Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
There is a bigger question or theme I’m feeling. About civic engagement, community engagement, etc. and how we’ve been pushed out of that (one way or another) so that we remain alone, isolated, and unable/unwilling/unmotivated to gather and be in community. That muscle has atrophied and been beaten out of us. #addto/questions
Highlights
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Cooperatives, for example, typically offer longer-term jobs with higher pay for workers and higher-quality goods and lower prices for consumers than their conventional counterparts. And they do so, moreover, under far more democratic and equitable conditions than conventional privately owned firms. In this way, as Ethan Miller has written, cooperatives demonstrate that “it is possible to build real livelihoods while also building another paradigm of social values.”
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the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union were able to build up revenue and loyalty during the 1920s and ’30s in part by providing their members with services ranging from health care and housing to banking.
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SEIU-UHW, a union of 100,000 health care workers in California, recently established a unionized health care cooperative providing both services to clients and meaningful employment to workers. Unionized lobstermen with the International Association of Machinists–affiliated Lobster 207 in Maine have formed a marketing cooperative to help members collectively sell their catch, allowing them to increase their income by cutting out middlemen. These kinds of mutualistic practices can bolster both the numbers and financial assets of unions — and, by extension, their political power.
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socializing institutions no longer provide the economic benefits that make them worth joining. This process has been centuries in the making, from the early modern state taking over the political functions of free communes, to capitalist firms taking over the economic functions of guilds, to elite nonprofits (funded by donations from the wealthy) taking over the social welfare functions of local benefit societies.