Green Job catalyst Michael Peck to speak at Grey to Green Festival Sept. 10 in Youngstown
September 8, 2011, Press Release:
Green Job catalyst Michael Peck to speak at Grey to Green Festival Sept. 10 in Youngstown
Michael Peck’s bio here as WORD doc as webpage
Good paying union jobs in the growing solar energy and wind power economy are being created in Ohio with cooperation from the Mondragon co-operative network in Spain. Michael Peck, US delegate of Mondragon, will share the excitement of these efforts at the fourth annual Grey to Green Festival, speaking at the Opening Ceremony on Saturday, September 10th, Wick Park Pavilion in Youngstown at 12:10 and leading a workshop at 1:30-2:45.
For the past decade, Michael has served as the first North American delegate for Mondragon, the world’s largest worker-industrial cooperative network.
Starting in late 2009, Michael has helped to engineer a partnership between Mondragon and the United Steelworkers Union to create next generation jobs opportunities involving worker empowerment and ownership under a hybrid union-coop model. In July, 2011, Michael was appointed Chairman of Isofoton North America, a leading Spanish Photovoltaics cell & module manufacturer. Isofoton will supply modules to the nation’s largest PV plant (49.9MW) east of the Rockies, sited on reclaimed mine lands in rural Appalachia in Noble County, Ohio, to be owned by a leading investor-owned utility and will construct a new PV assembly facility in Napoleon, Ohio, that will create up to 330 direct manufacturing jobs plus hundreds of indirect jobs with local contractors.
Ohio has the opportunity to make a “giant leap forward” building on steady growth of interest and support for worker owned cooperatives. The Cooperative Development Center at Kent State University, in conjunction with the the Cleveland Foundation has helped foster the growth of the Evergreen co-op network in the University Park area of Cleveland and the EEOC and CDC at Kent have assisted Potters Wheel & Beatitude House with the Beatitude House Green Clean cooperative and the start-up of the Lake-To-River Food Cooperative, both centered in Youngstown. Michael will present his model as a way to combine worker ownership with promising new technologies and cooperate with steelworker unions. This model has much to offer in a regional economy that seems at present to be providing mainly low paying entry level jobs. A Vindicator July 13 article noted that while the Mahoning Valley has seen new job growth, it ranked 90th out of 100 metro areas in green job creation.
Previously, working in Pennsylvania on a bipartisan basis during the 2002-2004, Michael was instrumental in bringing a leading global wind turbine manufacturer to the Commonwealth in 2005. The company since has invested over $220 million in two factories, one headquarters office, one central administration office, and multiple wind farms, and has created 900 in-state direct good and green jobs, and hundreds of indirect jobs with local contractors. With Michael’s direct involvement this was the first overseas wind turbine manufacturer to start building in the U.S., the first to sign and embrace an award-winning, progressive relationship with organized Labor (the United Steelworkers Union), the first to transform an abandoned brownfield industrial site into a green energy manufacturing hub, the first to achieve upwards of 65% domestic content, and the first to undertake a R&D partnership with a major U.S. defense aerospace & shipbuilding prime contractor (Newport News Shipbuilding) to develop and build next generation off-shore wind turbines “made in the USA”.
Contact: Jim Converse, Coordinating Team, Grey to Green Festival Also on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/GreytoGreenfestival
Regional Development Common Wealth, Inc. 330.518.6971
Tags: 2011, Michael Peck, schedule
