WORKER CO-OPS: A Leap Beyond Unions To True Worker Freedom & Luigi UPDATE
People need to set aside their petty Right/Left bullshit differences, boutique vanity political causes and unite together — from the right and left — as working people.
“We can’t do anything alone. We have to build mass movements that aren’t bought off and corrupted by the liberal elite or the Democratic Party. …We can’t get fooled by these people anymore. We have to regain a kind of militancy, and that comes through understanding the systems of power. We have to break the system, because if we don’t break the system it will break us.”
— Chris Hedges, Live Q&A (1/8/25)
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy (1/10/25)
Recently, I needed to buy a new chair for my living room. I was thinking I’d have to check out several stores and the first stop was a large furniture store called Steinhafel’s Furniture in a city near me. I had never even been in the place before. As luck would have it, I found just what I wanted and in about 20 minutes the order was done, a delivery date was set and I was out the door.
In my way out I spotted a sign noting the 87-year-old Steinhafel’s Furniture is “employee-owned”. I went online and found that in 2021 the chain of 16 stores in two states became 100% employee-owned, with all of the company’s stock in an Employee Stock Ownership Plan.
One of the most aggravating trends in corporate America these days is chains like Walmart getting all chummy in describing their workers as “partners”, “team members”, “family” or — even — “associates” when, in fact, they are usually poorly paid with no or minimal benefits and their hours limited to avoid having to provide health insurance. Instead these leeching corporations push off that responsibility on taxpayers with Medicaid and food stamp programs. So Steinhafel’s Furniture sounded like it was on the right track, but really?
A week later the chair was delivered by three young guys who were polite and efficient. As they were getting ready to leave, I asked, “So, I heard Steinhafel’s Furniture is employee-owned, is that true?”
All three of them stood up straight, looked me in the eye, smiled and said it was.
“Yeah, it is and it’s great,” one of them said spontaneously.
The company has 550 employees — no, 550 real business associates, exactly what we need more of.
If you need some furniture and live in southeast Wisconsin or northeast Illinois, check out Steinhafel’s Furniture.
In the video below, economist Richard Wolff talks about employee-owned co-ops, followed by a link to the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives. You may not have the opportunity to be in a co-op but one thing you can do today to support worker empowerment is pull your money out of a bank and put it in a member-owned credit union.
The choice is simple: unite or die
As labor writer Hamilton Nolan notes in the in the Real News Network interview below, whether its how businesses are owned and organized or how humane healthcare is brought to this country, people need to set aside their petty Right/Left bullshit differences, boutique vanity political causes and unite together — from the right and left — as working people.
Journalist Ryan Grim has an update on how to support Amazon workers and the people of Gaza.
We are the only ones who will save us. If we don’t, they will kill us.
Important Luigi case update
Finally, and oh, so predictably, the mainstream corporate media has been shunting aside and silencing the Luigi Mangione case. Yesterday’s Status Coup podcast has some important updates and details in the case, and be sure to watch it all the way through to the end for an especially egregious example of the pathology of the American medical industrial complex insurance industry.
Resist
Persist
Don’t be complicit!
Richard Wolff: "A SMALL Group Has All The POWER!"
“The seeds of change are sprouting everywhere.”
“Over time we can change less and less of the top down hierarchy of capitalism and more of the democratic worker co-op alternative. I think that's coming and I also think that the sooner we admit it — see it for what it could do for our country — the better off we'll be.”
— Economist Richard Wolff
Sabby Sabs (1/2/25)
16-minute video
“Worker co-ops have existed for thousands of years; this is not a new idea. It's not you and me concocting something interesting when Jill Stein talks about it or when Bernie Sanders talks about it. Both of them are picking up on an idea that has intrigued and attracted Americans and other people for thousands of years, because it is a beautiful idea. It's the idea of community; we get together and collectively make a workplace.”
