On the afternoon of February 24, in the basement of the Hudson Park Library in lower Manhattan, a crowd of workers gathered to see a play. Laura Neill, the playwright, greeted attendees, and friends excitedly exchanged hellos as they waited for the performance to begin. There was something unusual about this read-through.
When William Littig showed up for work at his REI store on Feb. 21, it didn’t take long for him to realize it would be his last day.
Two managers who were visiting from other stores called him into a closed-door meeting, Littig recalled. One of them read from a paper that turned out to be his termination notice.
the Zapatista communities, through dialogue with sister communities, sow the seeds of the común. The lands recuperated during the 1994 uprising have been declared “non- property” to be shared by those who are willing to work it, and respect it as the inheritance of the many generations to come. Far from a leap of faith, the declaration of lo común is a serious wager on the challenging work of building common ground —not a task for the faint of heart or of limited endurance. This is a marathon and they know it.
On March 18th, Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) spoke speak at a press event hosted by the co-owners of A Slice of New York, a worker-owned cooperative business in San Jose: A Slice of New York.
Before reaching the heart of the matter, two warnings are in order.
With more than 50,000 members in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho — mostly grocery and healthcare workers, along with several thousand more in retail, meatpacking and public service — UFCW 3000 is the largest local in the million-member UFCW International. It is the model of an energetic, pugnacious, organizing union, growing labor’s influence steadily in one of America’s most concentrated areas of corporate power.
Even eighteenth-century piracy, says Silvertown, is a good example of effective cooperation. Pirates worked together on their ships, and used violence more often against outsiders than as an internal mechanism for law enforcement.
In 1995, following the near-success of Quebec’s second independence referendum, that province’s government fell into an economic crisis, partly because its separatism was perceived as making loans risky.
The Quebec government responded by bringing together the major actors—business, labor, civil society—in order to collaborate on a way forward. As Beatrice Alain describes it, “we came together, as we typically do in Quebec. We have that ‘we’.”
