Michael Peck’s contribution to the Great Transitions Initiative’s Forum: Corporations in the Crosshairs: From Reform to Redesign The capitalist system is “on fire,” putting global democracy, climate, and peace at risk. Oxfam International reports that billionaires worldwide grow $2.5 billion richer every day, while the poorest half of the global population falls further behind. With social mobility still handicapped by…
Author Archive for Michael A. Peck
Michael A. Peck, MAPA Group
Back to the Political Future?
1worker1vote posted this piece toward the end of June 2016, What’s the Matter with Little England?, over four months before the November 2016 USA elections. Reading it again is painful but instructive. With UK elections set for this December and the 2020 U.S. presidential elections one year from this week, will the Brexit past once more presage another “America First” prologue, adding…
Liberating Our Futures Together: Building the Cooperative Ecosystem in Cincinnati
The modern co-op movement originated with the 1840s Rochdale principles in Manchester/UK as did industrial unionization. Cooperatives and unions evolved separately but today’s extreme solidarity, inequality & climate deficits & imperatives compel renewing and scaling the union-coop bond. Given its dual Labor & Cooperative founding rationale; 1worker1vote (a catalytic economic development organizing movement) focuses on policies, practices and helping to build…
Thrown “Unter” The Uber Bus
Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction especially when it comes to putting and keeping others “in their place”. Since August, the American world@work has been rocked by three hitherto difficult to predict revelations. First, the U.S. Business Roundtable publicly confessed that “Shareholder Primacy” is no longer its holy grail. Second, the myths-shattering State of California passed AB-5 declaring that giant…
American Factory – from Netflix and the Obamas – and More Movies About the Economy
An impactful visual, like good storytelling, is worth more than a mere thousand words. American Factory joins the films Shift Change, Weconomics and Don’t Give Up Your Voice in showcasing the rising hopeful-good, the very bad and the extremely ugly in the global quest, beyond borders, markets and silos for an aspirational future of work where all stakeholder workers have a…
The U.S. Business Roundtable Is Born Again
Sometimes earth-shattering truths slip in through the side door. Comparable to the unexpected revelation and conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, The New York Times reports from the U.S. Business Roundtable Front that, “the chief executives of nearly 200 of the nation’s largest companies pledged to revise the longstanding principle that shareholder interests come first.” The Times’ understated…
The One & Only Leo Gerard
Leo Gerard retires in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Monday, July 15th, 2019, after 54 years as a union member and 18 years as the International President of United Steelworkers (USW). The following is not an epitaph but a declaration: “Bestowed with the common touch of someone who willingly lives his roots every single day, there’s not been a power-paradigm-photo of note…
Are We All “Wee” Workers?
The history and future of concentrated economic power versus functioning democracy and an aspirational future of work with no workers left behind shows the intrinsic value of equating shareholders and stakeholders. This is accomplished in two concurrent steps: first, by relentlessly pursuing anti-trust policies on macro national and global levels to break down platform monopolists so that competition and transparency…
Creating local paths that work for local stakeholders
1worker1vote advisory board member, Dr. Steve Sleigh, with Dr. Julian Manley, Chair of Preston/UK’s Cooperative Development Network (PCDN) inspired by Mondragon’s cooperative ecosystem, outside of the University of Central Lancashire following a hybrid shared ownership model finance roundtable hosted by Julian and the PCDN on“Pension Funds and the value creation conversation,” featuring Steve and Cllr Martyn Rawlinson on “The use…
Legal Cannabis – A Blueprint from Persecution to Restitution through Local Stakeholders as Shareholders
The global legal cannabis industry is projected to reach $57 billion by 2027 according to a Forbes report but that may be a floor, not a ceiling. Other prognosticators (Grand View Research) predict the global legal marijuana market, hemp excluded which had $827 million in 2017 USA sales and is expected to triple that amount by 2022, will come in…
