The People's News

11/01/2022

An insightful interview on new local economic ideas, including how to re-energise the economy to lock in wealth and move towards net zero through new financing of projects.

Many local authorities in the UK have become a haven for co-operative friendly politics, especially Regional Metro Mayors. In Manchester, Andy Burnham has set up a co-operative commission, Dan Jarvis made South Yorkshire the first regional partner of the Ownership Hub and Jamie Driscoll has created....

03/01/2022

Courier Co-operatives are flourishing across Europe, partly thanks to CoopCycle.
The federation has facilitated cooperation between courier co-operatives making the model easily replicable, allowing more riders to take control of their work

23/12/2021

Workplace surveillance is becoming increasingly common in an age of technology. At my workplace, this fear was confirmed when a short convivial conversation, while the boss was away, resulted in an alarming email warning that work was not a time for chatting. And if you thought this was an isolated....

14/12/2021

It’s safe to say that climate change is a hot topic that politicians across the spectrum, for the most part, are working to mitigate, so much so that over 300 councils in the UK have now officially declared a climate emergency. Despite such widespread support for change at the local level, it is ...

30/11/2021

The UK has the draughtiest and oldest housing in Western Europe that has contributed to 13% of English households living in fuel poverty, but lost heat is harming our planet alongside our bank balances. The inefficient gas boilers that heat our homes emit more carbon dioxide than all of the country'...

17/11/2021

In 2011, the council for Wigan was faced with the daunting inevitability of austerity. Somehow, and from somewhere, they would have to make a savings of £160m from their budgets. It was certain to decimate their local services and population. So many others had suffered from the remorseless effects...

12/10/2021

Last month, a strike by Greek couriers for delivery company E-food saved the contracts of 115 of their colleagues. With the right tactics, their success could be replicated in Britain to fight against Deliveroo, but worker cooperative courier companies like CoopCycle could provide a permanent solution.

Last month, a strike by Greek couriers for delivery company Efood saved the contracts of 115 of their colleagues. With the right tactics, their success could be replicated in Britain.

03/10/2021

New York could be considered the heart of global capitalism, home to the infamous Wall Street, yet within the city, a thriving network of worker cooperatives has begun to flourish. In 2014, New York City only had 23 worker cooperatives but today that number is well into triple figures and the city p...

28/09/2021

The shock result of Sharon Graham winning the General Secretary position of Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, had not yet settled when Graham already began charting a target that was both audacious and ultimately necessary – Amazon. Graham’s largely unexpected victory, signalled a shift in...

28/09/2021

Labour's Conference has yield mixed results but a policy highlight was Milliband's pledge to invest £3bn in carbon emission-free steel.
This article explores why we rapidly need to decarbonise our steel industry.

Cleaning up the industry will require immediate institutional action, says Iwan Doherty

14/09/2021

We tax ci******es so to discourage smoking, yet we want to simultaneously tax work and entrepreneurship while seeking to create more jobs and entrepreneurship. An alternative tax system could be based on a core principle where corporations and individuals should as far as possible be taxed not on th...

08/09/2021

Instead of Boris' damaging tax rises, we should be looking to tax wealth to fund social care but it's important we break the control of corporations have on the sector.

This article makes a really good case for bringing in co-operatives to replace them to provide affordable, good quality care.

Due to an unknown but certainly high number of deaths in UK care homes, attention has now pivoted from hospitals to the care sector and rightly so. For too long this aspect of healthcare has remained hidden, facing eye-watering cuts and continual privatisation to the point where it is estimated that...

26/08/2021

Deliveroo is famous for bright blue bags and worker exploitation. The company has fought hard to stop their workers unionising while paying wages that can dip to as low as £2 per hour according to the IWGB, a union attempting to organise riders and other workers in the gig economy.Wings is a new wo...

13/08/2021

Nweeda and Martyn are Preston City Council Councillors Giving away that surplus appliance to a family member, friend or neighbour is an act of charity that makes you feel good. More recently, FareShare and other localised donation and distribution arrangements have harnessed this idea on a larger sc...

05/08/2021

The resounding defeat of the Labour Party at the national ballot box in 2019 appears to be a seismic event in the history of both the party and the British left. The optimism that came with the surprise result in 2017 has now been replaced with the dour reality of 14 years out of government by the n...

28/07/2021

The journalist and author of ‘Hired’ James Bloodworth once penned an article talking about the identity crisis of the working-class. In it, he wrote about the lingering nostalgia that wraps itself around those who remember a more cooperative past when jobs had greater security and solidarity to ...

25/07/2021

A Worker Buyout (WBO) is when the workers collectively purchase a business from its previous owner, often creating a worker cooperative. Worker buyouts usually occur to try and save a business facing closure due to insolvency or the former owner retiring. The next decade may yet hold huge opportunit...

17/07/2021

When those on their deathbed are surveyed what they regret the most in life, one of the most common answers is having worked too hard. Yet when our economic system produces an invention that allows us to spend less time producing the same amount of goods or services, we instead work the same amount....

15/07/2021

“GROUP K VOTE ”

30/06/2021

The election of leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s promised a society driven by the competition of dynamic entrepreneurship, rather than the impersonal, hulking bureaucracies of state-run enterprises. Instead, there would be competition and the inno...

16/06/2021

Questions about the future of work in Britain are inherently tied to our economic past and present. The era of heavy industry and stable blue-collar jobs collapsed, replaced by highly insecure jobs within the private sector. This decline in quality work has laid the groundwork for a contagious sprea...

21/05/2021

The current data economy is based on apathetic approval - everyone clicking on “I accept the terms and conditions” without reading them, let alone bargaining for better terms and conditions. However, MIT professor Alex Pentland has spearheaded a small movement with another idea on how things cou...

12/05/2021

The decline in fortunes of left-wing parties across Europe has partly been due to a loss of support among the traditional working-class communities that once formed part of their electoral base. The SDP in Germany and Labour in the UK, among others, have become culturally detached from many of these...

28/04/2021

Members for Cooperation wants to encourage the movement to do more to grow its ownership models around the world

26/04/2021

They say that memories are associated with smell, that we are transported through time from what it evoked from our childhood. The uniqueness of a community such as Green Street in Newham is its sprawl of supermarkets and restaurants decorating the town with the rich smells of South Asian culture. T...

10/04/2021

The social democratic movement has primarily been based on two simple organising methods. One was to get a group of workers together and have them elect a representative to bargain for higher pay and better working conditions on their behalf. These became known as trade unions. The other was to get....

31/03/2021

In the early 1970s there were only around 20 worker cooperatives in the UK, most of which had been found in the turn of the century. Now the number is more than 400 and growing, with one of the latest new arrivals being VME, the largest software company ever to have converted into a worker cooperati...

21/03/2021

On January 6th, former US President and notorious Twitter personality Donald Trump incited thousands of his followers to storm the country’s legislature, with a vague plan to reverse the results of the recent presidential election. Like millions of other US Americans, these fans of Trump had been ...

05/03/2021

Mobile home communities in the US Approximately 22 million people, or around 6% of the US population, live in mobile home communities, often known as trailer parks. Berkeley Public Policy Journal describes these communities as “America’s largest single source of unsubsidised affordable homeowner...

20/02/2021

The London Economic | How a new resolution could light a fire under a burgeoning co-operative sector | Business and Economics