— Economist Richard Wolff
LEARN MORE: United States Federation Of Worker Cooperatives
Democracy Dies, First, In The Workplace: A Conversation With Hamilton Nolan & Union Leader Sara Nelson
“To me, the one thing that can bridge that gap… and erase the distinction between ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ is the labor movement.”
By Maximillian Alvarez
The Real News Network (1/7/25)
“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “ I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor unions had fallen almost completely out of the public mind, it turned out that they were central to all our most fundamental problems.”
In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore on Dec. 6, 2024, Max speaks with Nolan about his new book, what the ongoing war on workers’ rights and unions tells us about the “fucked up” society we’re living in, and what lessons labor can teach us now about how to fight and win, even in the darkest of times.
Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, also makes a special guest appearance in the second half of the episode.
Link to story and 1-hour, 18-minute audio
Forcing Amazon To Respect Its Workers
By Ryan Grim (12/7/25)
Last month, while we were urging Drop Site readers to buy Refaat Alareer’s new book “If I Must Die,” we sent people to both Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and to Amazon, which most certainly does not. It pained me every time we included an Amazon link, but their dominance in the book industry is such that it’s effectively impossible to hit the bestseller list and avoid them.
So please consider this email today my penance: If Amazon intends to be an unavoidable fact of our daily lives, the least we can do is force them to treat their workers with dignity. As we reported earlier, Amazon workers at seven locations around the country organized a strike timed for the holidays to try to force Amazon to the bargaining table. These are workers who have already voted and decided to form a union, yet Amazon is simply refusing to recognize them or meet with them. Public pressure and striking is the only route left for those workers.
By signing the petition, you’ll not only be helping to show mass support – it already has nearly 90,000 signers – but you’ll also be giving the workers the ability to let you know about upcoming actions where public pressure can be helpful. (If you don’t want that, you can unsubscribe. You know the drill.)
Thanks for all you do,
Ryan
P.S. If you haven’t ordered Refaat’s book, you can still do that. It’s listed as “temporarily out of stock” but I’m told by the publisher, OR Books, they have a huge print run going now, so they should be shipping fairly soon.
Luigi Mangione Case DELAYED, Doctor WARNS United Healthcare is "Out of Control"
Status Coup (1/8/25)
Luigi Mangione and his trial has been delayed by quite a length of time, which is surprising considering how fast they were speed running this case up until this point. Jordan Chariton breaks down why this is, the new United Healthcare horror stories, and Sean Combs (Diddy) becoming jealous of Luigi.
18-minute video
ANOTHER REASON: To LOATH The Democrats
“They got a notification yesterday that their home is probably burned to the ground,” President Biden said of the Los Angeles wildfires before this whiplash-inducing change of subject: “But the good news is I’m a great-grandfather as of today.”
Preening While LA Burns: Biden, Trump and Newsom's response shows it's all about them
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Of course Luigi Mangione's trial will be postponed. The powers that be want this forgotten.
Mark, I absolutely agree that the "left" and "right" on the decency-filled, anti-establishment ends need to end this schism. At the same time one needs to approach this carefully, because such a unity can easily become steered by just one diversionary psyop in the wrong direction and lead to "class collaborationist" propping-up of the global Zionist regime.
IMO this entire "MAGA civil war" is designed to make sure the populist faction -- fed up with (the perception of) Trump, Vivek, and Felon selling them out -- will suddenly lurch to the "far left" on economics and push plenty of the same full-on anti-corporate, regulatory policies the "left" has persistently called for, culminating in an unholy "left-right" unity controlled by proxy manipulators. Then after graham crackers, marshmallows, Hershey milk chocolate, and s'more psyops along the way as a potential pandemic pushes the global economy to neofascist CBDC, this "left-right populist" opposition will be consolidated into the final regime.
Unfortunately, all major institutions are controlled from the top down by loyal puppets of the regime and there is nothing any of us decent people can do to overhaul them in an actual sense of fixing institutional structures into long-term bilaterally benefiting systems, I'm sorry to say. All we can do at this rate is inform as many people as possible lest they fall into the abyss with the masses who follow the broad/wide gate into perdition.