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.
