1:1

1worker1vote is building a national network of hybrid, shared ownership, regional and municipal ecosystems starting with unionized worker-owned cooperative businesses to overcome structural inequalities of opportunity, mobility, and income. Building pathways out of poverty leading to pathways toward prosperity.

Inspiration

1worker1vote.org is a Main Street, bipartisan solution to the problem of income inequality and limited social mobility.  

For Republicans:

  • Income inequality = class warfare and redistribution of wealth, taxing the rich to give to the poor
  • Prefer to emphasize opportunity and upward mobility
  • Government should do little; prefer laissez-faire “free” market so that a growing economy will create opportunity

For Democrats:

  • Feel that Republican ideas to overhaul education, job-training and safety-net programs often double as budget-cutting initiatives
  • Hold current political advantage on policy prescriptions
  • Strong public support for investing more in education from preschool through college, increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes on the highest earners

Common Ground:

  • Expanding mobility and opportunity = more appealing to middle-class voters for 2014 midterm elections
  • Americans less concerned about inequality of outcomes but more concerned about equal opportunities for rising generations starting out

Solution:

  • Deploy worker ownership to progress from the “Me” to the “Us”
  • Expand greater individual workplace equity, reconnect individual workplaces to community wellbeing, and empower local living economies…

 

Companies with broad-based ownership are more stable, produce fewer job losses and outperform companies with greater disparity between executive and employee compensation.

Yet, worker-owenership in America is a fraction of what it should be today:

  • 29,000 member-owned cooperatives account for:
    • $3 trillion in assets; $500 billion in revenue, more than one million jobs – but these are mostly membership entities
  • Only 400 worker-owned cooperatives in America representing between 4,000 to 5,000 worker-owners
  • More than 11,000 employee-owned companies but only 4,000 companies where the employees own the majority of the stock

 

Read more about Mondragon and some of the Articles inspiring our work.

 

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