Vernon and Michael discuss his White Paper, MRAGA Make Rural America Great Again: An Infrastructure Road-Map for Rural America’s High-Road Institutional Stewards. Michael Peck strives to overcome inequalities of wealth/income, opportunity, and social mobility by applying the sixty years of Mondragon experience and principles to form, transform, and transition worker co-ops and union co-ops. Since late 1999, Michael Alden Peck has served as the North American delegate for Mondragon, the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative. On March 26th, 2012, the United Steelworkers (USW), Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) announced the union-coop template, to create worker-owner hybrid projects and businesses with the goal of revamping U.S. manufacturing through worker empowerment and ownership. In January 2014, Michael helped to launch 1worker1vote.org, a non-profit dedicated to building a national network of unionized worker-owned cooperative businesses to overcome opportunity, mobility, and income inequality. He is a dedicated advocate for the cooperative business model, and has made major contributions to the cooperative movement.
