New Era Windows Cooperative Is Open for Business in Chicago
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Meet the takers: They took over their factory, they took on their bosses, they took the initiative to form a worker cooperative and today theyre taking the wraps off a brand-new worker-owned company: New Era Windows. It opened May 9 in Chicago.
The workers in this story are members of the same workforce who, when they received word that their plant was about to be closed with no notice at what was then the Republic Windows and Doors factory in 2008, occupied their plant and became a cause celebre in a grim winter of mass layoffs. When they were laid off again in early 2012, by a second owner, they decided, as Nike would say, to think different. With encouragement from their union, the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), and The Working World, a progressive investment group that helps co-operative start-ups internationally, they formed a company, New Era LLC. New Era is 100 percent owned by workers and now, at last, open for business.
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