Mexican Workers Win Ownership of Tire Plant With Three-Year Strike
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Truthout) If the owners dont want it, lets run it ourselves. When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes upand usually dies.
The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and once in business, the new worker-owners face all the pressures that helped the company go bankrupt in the first place. Most worker-owned co-ops are small, such as a taxi collective in Madison or a bakery in San Francisco.
But in Mexico a giant-sized worker cooperative has been building tires since 2005. The factory competes on the world market, employs 1,050 co-owners, and pays the best wages and pensions of any Mexican tire plant.
Aware that this unusual victory is virtually unknown in the U.S., friends in Guadalajara urged me to come down and see how the TRADOC cooperative is working. ....................(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15570-mexican-workers-win-ownership-of-tire-plant-with-three-year-strike