Worker Ownership Policy Think Thanks

Directory

Excerpted from Jacobin magazine, by PETER GOWAN and MATHEW LAWRENCE:

(focuses on US / UK organisations)

"For new UK policy organizations like Autonomy, worker decision-making in the future of work and the campaign for a four-day week are central. The New Economics Foundation (NEF) has pushed for worker control, as well as new ways of thinking about the ownership of personal data. We Own It, another young think tank, have been central in pushing for democratic public ownership of strategic sectors of the economy.

The Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) have long championed community ownership and wealth-building initiatives, and along with the Democracy Collaborative assisted the pioneering Labour council in Preston in building the UK’s most improved local economy in what was once a declining post-industrial town, through public support for cooperatives and other municipally and community-owned economic institutions. IPPR’s Commission on Economic Justice, hailed by John McDonnell as the Beveridge Report of its time, has set out an institutional roadmap for a post-neoliberal economy.

In the US, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s leadership on the Green New Deal has centered large-scale public infrastructure projects. In the face of historic racial inequality Cooperation Jackson has developed alternative economic institutions, including those based on collective ownership of land. Municipal efforts like those from Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant push for local ownership of common goods — including calls for workers to take over the Boeing airplane factory. Socialist legislators from the new socialist caucus on Chicago’s city council to Julia Salazar in New York are leading the fight for universal rent control and tenant protections.

On the research front, the socialist People’s Policy Project has published papers advocating for a massive public investment in social housing and the establishment of a publicly owned social wealth fund that would pay a universal basic dividend to all Americans, while the Democracy Collaborative and the Roosevelt Institute have been promoting firm-based worker ownership funds in the United States.

What makes worker ownership so important as a component of this agenda is how it works through both immediate redistribution of the surplus to workers, as well as building durable democratic institutions for workers to exercise collective power. The policy is radical not only in its redistributive force, but in the way it opens a discussion about how to build a fully democratized, sustainable, and socialist economy. If we are to address large-scale climate crisis and a dangerously oversized financial system that gambles using the public’s money, we need to embrace radically different configurations of ownership on both sides of the Atlantic — and to build even more international bridges between movements, across language barriers as well as between movements in the Global North and Global South." (https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/bernie-sanders-worker-ownership-funds-labour-party?)