Chicago Factory Occupiers Form Worker Cooperative

[patrice]

13. That's along the lines that I have been thinking . . . with an addition relative to some way to

identify what shares each worker has in the company, in addition to longevity. This would be something along the lines of an evergreen collaborative process to identify and define "value added" and assign ownership. I would like to think about this sort of thing, because of my own and others' experiences having to do with one's work being taken by a corporate entity, work that quite likely few if any other person could/would have performed at the level, quantity, and quality that a specific individual did, and yet the value of that work is taken and the person who did it is considered expendable. My experiences were in education and in IT, so perhaps you can infer some of the things I'm referring to here, but I think the model has relevance outside of those fields.

Think of the sorts of things that corporate entities currently do with suggestion and quality improvement processes, in which ideas for improvement are vetted, applied if found worthy, and rewarded to some extent, with ownership still retained by the corporation. My thinking is that the workers should engage in ongoing quantitative and qualitative research of that type and retain ownership for their own ideas that are regularly re-assessed for relevance and development and integrated with new R&D.