I’ve been on a kick, for many weeks, about the evils of the bankruptcy code–how can it be that companies are allowed to use the bankruptcy laws to destroy pensions (money that workers put away for future years) and attack union contracts…at the same time, by the way, that corporate CEOs continue to receive generous pay and benefits?

Well, workers would have some leverage if Ian Chan Hodges had his way. Ian has started an organization called the American Ingenuity Alliance. Its basic idea is this: workers should own the intellectual property rights to their inventions. Right now, if you are an employee inventor, you have to sign over your rights to your inventions.

But, if you actually kept the rights to your inventions, that would be a huge, valuable asset–one a company would have to negotiate the rights for. So, imagine one of these bankruptcy filings–if the union representing the workers owned the rights to a process that made, say, an MRI machine or a car or a software product, a company would have to bargain over the use of the rights in order to keep its product rolling out the door.

Hodges, who lives in Hawaii, has gotten the state legislature to move to charter something called the Ingenuity Corporation. That corporation would be empowered to hold the rights to patents, giving the creators of those patents the power to license and profit from their creations. Some of the interesting principles of this charter are:

• Raise global labor and environmental standards and build Hawaii’s role as an inventor-friendly state;
• Engage in any lawful business that operates upon International Labor Organization labor and United Nations environmental standards and sell, lease, or license goods and services only to business entities meeting International Labor Organization labor standards and United Nations environmental standards;
• Enable inventors, labor unions, the American Ingenuity Alliance, and public educators to create a business entity that owns and licenses intellectual and other property;
• Enable the corporation to negotiate with other corporations on behalf of all the constituency groups on issues of licensing intellectual property, labor, and environmental standards;
• Permit the corporation to collectively bargain and declare that exercising such power on behalf of inventors and labor organizations is an exception to all state anti-trust and anti-competitive practice rules.

So, this entity–and you could amend other state charters around the country to form similar corporations–would put more power in the hands of individual workers.

One of the things I like about this idea is that it begins a subtle but important movement: by changing state corporate charter law, it weakens the power of the almighty corporation and begins to return some power to the individuals–and to unions if they choose to use this innovation wisely.