For more information, please visit www.usw.org/coops The United Steelworkers, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center Announce a New Union Cooperative Model to Reinsert Worker Equity Back into the U.S. Economy
This is the Basque-based Mondragon worker cooperatives, which is not the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) model where individually employees are the corporate stock owners, with stock purchased without any reduction in wages or benefits and paid for out of earnings of the investment. The Mondragon model and other proposals would collectivize ownership through cooperatives.
Labor unions have a track record of seeing worker-ownership as a threat to organizing, and have opposed efforts by local steelworkers to explore employee-owned institution-building.
Still the US Steel Workers shoal be applauded for passing Resolution No. 27 at their 2011 convention. Under Workers’ Capital Industrial and Worker Ownership it reads: “Our Union will continue to promote and develop unionized, worker-owned cooperatives, as well as other forms of worker-ownership, as a profitable and sustainable means to create jobs and invest in our communities.”
