 | This article needs to be updated.(December 2019) |
New Era Windows is an American worker cooperative formed by Chicago union members seeking to purchase their workplace, a window manufacturing plant located on Goose Island.
Contents
| This article needs to be updated.(December 2019) |
New Era Windows is an American worker cooperative formed by Chicago union members seeking to purchase their workplace, a window manufacturing plant located on Goose Island.
 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2019) |
The plant, was originally owned by Republic Windows and Doors and then purchased by Serious Energy, assembles vinyl windows and sliding doors. The workers have twice occupied the plant in their struggle to secure their wages and maintain their jobs.
Towards the end of 2008, after Bank of America discontinued Republic Windows and Doors' credit line, Republic closed the Chicago factory. [1] Following the sudden closure of the factory, workers were fired with only three days' notice, violating the WARN Act. The WARN Act requires 60 days' notice of a plant closing, or 60 days' pay if timely notice is not given. [2]
Workers and members of the UE Local 1110 [3] organized and decided to stage an occupation of the factory in protest of the firings. On December 5, 2008, the plant was occupied by workers for six days, drawing comparisons to the autoworkers strikes of the 1930s. [4] The workers' action drew extensive media coverage and attracted wide support. President Barack Obama said that Republic should follow through on its commitment to the plant's employees and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan launched an investigation into violations of the WARN Act. [5] Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich banned state business with Bank of America, because the bank's cancellation of the company's line of credit had prompted the shutdown. [6] Protest demonstrations at Bank of America branches took place in dozens of U.S. cities during the sit-in. On December 10 the union members voted to end the occupation after Republic, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and the union negotiated a settlement that paid each worker eight weeks wages, plus all accumulated vacation pay, and health insurance for two months. [7]
The workers and their struggle were featured in Michael Moore's 2009 documentary Capitalism: A Love Story . [1]
In February 2012 Serious Energy management announced the plant's immediate closing. The news was unexpected and the union responded in the same way it had four years prior. On February 23, 2012, workers represented by the UE Local 1110 and supported by organizers from Occupy Chicago occupied the factory again for 11 hours. [1] [8] Despite its drastic diminution—Serious Energy had called back 75 of the plant's 250 employees, with only 38 employed by the closing's announcement—workers successfully negotiated an agreement with management by that night. Assistance and publicity coincided with the Occupy movement in Chicago, members of which came to the plant. The union agreed to 90 days of employment before the plants closing. [9]
Two months later, California window manufacturer Serious Materials (now Serious Energy) bought out Republic Windows and Doors for $1.45 million and reopened the plant, reinstating the union workers to their jobs in order of seniority and signing a labor contract with UE Local 1110 that was substantially the same as the union's former contract with Republic. [10] [8] In April 2009 Vice President Joe Biden visited the plant and met with company officials and union leaders, praising the reopening of the plant as "a big deal." [11]
On May 30, 2012, workers from the factory incorporated as a worker-run cooperative. [12] They are trying to secure an equitable price for the factory's machinery in their negotiations with Serious Energy and their financiers, Mesirow Financial. The workers raised $520,000 and made an offer of $1.2 million for the purchase of the factory. [13]
The economy of Tajikistan is dependent upon agriculture and services. Since independence, Tajikistan has gradually followed the path of transition economy, reforming its economic policies. With foreign revenue precariously dependent upon exports of cotton and aluminium, the economy is highly vulnerable to external shocks. Tajikistan's economy also incorporates a massive black market, primarily focused on the drug trade with Afghanistan. Heroin trafficking in Tajikistan is estimated to be equivalent to 30-50% of national GDP as of 2012.
The 1936–1937 Flint sit-down strike, also known as the General Motors sit-down strike, the great GM sit-down strike, and so on, was a sitdown strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, United States. It changed the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from a collection of isolated local unions on the fringes of the industry into a major labor union, and led to the unionization of the domestic automobile industry.
New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) was an American automobile manufacturing company in Fremont, California, jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota that opened in 1984 and closed in 2010.
Maruti Suzuki India Limited is the Indian subsidiary of Japanese automaker Suzuki Motor Corporation. As of September 2022, the company had a leading market share of 42 percent in the Indian passenger car market.
A sit-down strike is a labour strike and a form of civil disobedience in which an organized group of workers, usually employed at factories or other centralized locations, take unauthorized or illegal possession of the workplace by "sitting down" at their stations.
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), is an independent democratic rank-and-file labor union representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States.
