The Art of the Possible

By Nairuti Shastry (Center for Economic Democracy)

The Community Wealth Building (CWB) movement in the United States, while innovative, lacks a cohesive analysis of, and agenda for, political change. Among practitioners—from Denver to Seattle to St. Louis—there has been significant work advocating for a legislative agenda that enables various elements of CWB. However, despite significant wins over the past century—from the establishment of collective bargaining for private sector employees (i.e. National Labor Relations Act of 1935) to the more recent legislative fight led by the Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power (COWOP) in Massachusetts to make the state’s Center for Employee Ownership a permanent line item in the budget (S.B. 261)—this work falls short on two fronts.