Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.
Charleroi, a little town of about 4,000 in the heart of western Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley, lost not one but three major manufacturers last year. First to go was the Quality Pasta company, with 100 jobs lost. Next was the more than a century-old Corelle glass-making plant that employed 300. Finally, just in October, the Fourth Street Foods processing plant announced it would be closing and permanently laying off 250 workers.
This example opens up a short essay by Bhaskar Sunkara that just came out at the journal Democracy. The larger problem underlying these kinds of plant closures, that often take place when businesses are still profitable but not quite as profitable as owners think they could make them by relocating elsewhere is, he argues, “not only question of what we produce or how much we invest—it is also a question of who has the authority to decide when productive enterprises are allowed to disappear, and why workers so rarely have a say.” A complete solution would “require massive investments in infrastructure and industry and ultimately a reorganization of the economic structure.”
Shameless plug: Bhaskar and I and our friend Mike Beggs co-wrote a book about what that long-term reorganization might look like that’s coming out this fall from Verso. And a short preview of the model we develop there can be found in the opening chapter of Bhaskar’s first book, The Socialist Manifesto (“A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen”), which also involves an example about a pasta company.
In this essay, though, instead of dwelling on that long-term vision, he focuses on an incremental step in the right direction that left-populist politicians could put in their platforms in 2026.
A federal right of first refusal for employees to purchase their workplace would take this asymmetry seriously without trying to suppress economic change. The basic idea is straightforward. When a firm with more than 100 workers is being sold, closed, or relocated in a way that would eliminate a substantial share of local jobs, employees would have a legally enforceable opportunity to purchase the enterprise themselves. This guarantee would apply to a range of firms, from those that are already profitable to ones where workers can present a credible plan to restructure operations and return the business to viability.
That right would mean nothing without institutional backing, however. The proposal must include access to standard-form public financing that allows workers to quickly assemble takeover plans, secure technical assistance, and apply for funding. This financing should take the form of long-term, fixed-repayment loans priced at or near the prime rate, offered through existing federal lending channels such as the Small Business Administration.
This isn’t a new idea. I can remember Richard Wolff talking about it at a conference I went to in 2018, for example. Jeremy Corbyn talked about things like this when he was the leader of the Labour Party. And Italy’s Marcora Law offers some real-world precedent.
But this is the best version I’ve read of the case. Bhaskar is a socialist who sees this as a baby step in the direction of long-term socialist hopes, but the argument he makes here doesn’t assume readers who are on board with any of that, and takes a variety of possible objections that could be raised from other parts of the political spectrum seriously. He agrees that soft budget constraints can be economically crippling, for example, and doesn’t want to keep firms afloat if the new owners can’t make them viable.
He has several sharp responses to mainstream economic arguments that could be wielded against a right of first refusal. But the part I found the most interesting was about the politics of the proposal:
In a country that has failed to secure even something as basic as single-payer healthcare, it might sound absurd to suggest that Americans would welcome a policy that expands worker control over the means of production. Yet, according to survey data from the Center for Working-Class Politics, a majority of working-class voters support major government interventions to alleviate mass layoffs, raise wages, stimulate manufacturing, and even provide public jobs. This isn’t a paradox. The populist sentiment that helped propel President Trump to power was informed in large part by discussions of industry, production, and the fate of the “American worker” in an increasingly lopsided economy where many workers are being left behind. In this environment, progressives need to offer reforms that treat citizens less as passive recipients of welfare, and more as producers who deserve a voice in the decisions that shape their lives.
Redistributive policies are, of course, necessary, and any serious egalitarian politics will require more of it. But redistribution alone has proven to be a brittle foundation for rebuilding working-class allegiance, in part because it too easily maps economic politics onto a moralized divide between those who “contribute” and those who merely “receive,” rather than onto the identities people most readily recognize in their working lives.
For most workers, the defining economic experience is not the level of after-tax inequality in the abstract, but instability and the feeling of powerlessness in the modern economy. Factories are closed, offices relocated, and plants sold off not only when they fail, but often when ownership changes or financial incentives shift. The people who depend on those firms—for income, yes, but also as a font of individual and local identity—absorb the consequences, while the decision itself remains firmly out of reach.
If Democrats want a reform that will shape our national political conversation and how the party is perceived, they could champion demands more closely tied the point of production. One concrete way to do that would be to establish a federal right of first refusal for workers to buy their workplace when it is being sold, closed, or relocated, paired with access to standard-form public financing that makes that right real.
This policy does not mandate worker ownership, abolish markets, or require ideological buy-in from the people it affects. It simply recognizes that when a firm can plausibly continue operating, the people who built it and rely on it should have a legally enforceable opportunity to keep it running.
Read the rest here.
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If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out the article Matt McManus and I wrote for Current Affairs:
Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism Finally, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just under two thirds of the way there. Consider chipping in!
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