"Unsourcing" - does free labour ultimately require free goods too? Crowdsourcing has been discovered by the corporate sector, The Economist tells us, as a great way to turn consumers into free labour.
Guild socialism. Worker cooperative. A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and self-managed by its workers. This control may be exercised in a number of ways. A cooperative enterprise may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which managers and administration is elected by every worker-owner, and finally it can refer to a situation in which managers are considered, and treated as, workers of the firm. In traditional forms of worker cooperative, all shares are held by the workforce with no outside or consumer owners, and each member has one voting share. Definition of worker cooperative[edit] Many definitions exist as to what qualifies as a workers' cooperative.
Workers' cooperatives also follow the Rochdale Principles and values, which are a set of core principles for the operation of cooperatives. Workers' self-management. Self-management or workers' self-management (also referred to as labor management, autogestión, workers' control, industrial democracy and producer cooperatives) is a form of management that involves management of an organization by its workers.
Self-management is a characteristic of many models of socialism, with proposals for self-management having appeared many times throughout the history of the socialist movement, advocated variously by market socialists, communists and anarchists.[1] There are many variations of self-management. In some variations, all the worker-members manage the enterprise directly through assemblies; in other forms, workers manage indirectly through the appointment of managers through election. Economic theory[edit] Can co-operatives crowd out capitalism? In the eyes of the mainstream media and the high priests of the free market, Argentina just doesn’t get it. This past May, the country was savaged by the international business press for nationalizing the Spanish-owned oil company, YPF. Scarcely mentioned was the fact that Argentina’s oil and gas industry was only ‘privatized’ in the late-1990s under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other hardline enforcers of then fashionable neoliberal economic policies.
Like many countries around the world, Argentina’s oil industry used to be state-owned. Should I Work for Free? December 17 Rachel Maddow: Thin blue line thinner as GOP sacrifices America in war on Obama. Rachel Maddow: More lip service than legislation from Wisconsin GOP on jobs. Unions aren't to blame for Wisconsin's budget. Posted at 9:36 AM ET, 02/18/2011 By Ezra Klein Let's be clear: Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is -- or is not -- facing at the moment, they're not caused by labor unions.
That's also true for New Jersey, for Ohio and for the other states. There was no sharp rise in collective bargaining in 2006 and 2007, no major reforms of the country's labor laws, no dramatic change in how unions organize. And yet, state budgets collapsed. Blame the banks. Of course, the fact that public-employee pensions didn't cause a meltdown at Lehman Brothers doesn't mean they're not stressing state budgets, and that the pensions they've been promised don't exceed what state budgets seem able to bear. In fact, it particularly doesn't work for what Walker is attempting in Wisconsin.
In English: The governor called a special session of the legislature and signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Made-in.com. War. "Blood diamond" regulation system broken. The recent approval of Zimbabwean diamonds mined from the $800bn Marange fields by the Kimberley Process (KP) chair, the DRC's Mathieu Yamba Lapfa Lambang, has prompted a global "human rights" outcry with KP members such as Canada, the EU, and the US claiming there was "no consensus".
Meanwhile, other countries like China (the world's fastest growing diamond consumer market), and India (which cuts and polishes 11 of 12 stones) have all given the green light to Zimbabwe, removing any potential problems of surplus minerals from Marange, which has been described by Zimbabwean Finance Minister Tendai Biti as "the biggest find of alluvial diamonds in the history of mankind". With potential revenues pegged at $1-1.7bn annually, the support of neighbouring governments like South Africa, another major diamond producer, and "host" country to 3 million Zimbabwean political and economic "refugees", is not surprising.
Governments given a free pass No matter. De Beers funds African conflicts. Foxconn sees latest worker suicide following Chengdu fire|Economy. The latest suicide by a Foxconn employee brings to thirteen the number of such worker deaths since January last year.
Picture: Outside Foxconn's Chengdu plant, the site of an explosion last week. (File Photo/CFP) International Labor Rights Forum. Labor Rights Now!