uncharted.ca

Montpelier, Vermont, March 6th 2005 -With a $30,000 feasibility study now complete, former Capital City Press workers are moving forward with a plan to launch a worker owned printing plant in central Vermont.

If successful, these print workers will join such companies as Carris Reels, Croma Technologies, The Trust Company of Vermont, and King Arthur Flower as the latest addition to the growing list of employee owned Vermont businesses. In total there are 45 worker owned companies in Vermont, employing an estimated 2200 people. The vast majority of these are organized according to one of two dominant models. These are worker cooperatives, and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs).

I think that we must be bolder, more biting, more in-their-faces with our condemnation of the existing order and our affirmation of what as just society must look like. We need to articulate the the problem that has no name and talk about economic justice as an issue of justice and not just the wages and working conditions on the modern-day plantation. Then, I think, we will tap the deep vein of dissatisfaction and give life to a new vision of how things ought to be.

For myself, my aim is to do a full frontal attack on the “framework” (translation: prison) of contemporary workplace relations. For a while now it has been occurring to me that the workplace-as-we-know-it is an incubator for conformity and subservience. It’s where learn to submit and obey. It’s where we squander our talents and energies in mind-numbing tasks or mindless internecine conflict. It’s where we get brainwashed and stay brainwashed. Think about it: Every day, for several hours (in the case of many of us, for most of our waking hours) we behave as slaves of various types (some of us have more pleasant working conditions and a higher status in the community of slaves but we are, without question, slaves). Given the effectiveness of this ongoing slave schooling, I have to wonder whether any of us are capable of rising up to do much more than wipe our asses as long as the current paradigm of workplace relations (master/servant) continues unchallenged. Change the workplace order and the social order will follow – that sort of occurred to me a while ago and so I will spend the next few weeks/months/years crapping on the workplace order in the hope that I might stir something up that will change it.

I hope that others do similar things in relation to areas of our existence on this planet that don’t seem just to them and that need to be understood and condemned and where visions of a just alternative need to be explored and discussed. That is the reason that I’ve been so totally obsessive about the Internet and the reason that we created this web site (and it’s predecessors) – to make a place where the social order shifters of our era can evolve in the largest possible numbers. There are so many people out there with things to say, ideas to profer and visions of a different future to share. We have to get them out of their seats and past the self-esteem issues that a lifetime of brainwashing has inflicted.

The timeline, I believe, can be as long or as short as we want to make it. It’s up to us. The social movements of the 20th century should give us confidence in what can be made to happen in a short period of time if we are willing to step up and communicate on a fundamental level about fundamental things. Those movements made a lot of progress in a short span of time because somebody stepped up and said what was on a lot of people’s minds. I think that those movements stopped short of their ultimate goals because, despite the progress that was made in the area of racial and gender equality, we continue to live in a society where there is no economic justice. You can make a lot of progress getting legislation passed to guarantee your equality but as long as you are a subordinate in the economic sphere, you will continue to be exploited in slavish fashion.

Maybe we should look at the sphere of socio-economic j-ustice as the unfinished business of our justice-seeking predecessors – a final frontier for us to conquer.