The recent precedent-setting Market Basket strike, the historic Bread & Roses strike and the Occupy movement will be the subject of a panel discussion sponsored by Northern Essex Community College’s Department of Global Studies Friday, Oct. 24, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Hartleb Technology Center on the Haverhill campus, 100 Elliott St.
This event is free and open to the public.
These three examples of direct action will be examined and discussed by a panel of local experts including NECC Professor Stephen Russell, who will speak on the Bread & Roses strike of 1912; NECC Professor Stephen Slaner, who will examine the Occupy movement; independent labor consultant Chris Mackin, who will discuss the Market Basket action; and an NECC student speaker, Crystal Pringle, who will give her inside perspective on Market Basket.
Mackin is the president of Ownership Associates of Cambridge. Founded in 1987, Ownership Associates (OA) provides strategy and communications advice to a national market of over 10,000 firms owned by their employees through Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) as well through industrial or worker cooperatives. He also serves as a special adviser to American Working Capital, LLC, a merchant bank that specializes in ESOP transactions. He is also a lecturer at Rutgers University where he teaches a course titled “Democratic Capitalism”. He also serves as a member of the core faculty of the Harvard Trade Union Program where he teaches a course titled “Capital Strategies for Labor”.
NECC student and Merrimac resident Crystal Pringle, a liberal arts: physical science major, was involved with the Market Basket strike from its early days. Representing the customer base, she gave an impromptu speech at a rally held in Chelsea on August 10 and then spoke again in Tewksbury on August 16 as a customer representative.
For additional information contact Stephen Slaner at [email protected]
An hour and a half doesn’t seem like much time to discuss much. It’s an interesting choice of subjects because Bread & Roses, Occupy and Market Basket are all “stockholder theory” related problems.
The 1912 Bread & Roses strike predates Stockholder Theory by more than half a century yet it’s still related.
Milton Friedman’s stockholder theory (1963) was the modern legal justification for previously established business beliefs. The Massachusetts government started the ball rolling in the B&R strike with mandated worker hour reductions. Then companies reacted to the mandate with pay decreases and it all hit the fan. The government was reacting to the stockholder theory equivalent of those bygone days.
Occupy relates to the distribution of wealth. The modern version of that problem correlates to the modern rise of stockholder theory. As stockholder theory took hold the wealth disparity grew. The redistribution of wealth powered and justified by stockholder theory.
Market Basket operates based on “stakeholder theory” and they were battling the forces of stockholder theory.
It’s nice to see a customer representative on the panel. However, one customer representing more than 2 million will likely bias things.
The Market Basket saga was over-centralized to begin with and that continues with this panel selection. Customers are still under-represented and the customer representatives aren’t being chosen by customers or the Market Basket folk in each region.
It’s like the 2 million plus people in the American Revolution coming out of the war and only being granted one representative for the people. Too centralized.
Let’s see how it turns out.