the press, and the politicians in the state and around the country. And, in
fact, the inspiring example of the Youngstown workers and ecumenical coalition
has had ongoing and profound impact. There are now many worker-owned businesses
in the state of Ohio, and the simple idea that workers can and should own their
workplace is commonplace not only among workers, but also among businesspeople,
many of whom (aided by certain tax benefits) now sell their successful
businesses to former employees when they retire. Also in Ohio, the late John
Logue, a Kent State professor inspired by the Youngstown effort, established
the Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University, a support system
for worker ownership in the state that is one of the best in the nation.
It is not just Ohio. The concept of worker ownership has become commonplace
across the country and the world. A 2004 film, The Take, by Naomi Klein and Avi
Lewis, documented the struggle of Argentinian workers to turn their factory
into a worker cooperative, and it inspired many people to develop worker
cooperatives. Also in 2004, the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC)
was established. Starting with just $7,000 in the bank, the USFWC has grown to
represent and support more than 160 democratic workplaces and organizations,
representing more than 4,000 workers, and has been instrumental in pushing
state and local governments to support worker cooperatives as part of their
economic development strategies.
In New York City, a coalition of grassroots community organizers and
cooperative advocates -- including the New York City Network of Worker
Cooperatives, an affiliate of the USFWC, and The Working World (an organization
founded by a young New Yorker who was motivated by The Take) -- recently
secured $1.2 million from the city's budget to support worker-owned businesses
in low-income communities. One of the driving forces behind the New York City
legislation is Cooperative Home Care Associates, the largest worker cooperative
in the United States with more than 2,000 workers, most of whom are women of
color, who enjoy above-average pay and benefits.
In Madison, Wisconsin, a measure has passed the city council earmarking $5
million over 5 years to support cooperative development. In Jackson,
Mississippi, before his tragic death, Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was preparing an
ambitious strategy to combat economic inequality in the heart of the Black Belt
by building a "solidarity economy" -- one that connected community and
cooperative enterprises to municipal procurement and remains underway.
In 2008, the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative was launched in Cleveland, Ohio
-- where the population has fallen from more than 900,000 in 1950 to below
400,000 today. Here, a number of cooperatives are linked together with a
community-building non-profit corporation and a revolving fund designed to
create more such connected, community-building businesses. The Evergreen
Cooperative Laundry operates out of a LEED [Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design] Gold-certified building, uses around one-fifth the amount
of water that conventional laundries use, and has an advanced water heating
system that saves energy. Evergreen Energy Solutions recently installed one of
the larger urban solar fields in the country. And Green City Growers Cooperative
-- a 3.25-acre hydroponic greenhouse -- can produce roughly 3 million heads of
lettuce and 300,000 pounds of herbs per year. An important new strategy in
Cleveland uses anchor institutions -- hospitals and universities in the area
that purchase more than $3 billion a year in goods and services -- to provide a
long-term market for the worker-owned cooperatives.
The United Steelworkers, whose national leadership once opposed the Youngstown
effort, has also evolved. The union has adopted a major strategy to help build
"union co-op" worker-owned companies around the nation. Efforts are underway,
in particular, in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.
This is not, however, simply a story about worker coops. It is much more about
how change can happen -- and about how an idea whose time has come actually
"comes." The spirit of Youngstown lives on. At this time of writing, a major
new initiative -- "50 by 50" -- aims to organize 50 million workers in
worker-owned enterprises in the United States by 2050. And in many communities,
other new initiatives have been building momentum. Philadelphia and Santa Fe,
for instance, are actively considering new public banks to develop much more
broadly democratized local economies. Activists in Boulder, Colorado, have won
two major referenda to take over the local electric utility and convert it to
less climate-destroying approaches.
Beyond this, the Bernie Sanders revolution gave millions of people a sense that
things might move faster than the steadily developing worker coop revolution.
So, too, Black Lives Matter activists have turned their attention to new
community-building economic strategies. At another level, the Next System
Project, backed by some of the nation's leading scholars and activists, along
with 10,000 engaged citizens, is considering developmental trajectories that
begin, like Youngstown, in the here and now, but look forward even to such
major changes as turning the big Wall Street banks into public utilities, and
nationalizing oil companies and other firms in the interests of dealing with
climate change, on the one hand, and corporate power, on the other.
Slowly, like an image emerging in a photographer's darkroom, the basis of a
different economy is beginning to appear, first in outline form, then perhaps
with increasing pace over time, with more and more elements at all levels --
community, region, nation. It might be called a "Pluralist Commonwealth" in its
bringing together of different forms of democratic ownership, from neighborhood
to community to region and beyond. At its core is a vision of community, one
made real by the forms of economic life it nourishes.
The late Margaret Thatcher, conservative Prime Minister of the UK, famously
declared that "There Is No Alternative" to capitalism, and the acronym "TINA"
became a way to stifle new thought and action. What Youngstown, the myriad new
experiments, the climate change and Black Lives Matter movements, and the
Sanders revolution all suggest is precisely the opposite: there is an
alternative -- or rather, there is a powerful and fast-developing process
underway that offers promise, though surely not inevitability, of a new way
forward. And the Youngstown idea of linking both workers and community in a
much broader universalizing model is fast developing, not only in Cleveland,
but in cities like Rochester, New York State, and Richmond, Virginia.
Gar Alperovitz
Gar Alperovitz, author most recently of What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk
About the Next American Revolution, is cochair of the Next System Project and
cofounder of the Democracy Collaborative. Alperovitz was deeply involved in the
teach-ins on the Vietnam War.