FaSinPat, formerly known as Zanon, is a worker-controlled ceramic tile factory in the southern Argentine province of Neuquén, and one of the most prominent in the recovered factory movement of Argentina.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., trading as Hon Hai Technology Group in China and Taiwan and Foxconn internationally, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer established in 1974 with headquarters in Tucheng, New Taipei City, Taiwan. In 2021, the company's annual revenue reached 6.83 trillion New Taiwan dollars and was ranked 20th in the 2023 Fortune Global 500. It is the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics. While headquartered in Taiwan, the company earns the majority of its revenue from assets in China and is one of the largest employers worldwide. Terry Gou is the company founder and former chairman.
The Belvidere Assembly Plant (BVAP) is an idled automobile production facility owned and operated by Stellantis North America. The factory opened in 1965 in Belvidere, Illinois, United States, and last assembled the Jeep Cherokee.
The Fisk Generating Station, also known as Fisk Street Generating Station or Fisk Station is an inactive medium-size, coal-fired electric generating station located at 1111 West Cermak Road in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. It was sited near the south branch of the Chicago River to provide access to water for steam and barge traffic for coal, and closed down in 2012.
Fiat Serbia – formerly "FIAT Automobiles Serbia" (FAS) from 2008 to 2014, then "FCA Serbia" (FCAS) until 2021 – is a Serbian automotive manufacturing company based in Kragujevac, Serbia. It is a joint venture (JV) between the ex-Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), merged into Stellantis in 2021, which owns 67% of the operation, and the Republic of Serbia, which owns the remainder.
The Barkan Industrial Park is located about 25 kilometres east of Tel Aviv in the West Bank. Its offices are located at the northern entrance. The industrial park is located adjacent to the Israeli settlement Barkan and near the settlement and city of Ariel.
The history of the cooperative movement concerns the origins and history of cooperatives across the world. Although cooperative arrangements, such as mutual insurance, and principles of cooperation existed long before, the cooperative movement began with the application of cooperative principles to business organization.
As an act of protest, occupation is a strategy often used by social movements and other forms of collective social action in order to squat and hold public and symbolic spaces, buildings, critical infrastructure such as entrances to train stations, shopping centers, university buildings, squares, and parks. Opposed to a military occupation which attempts to subdue a conquered country, a protest occupation is a means to resist the status quo and advocate a change in public policy. Occupation attempts to use space as an instrument in order to achieve political and economic change, and to construct counter-spaces in which protesters express their desire to participate in the production and re-imagination of urban space. Often, this is connected to the right to the city, which is the right to inhabit and be in the city as well as to redefine the city in ways that challenge the demands of capitalist accumulation. That is to make public spaces more valuable to the citizens in contrast to favoring the interests of corporate and financial capital.
Occupation of factories is a method of the workers' movement used to prevent lock outs. They may sometimes lead to "recovered factories", in which the workers self-manage the factories.
Republic Windows and Doors is based in Chicago, Illinois. The company was founded in 1965 by William Spielman. The company was declared bankrupt on December 2, 2008. The property was put under the control of its major creditors, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.
Labor Express Radio is a weekly labor news and current affairs radio program that broadcasts every Monday morning on WLUW, a formerly-independent community radio station in Chicago which has recently reverted to its original status as the radio station for Loyola University in Chicago. It is Chicago's only English-language radio program devoted to issues related to the labor movement and one of only a handful of such programs around the country. Labor Express has covered local, national and international labor news for almost a decade and a half, since its first broadcast in 1993. It is a totally volunteer-produced and self-funded project. The program is a production of the Committee for Labor Access, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which oversees both Labor Express and Labor Beat, a Public-access television labor cable TV program which broadcasts in Chicago and Rockford, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri. The program is affiliated with IBEW Local 1220 which represents radio and TV broadcast engineers in Chicago, but the views expressed on the show are solely that of its producers.
The post-2008 Irish economic downturn in the Republic of Ireland, coincided with a series of banking scandals, followed the 1990s and 2000s Celtic Tiger period of rapid real economic growth fuelled by foreign direct investment, a subsequent property bubble which rendered the real economy uncompetitive, and an expansion in bank lending in the early 2000s. An initial slowdown in economic growth amid the international financial crisis of 2007–2008 greatly intensified in late 2008 and the country fell into recession for the first time since the 1980s. Emigration, as did unemployment, escalated to levels not seen since that decade.
Workers' control is participation in the management of factories and other commercial enterprises by the people who work there. It has been variously advocated by anarchists, socialists, communists, social democrats, distributists and Christian democrats, and has been combined with various socialist and mixed economy systems.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. Originally created in 1935 as a committee within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by John L. Lewis, a leader of the United Mine Workers (UMW), and called the Committee for Industrial Organization. Its name was changed in 1938 when it broke away from the AFL. It focused on organizing unskilled workers, who had been ignored by most of the AFL unions.