Eminent Domain: Building Toward Worker Cooperatives in the United States

Abstract

This article deals with the major challenges to the development of cooperatives owing to the retreat of the state in intervening on behalf of the public good. Cooperatives represent a clear response to unemployment and poverty within the liberal capitalist economies. Cooperatives represent a re-envisioning of work organization, democratic procedures, the reality of employee self-management, the fostering of community and political outreach that combine to provide an alternative to the hierarchical private firm’s place in the economy and society. The potential uses of eminent domain to meet this socio-economic challenge in the United States represent viable public policies that can provide workers with the legitimacy to own and run their own enterprises. Eminent domain, a legal process, has a basis in public policy, which includes the powers to tax and spend, to zone for economic purposes, to impose environmental regulations, and to avoid neighborhood blight. Worker control requires the implementation of eminent domain on behalf of workers for the clear benefit of economic development, social justice and worker autonomy.