How Workers Laid Off from a Chicago Factory Took It Over Themselves

[Fire Walk With Me]

YES! Magazine ?@yesmagazine

How Workers Laid Off from a Chicago Factory Took It Over Themselves — by @GRITlaura http://bit.ly/13Ily7N #occupy


http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/chicago-factory-workers?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=socmed&utm_content=FlandersL_Chicagofactory&utm_campaign=130307_65coops

Four years ago, as the recession took hold and layoffs around the country were approaching 500,000 a month, a group of workers in Chicago saved a factory and inspired a nation. Fired by their boss, they occupied instead of leaving. Fired by a second boss, they occupied and formed a worker’s cooperative. Now they are worker-owners of a load of equipment and they’re setting up a factory in a new location.

All they want to do is to get back to making and selling windows. It shouldn’t be this hard to keep good jobs in Chicago, but “A cooperative can be a way of surviving, of moving forward,” says Armando Robles, one of the workers.

Robles was one of 250 workers fired in December 2008 without notice or severance by Republic Windows and Doors when the company announced it was closing its Chicago factory. The company said that it could no longer operate because it had lost its line of credit with Bank of America. The irony of the situation was clear. Bank of America had received billions in government bailouts to keep the economy working, and yet the Republic workers were being laid off without their entitled payments and benefits. Supported by their union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Robles and his fellow workers voted to resist. They occupied the plant for six days, winning back pay, severance, and time for a new company to take ownership. Generating thousands of articles and news reports about their fight, they encouraged a downcast nation, even an incoming U.S. president.

At a press conference during the factory occupation, then President-elect Barack Obama declared: “When it comes to the situation here in Chicago, with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned … I think they are absolutely right.”

(More at the link.)

[limpyhobbler]

1. du rec

[limpyhobbler]

2. The Take - A Film by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis

A movie about how people successfully took over idle factories in Argentina

Link to playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5AFAD883AF178802

[99th_Monkey]

3. IMHO this is what the Labor Movement needs to get back into, and pronto!!

rather than collective bargaining motif, which hasn't worked out so well
over the long haul, which has led to outsourcing, downsizing, and all
manner of anti-worker laws being passed. Fuck 'em. Just buy and own
the freaking factory, using well-known, tried and true methodologies and
models that have been around for over a century.
http://www.workerscontrol.net/authors/worker-cooperatives-united-states-historical-perspective-and-contemporary-assessment
This is what the Labor Movement was pretty much ALL ABOUT in the late
1800's and during 1900s, until they dumped all their eggs into the collective
bargaining basket in early 20th century in the US.

When the workers own the business, and hire management, there's no
fucking way they are going to "outsource" their jobs, and because they own
the business that pays their wages, they can actually afford to run at less
of a "profit", which to them is just a bonus on top of their wages.
see Mondragon phenomenon in Spain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Also there is a technical assistance resource nationally for this kind of thing,
either start-ups or buy-out conversions. http://www.nceo.org/

It isn't that the labor movement is "dead" so much as it IS that collective bargaining
as a model for leveraging a living wage, has outlived itself; and that worker
ownership is the future of the labor movement, if it has one.
Also see: "Revealed: Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras
Than Employee-owned Firms: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/08-6

[limpyhobbler]

4. Thanks for the links and

LOL

[99th_Monkey]

5. Yes LOL.

and the articles they did do, probably 90% were "horror stories" they dug
up from the Pit, rather than fair comparisons re: employment stability, amount
of capital that STAYS in the local community to multiply over and over, rather
than being syphoned off to a distant corporate boardroom.

I did my masters thesis on this very comparison, in the timber plywood mills
in Oregon in the '80s. On every measure, worker owned coops out-performed
absentee ownership dramatically.