Our social safety net is designed to fail. Our government isn’t working for the people. Bold steps are necessary to end this system of oppression, “that replaces our racial and gender caste system with a just and equitable one.”
READ MORE in this piece by SLU Professors Deepak Bhargava and Mimi Abramovitz and Tammy Thomas Miles, Senior Organizer at Community Change.
By Rebecca Lurie
Last week, CWOP hosted a conversation with Sofia Arana from the Basque Country. She shared a qualitative comparison of US tax codes and those of the Basque region in Spain as ways and reasons we have such difficult uptake of just and equitable economic development in the US. Her chapter in the book The Basque Tax System, produced by The Center for Basque Studies and the University of Nevada, Reno, makes a point of thanking SLU as the host of her studies and research as she honors the ancient ways of the Basque Economic Agreement. The information she shared offered a perspective we can use when trying to understand and advocate for policies and taxation that encourages stronger communities and better businesses. Her chapter offers insights gained living in her region of the world through “The impact of the Basque Economic Agreement on Community Economic Development”.
Guests included scholars from Brooklyn College, the Graduate Center and Rutgers University, activists from the NYC cooperative community and representatives from the Deputy Mayor’s Office on Strategic Innovations.
Many thanks to Sofia for generating such a fruitful discussion and opportunity for a shared thinking. More to come!
Featuring:
Join us for a presentation in connection with the SLU summer course “Theory, Practice and Principles of Cooperative Enterprise Management.” Over the past eight weeks, 25 SLU students engaged in learning and experiencing cooperative management techniques and approaches for bringing the change we want to see in the world.
This special final session will feature guest speakers from two of the largest organizations involved in worker co-ops in New York City. Adria Powell, CEO and President of Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, represents the cooperative with more than 2,000 workers who are members of 1199SEIU-United Healthcare Workers East. Maru Bautista, Director of the Cooperative Development Project at the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, serves the immigrant communities with start-up support and sector-based cooperative economic development. Both women serve on the board of Democracy At Work Institute (DAWI), and both are members of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. SLU Professor Rebecca Lurie will host the conversation and moderate a discussion with the audience.
No RSVP necessary. Doors open at 6 PM. Light refreshments will be served.
Last month, SLU hosted Our Economy!, a conference where leaders in community, labor and the economic democracy movement gathered to vision for an economy that can work for everyone. The most recent episode of the Laura Flanders Show covers some of the conversations that took place at the conference, and which have been happening in SLU’s Community and Worker Ownership Project and beyond. Check it out here:
via Laura Flanders Show:
Our city’s economy – what is it for? New York’s has been very good at piling up profits and building tall buildings. But all that private profit has come at a cost to public services and public trust. Could it be different? On this week’s show, we talk about the new conversations that are happening between labor unions and community members. Between residents, workers, and employers about how everyone’s economy can move forward.
April was a very exciting month for the Community and Worker Ownership Project at SLU. We hosted the new school’s first faculty conference; “Our Economy! Economic Democracy and System Change,” giving us the opportunity to gather several hundred people to have shared conversations about what would it take to take to scale practice for economic democracy. What policies should we be promoting? What should we be teaching? How are we doing it?
Later in the month, CWOP coordinator Rebecca Lurie visited Wellspring Cooperatives, a cooperative development organization in Springfield, Massachusetts that works closely with organized labor and U. Mass at Amherst. While there, Rebecca spoke at the Pioneer Valley Central Labor Council and the Western Mass Affiliate Labor Federation as part of their Annual Training Conference and Workers Memorial Day Ceremony. She talked about unions and coops and where they overlap with vision and mission for worker dignity, offering expanded approaches with the notion of worker and community ownership and control. Continue reading Updates from the Community and Worker Ownership Project
After last month’s economic democracy conference at SLU, new ideas and conversations are bubbling up in New York City and beyond. How can we implement some of our best ideas about democratizing our workplaces and our economy?
One attendee, Evelyn Wright of Commonwealth Hudson Valley, wrote a blog post outlining her work and ideas and summarizing some of the conversations that the day generated…
Last Friday I went into the city for a daylong conference on Economic Democracy and System Change at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. Deputy Mayor Philip Thompson opened the day with a talk about why we need economic democracy, how economic democracy differs from the socialism and social democracy of the twentieth century, and what the city is doing to promote it. Continue reading Notes on Our Economy
