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In recent posts, I have been writing about the role Fordham's Community Economic Development Clinic played in the founding of Colors, a worker owned restaurant founded and run by surviving employees of Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of The World Trade Center.
In this final installment on Colors, Fekkak Mamdouh, one of the leaders among the workers and Saru Jayaraman, a lawyer and organizer, who founded Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), an organizing group for restaurant workers, talk about some of the ways that this worker owned restaurant differs from the typical restaurant. As I listened to them and saw the beautiful dining room they have created, my first thought was that they have done something very new and exciting. But as I reflected, I realized that they did something rather old and exciting. Many of you are no doubt familiar with the very significant role cooperatives played in many aspects of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Agricultural and electrical co-ops are probably the most familiar, but there are plenty of other examples and types of cooperatives, including many other worker owned cooperatives in America.
Too many of us accept a monolithic view of the American economy. We might remember our history and better understand our present condition, from which I take the lesson that in our huge and very complex economy, there is plenty of room for diverse structures and organizational forms. This is a story about people who had the daring and courage to think differently. They have changed many lives already and they have not, by any means, exhausted their courage or daring.
-- Ian Weinstein
Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Windows on the World, Community Economic Development, World Trade Center
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