Activities, Publications, Mission, Acknowledgements

Activities

To “show and tell” in humility with resolve to do better, once social lockdown became an official U.S. reality last March, 1 worker1vote, together with the American Sustainable Business Council, Catholic Charities USA, the Urban Manufacturing Alliance and other stakeholders launched a coalition advancing a shared services cooperative design to help frontline healthcare, homecare and emergency response personnel gain better and more cost effective access to PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) on a micro-purchase basis – that we continue to advance within 1worker1vote movement operating ecosystems. 1worker1vote also helped start an ongoing bipartisan campaign with other U.S. cooperative community leaders to support elections-cycle-challenged U.S. postal workers, America’s largest and most diversified workforce.  We participated in “ReImagine Appalachia” and “Appalachia Cooperates” initiatives to extend regional hybrid shared ownership practices, ecosystems and community wealth impact. One of our co-founders, Professor Carmen Huertas Noble from CUNY Law School and founding executive director of its Community Economic Development Clinic (CEDC), was elected to the Cooperative Hall of Fame, the highest service and impact honor bestowed by the U.S. cooperative community. One of our advisory board members, Ra Criscitiello, is helping to lead California’s “Cooperative Economy Act” pushing back on grifter gig economy companies falsely equivocating consumer convenience with societal innovation to exploit and misclassify their workers by denying living wages and earned benefits especially during a pandemic.

Globally, 1worker1vote collaborated with the UK Cooperative College and Union Coops UK resulting in last July’s “Manifesto for Decent Work“, and we co-launched past November’s release of the MOU between the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO) and 1worker1vote to “Build Back Fairer” by convening a global worker cooperative fair trade community with multiple like-minded allies (see logos & photos).  On December 12th, the fifth anniversary of the Paris Accord, 1worker1vote (and our partner in this endeavor, Mondragon’s social transformation consultancy, LKS), both enabled and will team with Social Economy Europe (SEE) and the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) who announced the precedent-setting SEE/ASBC transatlantic mission collaboration partnership (a 3.1 million combined social enterprise and triple bottom-line business members) to advance business sustainability on all fronts. The formal title is “Boosting EU-US transatlantic relations between social economy enterprises and sustainable businesses” (Social Economy Europe and American Sustainable Business Council Announce Global Collaboration to Mark 5th Anniversary of Paris Accord).

Publications

Since the pandemic struck, the1worker1vote movement is being recognized in the global battle of ideas to “build back better and fairer” by recent and upcoming publications such as:  

• multiple-cited and acknowledged in the current best seller, “Reimagining Capitalism In A World On Fire”, April 2020, by Harvard Business School professor, Rebecca Henderson – Hachette – shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year Award
• Interviewed in chapter twelve, Ongoing Practice, of “Simple Acts” – practices for a broken world – by Jason L. Kessler, New Degree Press
• A chapter in: The Preston (UK) Model and Community Wealth Building: Creating a Socio-Economic Democracy for the Future – Edited by J.Y Manley ad P.B. Whyman – Published by Routledge
• “Quoted & noted” in the upcoming (Q1 2021 – Random House), “Mutualism: Building The Next Economy From The Ground Up” – by Sara Horowitz, former NY Federal Reserve board chair, founder and CEO of the Freelancers Union and McArthur Genius Grant recipient
• Contributor to “Creating An Economic System That Works For All” – the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC – October 2020),  pages 29-31
• Tellus Institute/Boston “Great Transition Initiative” GTI forum on CSR/corporate redesign. See also Democratize the Corporation.

Mission

Founded in Q1 2015, 1worker1vote collaborates “across borders, barriers, markets and silos” to reimagine, restructure and re-localize better & fairer capitalism. We cast aside delusional, extractive Shareholder Primacy “trickle-down” and replace it with aspirational, caring and healing Stakeholder Economy “bubble-up to gusher-up” ™. We organize to co-design and co-build individual and community proofs of concept marked by higher rates of resiliency and inclusivity achieving climate metrics founded on shared wealth, wellbeing and prosperity templates that pursue workplace democracy. Based on in-practice wealth-creating and governance-sharing models, our work proves its capacity to uplift and transform local stakeholders into shareholders, one profit-seeking social enterprise, ecosystem and worker-owned job at a time.

1worker1vote honors hybridity, inclusivity and reconciliation of opposites by operating through domestic and global, hybrid shared ownership models (starting with the union-coop template) in social enterprise ecosystems that start in local economic development trenches. Our movement –  characterized by replicable foundational examples (Co-op Cincy as prototyping “living lab,” Co-op Dayton, and healthcare-centric Citizen Share Brooklyn in collaboration with CUNY Law School’s Community Economic Development Clinic) – is inspired by 70 years of Mondragon’s cooperative ecosystem principles and practices.

Like Mondragon,  we believe that profitability enables those who share in the profits to afford highest and most enduring values. This outbreak of rising economic opportunity outcomes for all stakeholders is contagious and attracts aligning principled and skilled collaborators:  as just two examples, the Preston/UK model contributes thought leader innovation and practice, while the American Sustainable Business Council (especially through a new global partnership with Social Economy Europe) helps us propel practice into policies advancing mutually reinforcing workplace democracy design, enlightened entrepreneurial culture and operational shared purpose.

Our mission in the vortex of a biological pandemic is more relevant than ever: to offer a more productive, fair, resilient, inclusive, climate-worthy, profitable and truly “free market” construct for “humanity@work”. To flatten socioeconomic inequality curves made even more raw and unjust by predatory/extractive/rent-seeking/crony capitalism that intentionally and biologically weakens and demeans to “creatively destruct” what it then commoditizes by arbitraging human labor and deindustrializing neighborhoods, cities and regions as precursor to prioritizing “winners take all” ends justifying self-serving means. Such “race to the bottom” design and practice flaws privatizing profits while socializing losses overrun domestic and global societal and ecological cohesion tipping points with the world’s overflowing hospitals as bottom-line result.   

Flattening these curves means seeding and cultivating economic opportunity aspiration and wellbeing metrics made real, localized “up close and personal” until transformation becomes inveterate-organic. Until Stakeholder Capitalism “across borders, barriers, markets and silos” ignites concurrently in boardrooms, factory floors, fulfillment centers, farms, city service lanes, laboratories, community advocacy centers, non-profit cathedrals, financial towers, sprawling prisons, involuntary plantations. Until both “Divine Left” and “Neoliberal Right” political campaigns, hospitals under siege, academic clusters, and every locked-down home office including those hoping to survive in borrowed spaces practice results-driven virtuous cycle models flattening all the vicious cycle, race to the bottom curves. Until doing well individually is preceded by doing good collectively for others. Until rising shared prosperity and wellbeing drives markets, movements and nations toward an inclusive Stakeholder Economy foundationally structured by broadened and deepened workplace ownership and democracy.

Acknowledgements

In fullest solidarity, we take permanent stock of those intersecting with our movement, their families and loved ones who passed this year due to COVID-19, those who enable us to continue in their names to flatten the curves that cropped so many individual and community destinies in mid-bloom. In their memory and for a more aspirational collective future we renew our vows as pebble rollers, ESG and SDG lab rats, starting avalanches hastening the moral universe’s long arc bending towards an overdue destiny hastening regenerative socioeconomic justice and wellbeing for all.

Respectfully submitted in this, our fifth operating year, on behalf of the 1worker1vote movement’s 10 co-founders and 10 advisory board members, as well as our growing domestic and international mission ecosystem of allies and collaborators, inspiring way-showers and encouraging friends, each and everyone for whom we remain most grateful in thought and deed,

Michael Alden Peck
executive director & co-founder