Over the past few decades, thousands of alternatives to the standard, top-down corporate model have sprouted up – worker-owned companies and co-operatives, neighborhood corporations and trusts, community-owned technology centers and municipally owned enterprises. In fact, today, involvement in these alternative models of business outnumber union membership as the means by which private-sector workers and community members are taking their economics into their own hands.
The above introduces an excellent interview with University of Maryland political science professor Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism.
A short excerpt, read the whole interview here.
* Maria Armoudian: How big is this economic movement in the United States?
“Gar Alperovitz: It’s a huge development. But the president doesn’t cover it, and the press, on the surface, is not aware of it.
At the grassroots level, there is a lot of activity that is changing the ownership of wealth and making it benefit neighborhoods, workers, cities and communities, at large. There are 11,000 worker-owned companies in the United States, and more people involved in them than are members of unions in the private sector. There are also 120 million Americans who are members of co-operatives – a huge number, about a third of the population.
About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories.
One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood – health care and nutrition, education and jobs. So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth.”