It's high time that Richard Wolff, et. al. got an audience with Obama & the Sec. of Treasury

[99th_Monkey]

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Mr. Wolff is a powerful advocate for self-directed (worker-owned) democratic workplaces where
the workers own the business as a collective or cooperative. This idea has been around for awhile,
ever since was birthed by the early US labor movement in the 1800s in fact, yet there is a very
compelling case to be made for democratizing the workplace as a strategy for "reforming" capitalism
from the ground up. I believe this a classic case of "an idea whose time has finally come".

There ARE ways -- whether by congress or executive order -- for the US Government to encourage
and incentivize both start-ups of, and conversions to, worker-owned enterprises. Many of these
measures could be enacted without any significant cost to taxpayers, yet the benefits (especially
given the current post-Occupy zeitgeist) could be many and very far reaching in terms of the long
term prospects for resuscitating the American Dream.

HISTORY OF WORKER COOPERATIVES
From Wikipedia: "Historically, worker cooperatives rose to prominence during the industrial revolution as part of the labour movement. As employment moved to industrial areas and job sectors declined, workers began organizing and controlling businesses for themselves. Workers cooperative were originally sparked by "critical reaction to industrial capitalism and the excesses of the industrial revolution." (Adams et al. 1993: 11) The formation of some workers cooperatives, such as those of the Knights of Labor in 19th century America, were designed to "cope with the evils of unbridled capitalism and the insecurities of wage labor".

Most early worker co-ops did not adhere to clear cooperative structures or ideologies. Starting in the 1830s, worker cooperatives were formed by hat makers, bakers, and garment workers.

In the United States there is no coherent legislation regarding worker cooperatives nationally, much less Federal laws, so most worker cooperatives make use of traditional consumer cooperative law and try to fine-tune it for their purposes. In some cases the members (workers) of the cooperative in fact "own" the enterprise by buying a share that represents a fraction of the market value of the cooperative.

When the current cooperative movement resurfaced in the 1960s it developed mostly on a new system of "collective ownership" where par value shares were issued as symbolic of egalitarian voting rights. Typically, a member may only own one share to maintain the egalitarian ethos. Once brought in as a member, after a period of time on probation usually so the new candidate can be evaluated, he or she was given power to manage the coop, without "ownership" in the traditional sense. In the UK this system is known as common ownership.

Some of these early cooperatives still exist and most new worker cooperatives follow their lead and develop a relationship to capital that is more radical than the previous system of equity share ownership.

In Britain this type of cooperative was traditionally known as a producer cooperative, and, while it was overshadowed by the consumer and agricultural types, made up a small section of its own within the national apex body, the Cooperative Union. The 'new wave' of worker cooperatives that took off in Britain in the mid-1970s joined the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) as a separate federation. Buoyed up by the alternative and ecological movements and by the political drive to create jobs, the sector peaked at around 2,000 enterprises. However the growth rate slowed, the sector contracted, and in 2001 ICOM merged with the Co-operative Union (which was the federal body for consumer cooperatives) to create Co-operatives UK, thus reunifying the cooperative sector.

In 2008 Co-operatives UK launched The Worker Co-operative Code of Governance. An attempt to implement the ICA approved World Declaration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Worker ownership was the focus of my graduate work at the University of Oregon, as well as my Masters Thesis; which I was doing during the late 1980s. So this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I know full well there is no one-size-fits-all panecea to "fix" the mess we call our "economy" right now. However -- call me a dreamer, but I do still firmly believe that this one strategy could become a contageous grass-roots bloodless rEvolutionary tidal wave to right many of the wrongs from which we are suffering as a nation. Sometimes, maybe all the time, it's "all about the timing".

FOR MORE ON RICHARD WOLFF'S WORK:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9191-occupy-the-economy-author-richard-wolff-on-how-his-new-interview-collection-challenges-capitalism
http://rdwolff.com/
http://rdwolff.com/content/democracy-work-cure-capitalism
http://rdwolff.com/content/corporate-america-has-messed-wrong-people