Mazzucato and Li, and Darzi provide compelling arguments for and against the nationalisation of the pharmaceutical industry.1 Mazzucato and Li’s argument regarding the “short termism and misalignment of public interest” are justified criticisms of big pharma, and Darzi’s counter on the singular financial power that these companies wield is an effective response.
“We don’t have to lay anybody off,” Goldsmith, one of the Cheese Board’s worker-owners, tells Eater SF. “When we decided to close, we decided to take that financial hit. And we all take that hit.”
Last Friday, the CARES Act became law, and with it comes $2 trillion in support of Americans in response to COVID-19.
Your team is suddenly remote, and you need a place where you can have discussions and make decisions.
Your team can get going in under 10 minutes with these five simple steps.
- Set up your group
- Invite team members
- Start a discussion thread
- Make a decision
- Set an outcome
Read the rest on the Loomio blog
I came in last Saturday about a half hour before we open. The line stretched from our 13th St. door around to Folsom and then halfway down Folsom to 14th, all seniors. It was starting to rain. I felt terrible for them. I started to dread my shift even more. This will be awful, I thought.
Too often, groups that rely on short-term adrenaline are not ready to contend with the longer game that the more powerful are prepared to play. Looking past the energy-fueling mutual aid in the early days of the pandemic, I fear the burnout, the defeats and the cynicism that will follow. But that does not have to be the story. We can start building long-haul mutual aid right now. We have to beware of the short-term allure of social-media-friendly coming-together stories when they don’t have the ingredients for outliving a media cycle or two.
We at the TESA Collective, a ten-year old worker-owned cooperative, specialize in creating dialogue-based and interactive forms of education for non-profits and other mission-based organizations. For the past five years, we have also been working with groups to adapt and update their existing materials, sessions, and curriculum for virtual settings. We have also worked with these clients to build new digital materials, curriculum, and sessions from the ground up.
In Italy around ten per cent of the economy (gross domestic product) is organised through co-operatives, with around eleven per cent of the workforce employed by co-ops, including many large-scale worker co-ops of course.
The response of co-ops in Italy to the health, social and economic crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to draw on their values, for sure, but also to find ways to co-operate between co-operatives.
Amidst the covid-19 pandemic which has gripped the world, the health challenges which we faced before are still pervasive: The developed world must meet the challenge of increasing its health expenditure to meet rising healthcare needs of an aging population while low-income countries across the world battle to reduce healthcare inequality and expand coverage.
We can all use the Government stimulus checks, but our needs are very different. For some, $1200 is a supplement to ongoing income or savings, for others it can make the difference between staying in their home or being on the street, feeding their families or going hungry. Our proposal is simple: if you can survive without all or part of your stimulus money please give to one or more of the organizations listed on this site.
Hemstreet and Powell have known each other for many years through cooperative networks. In mid-March, Powell was having a difficult time getting masks for her workforce. When she saw an article about sewers in Los Angeles making masks for health care workers, the light bulb went off and she decided to reach out to Hemstreet to see if the sewers at Opportunity Threads could become her supplier. The timing was perfect, as in response to local needs, Hemstreet was already in the process of developing prototypes.
This is Barikama, a co-operative started in 2011 by a group of young Africans. Many of the founders took part in the Rosarno revolt, an uprising in January 2010 in which hundreds of African fruit pickers whose labour was being exploited in Italy’s citrus groves rose up in support of a workmate seriously injured in a racist attack.
