Historian, political economist, activist, writer

Monthly Archives: September 2017

Black Monday, ’77, When the Mill Shutdown in Youngstown Gave Birth to the Rust Belt

By Kaylee Thornley | Published: September 25, 2017

Gar Alperovitz’s chapter in Charles Derber’s new book, Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times, was featured on BillMoyers.com. The chapter discusses the story of Youngstown and how change happens and is happening today.

This is not, however, simply a story about worker coops. It is much more about how change can happen — and about how an idea whose time has come actually “comes.” The spirit of Youngstown lives on. At the time of this writing, a major new initiative — “50 by 50” — aims to organize 50 million workers in worker-owned enterprises in the United States by 2050. And in many communities, other new initiatives have been building momentum. Philadelphia and Santa Fe, for instance, are actively considering new public banks to develop much more broadly democratized local economies. Activists in Boulder, Colorado, have won two major referenda to take over the local electric utility and convert it to less climate-destroying approaches.

Click here to read the full excerpt on BillMoyers.com.

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Democratic Ownership and the Pluralist Commonwealth: The Creation of an Idea Whose Time Has Come

By Kaylee Thornley | Published: September 19, 2017

In Charles Derber’s new book, Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times, Gar Alperovitz offers a “guest interlude” discussing how “an idea whose time has come actually ‘comes.'”

On September 19, 1977 — a day remembered locally as “Black Monday” — the corporate owners of the Campbell Works in Youngstown, Ohio, abruptly shuttered the giant steel mill’s doors. Instantly, 5,000 workers lost their jobs, their livelihoods, and their futures. The mill’s closing was national news, one of the ﬁrst major blows in the era of deindustrialization, offshoring, and “free trade” that has since made mass layoffs commonplace.
What was not commonplace was the response of the steelworkers and the local community. “You feel the whole area is doomed somehow,” Donna Slaven, the wife of a laid-off worker, told reporters at the time. “If this can happen to us, there is not a secure union job in the country.” Rather than leave the fate of their community in the hands of corporate executives in New York, New Orleans, and Washington DC, the workers began to organize and resist. And they joined with a new coalition of priests, ministers, and rabbis — headed by a Catholic and an Episcopal bishop — to build support for a new way forward. I was called in to head up an economic team to help.

Click here to read the entire excerpt featured on Truthout.