Michael Johnson

New Society Publishers, an alternate publishing company still thriving, published When Workers Decide in 1992 (WWD). It's a collection of writings on the workplace democracy movement gathered largely from issues of Changing Work, the predecessor of GEO. When I volunteered to take on the task of reviewing it in order to shed some historical perspective on the role and significance of the work GEO has done, I thought it was going to be a rather straightforward task. It didn't turn out that way.

I never knew Frank Lindenfeld and had no idea that I was taking on his legacy and vision when I joined GEO in 2009, which was after he died. In fact, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a GEO Newsletter until 2008. It was only a year before at the tender age of 65 that I woke up to the fact that democracy without democratic economics at its core was a distraction. I made myself pretty much an outsider in the various discussions the GEO team has had on this Memorial issue for Frank.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This article emerged out of conversations Michael had with Terry Mollner and his thinking about creating institutions grounded in the idea the common good. Terry’s book, The Love Skill: We Are Mastering the 7 Layers of Human Maturity, explores these ideas in depth. It will be out in May of this year. He has written a lot on the Mondragon Cooperative experiment, which can be accessed at www.trusteeship.org).