Ownership is the new black, orange, blue and green – socially cool in “new economy” advocacy circles with an economic justice edge, growing in corporate and cooperative numbers, and claiming superior sustainable practices. Divided into land, home, individual, and workforce “communities of practice,” ownership appeals to historically admired American values. Cooperatives (member-based, worker and union affiliated) and companies with varying degrees of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), individual proprietorships and partnerships connect ownership with cultural ideals of freedom, innovation, self-reliance, civic commitment, democratic decision-making, wealth-building through risk-taking, and equality-grounded opportunity and mobility. Incentivizing workers as owners in “doing well by doing good” projects and companies reflects core principles and practices as ineluctable components of the historical American Dream’s original civic promise.
On the east coast, New York City’s Mayor and City Council unanimously proclaimed Saturday, June 21st, as “Worker Cooperative Day” and promptly backed their words with a $1.2 million appropriation. On the west coast, Seattle’s Mayor and City Council unanimously approved the nation’s highest municipal minimum wage, $15 per hour that doubles the current federal standard. Clearly, momentum to transform stakeholders into shareholders is on the rise in America’s most progressive cities to combat the public sector taxing, private sector productivity-depressing, and neighborhood regressive inequality triad (wealth aggregation, mobility, and opportunity).
It appears that a new formula for American private sector competitiveness is staring the country in the face if the nation’s collective “ownership economy” can just check its privilege at the door on behalf of a growing populist movement that wants in.
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