Re: Corporations/Side Issue

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Mike B. writes:
>I'm wondering about these pressures to cut costs which
Chomsky refers to.  Don't they lead to the big, nice
co:operative having to try to find cheaper sources of
material via low wage, usually dictatorial political
states?<

FWIW, David Schweikert's "market socialist" utopia of worker-managed co-operatives has two major institutions that are aimed at preventing the co-ops' profit-maximization from turning into this kind of thing:

1) a minimum wage, so that profit-max doesn't involve co-ops competing via a race to the bottom among themselves.

[I think there must also be some rule about not hiring non-co-op members to do work. But I don't remember it.}

2) a special tariff on imports from countries that don't live up to labor standards. In this case, the revenues collected by making these imports more expensive to domestic consumers are supposed to be returned to the country whose imports are taxed as a lump sum (development aid).

Jim Devine