Moscow Sydney Line

In May 2012, I had occasion to visit the city of Arrasate-Mondragon, in the Basque region of Spain. It is the headquarters of the Mondragon Corporation (MC), a stunningly successful alternative to the capitalist organization of production.

MC is composed of many co-operative enterprises grouped into four areas: industry, finance, retail and knowledge. In each enterprise, the co-op members (averaging 80-85% of all workers per enterprise) collectively own and direct the enterprise.

Through an annual general assembly the workers choose and employ a managing director and retain the power to make all the basic decisions of the enterprise (what, how and where to produce and what to do with the profits).

- Richard Wolff

"Why has Somyot been in jail for almost a year?" asks Ian Graham at Global Labour Column.

"The plain truth is that he is rather well known to the Thai authorities. Now aged 50, he joined the Thai labour movement as a teenager. He and other students used the technique of taking jobs in the country’s burgeoning export industries. There, they could get to know the young workers who were moving in from the impoverished rural areas, listen to their concerns, talk to them about trade unionism, and gather information about pay, safety and discipline in the export plants. As part of the student movement, Somyot was also active in the 1976 democracy demonstrations in Thailand. And he set up a national campaign for maternity rights.

"In the 1980s, his organising work took a significant new turn when he founded the Centre for Labor Information Service and Training (CLIST). This provided much-needed training and advice for local unions in the industrial zones of the Bangkok region. Its work benefited unions in sectors ranging from the auto industry to chemicals, garments, diamonds and energy. CLIST cooperated with both national and international labour confederations, building up a well-respected network of activists and campaigns. Somyot also put his organising experience at the service of unions in other newly industrialising countries.

"In 2005, he fulfilled a lifelong ambition when he launched a left-wing publishing company. Among other things, it produced paperbacks about the Thai labour movement. As part of the company’s dissemination work, he also organised a series of public debates and seminars, as well as making use of online forums and blogs to engage people on issues of Thai politics, labour and social justice. On the political side, he has been active in the Thai Democratic Party.

"Not surprisingly, his arrest sparked protests both in Thailand and abroad. Trade unions in a number of countries have held demonstrations and organised petitions. In November 2011, organisations including the Clean Clothes Campaign and the Southeast Asian Press Alliance wrote a joint letter to Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinnawatra, calling for the charges against Somyot to be dropped or bail to be granted. They also asked for the Thai lèse majesté law to be reviewed, so as to 'ensure its conformity with Thailand’s international human rights obligations'.

Marcia Marie Druliner acknowledges Paulo Freire's debt to the YCW in her 1992 PhD thesis.

Freire insists that theory and praxis cannot be separated. His Metodo Paulo Freire was a literacy program used to teach campesinos to read and write. Freire attributes the success of this method to his concept of conscientization, the word he employs to describe humanizing, problem-posing education versus dehumanizing, banking education.

Freire's ideas stem from the Young Christian Workers, and it was from Freire's pedagogy that the Movement for Basic Education developed. This Basic Education Movement, in turn, influenced the growth and development of Gutierrez's theology and the Basic Christian Communities that Gutierrez helped to found.

"What would happen, for example, if the so-called 99 percent ignored the 1 percent and began to build a new economic model from the ground floor up? What if masses of people stopped trying to reform an increasingly unworkable system and instead focused on constructing an economy of shared institutions that were fundamentally fair, just, respectful and sustainable?" asks Gar Alperowitz in a new book, America beyond capitalism.

Mondragon-style cooperatives are just one of many new alternatives to the centralized corporate workplace, Alperovitz writes. Other models include nonprofit neighborhood corporations, community trusts, municipally owned enterprises, consumer cooperatives, mission-driven nonprofit organizations and worker-owned companies.

This is my latest post on CathNews in which I argue that the boundaries of Australia's Catholic dioceses need to be updated.

Long before he became the first elected national president of the African nation of Rwanda, Grégoire Kayibanda was a committed YCW leader.

In 1950, he took part in the YCW International Conference held in Brussels.

Mary Lyons, founder of the Girls’ Young Christian Workers movement, died at the age of 92, writes her husband Austin Lyons in the Catholic Herald.