Fwd: Economic Cooperatives

[Larry Dansinger]

FYI--interesting collaboration worth thinking about.

Larry Dansinger

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Doug Rawlings" <rawl...@vfpmaine.org>

Date: November 3, 2009 3:28:10 PM EST

To: <list...@vfpmaine.org>

Subject: Economic Cooperatives

Reply-To: list...@vfpmaine.org

 

Tired of bailouts, of working people getting stuck with the bill?

Sick of seeing the same crooks get another chance to do it all over again?

Not sure how to get a handle on it all?

 

Then this news is the biggest sleeper of the year and something we should shout to the rooftops. 

Summed up in two words, it is "Economic Democracy."

It's what we need if we're ever going to get political democracy.

It's what we need if we're ever to have the power to define what we need for a better life and then actually get it!

 

The Mondragon Cooperative example has been around for decades.  Perhaps now it will become a household word among union families and eventually the entire population yearning for justice and a better world.

 

Mike

 

"I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world."  --Gandhi

 

"Don't ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.  
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." - Howard Thurman

 

---

From: The Labor Educator <labor.e...@gmail.com>

Date: November 2, 2009 10:38:39 PM EST

Subject: LaborTalk: Steelworkers Create a Working Agreement With World's Largest Worker-Owned Co-Op

 

LaborTalk for November 3, 2009

Steelworkers Create a Working Agreement 
With World's Largest Worker-Owned Co-Op 

By Harry Kelber

The United Steelworkers (USW) and the Spanish-based Mondragon Internacional, S.A. have announced a framework agreement for collaborating to establish Mondragon cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada.

The manufacturing cooperatives that will be created in the U.S. will adopt the collective bargaining principles of the Mondragon worker-ownership model of "one worker, one vote." The agreement was reached on Oct. 27.

The Spanish co-op was started in 1956 in the Basque rural town of Mondragon by a visionary priest (Ed. note: together with a Communist Party activist). Today, it has some 100,000 cooperative members in 260 enterprises and has a presence in more than 40 countries,

The co-op has its own university, bank and social security system. In 2008, it reached annual sales of more than 16 billion euros ($23.5 billion). It is the seventh largest enterprise in Spain and the world's largest industrial workers cooperative.

"We see today's agreement as a historic first step toward making union coops a viable business model that can create good jobs. empower workers and support communities in the United States and Canada," said USW International President Leo Gerard. "Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and closing plants."

Steelworkers Chart New Path for Labor's Global Power

The Steelworkers' bold and unprecedented deal with Mondragon is a remarkable achievement on at least two counts. It can open up a new foreign market for U.S. manufactured goods. It can provide good-paying jobs by creating a chain of co-op stores that are committed to union standards. It also can strengthen labor's role in the global marketplace.

The USW has opted to globalize its operations by forming alliances with its foreign counterparts, unions that represent employees at the same global companies where USW members work. But it has also negotiated a merger with the newly-formed Unite. the U.K.'s largest union-a move that would create an organization of 3.7 million members on two continents.

There has, as yet, been no official reaction to the USW-Mondragon deal from the top leadership of the AFL-CIO or the international union affiliates. It will be interesting to see if other unions follow the Steelworkers' example and seek out links with progressive foreign companies that are willing to make agreements that include acceptance of union standards.

LaborTalk (11) will be posted on Thursday, November 6, 2009.

 

[Davis Taylor]

From the media I've seen on it so far, I'm not sure that the leadership of USW "gets it." There's talk of collective bargain principles, global alliances and opening new stores and such. No where is the word "ownership" used, nor the core principle of worker ownership mentioned. "Collective bargaining principles" doesn't even make any sense in a Mondragon-type arrangement: at Mondragon, the workers *are* the owners, so with whom would they be bargaining?

     Until some explanation is given otherwise, this appears to be labor leadership grasping at straws. Maybe it can be seen as an incremental step, part of an iterative process. But by obscuring or conflating the core elements and logic of worker-owned businesses,  it could also be detrimental to real economic democracy.

 

    I want to challenge labor leadership to be clear in its intentions and clear in begining the process of educating its people on worker ownership and economic democracy.

 

Davis

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[Jane Livingston]

I hope Mike Howard will weigh in at some point, he is far more knowledgeable than I am on labor and co-ops.

 

A couple of points, though, gleaned from my longtime Canadian friend and colleague Tom Webb, who runs the Master of Management, Co-operatives and Credit Unions degree program, an international program and the only one of its kind available in English by an accredited university (Saint Mary's in Halifax, Nova Scotia). (I edit the MMCCU newsletter which you can find at www.mmccu.coop)

 

Every year, Tom takes a class of MMCCU students and a few other interesting people on a 10-day study tour to Mondragon or Emilia Romana (a co-op epicenter in Italy). He has been visiting Mondragon for many years and has an incredible network of colleagues who leave the students stunned and inspired (I have interviewed about 25 of them so far!).

 

Mondragon began outsourcing manufacturing jobs to Third World countries a number of years ago and much has been written about it. It has generated hundreds of hours of discussion and caused genuine soul-searching within the co-op. One fact is this: the thousands of owners of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation have made a commitment that when they set up foreign shops, their standards--of safety, wages, and other meaningful performance specifications--will exceed the prevailing standards. So while they may not yet see how to keep their companies (which drive northern Spain's economy) afloat without hiring foreign non-member workers, they are at least offering them a better deal than those workers can get from their own countrymen. And they have plans for transition from employee to owner. I assume that will hold true for the steelworkers.

 

Historically, in the USA it was factory workers tired of brutal conditions walking out in Philly, New York, Baltimore and Boston, starting cooperative unions. Then the two ideas took on separate meanings and branched out. This is a simplistic explanation; there is much of value today to be learned from tracing the roots of the (US-UK) trade union movement and the (western European) co-op movements.

 

By the way: a 3-hour interview filmmaker Michael Moore did with Tom Webb earlier this year didn't make it into his movie on capitalism, but parts of it are in the DVD due out in March, MM just told Tom. Also on the DVD: an interview with John McNamara of Union Cab in Madison WI (JM is current chair of Board of US Fed. of Worker Co-ops and a student in the MMCCU program).

 

Best, Jane 

[Jennifer Hill]

ooh, sounds like a letter to the editor of LaborTalk!

 

Jennifer Hill
Hungry Heron Farm
81 Moosehead Trail
Waldo, Maine  04915
207-722-3383
roo...@fairpoint.net

----- Original Message -----

From: Davis Taylor

To: cooperat...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 11:03 AM

Subject: Re: [Cooperative Maine] Fwd: Economic Cooperatives

[Larry Dansinger]

One question I have:

If labor unions begin to organize cooperatives, who will be labor and who will be management in a cooperative structure? Who will negotiate with whom for wages, working conditions, etc.? Or will there only be one category--worker/owner?

Larry Dansinger

[Ethan Miller]

Hi Larry and all,

That question of who will be labor and who will be management is a good one, and there's been lots of interesting discussion on it in various realms. In the Mondragon Cooperative Complex (MCC), they've created two parallel governance structures: the General Council and the Social Council. In a sense, the General Council is where worker-owners represent themselves "as owners", making business decisions about the direction and operations of the MCC. The Social Council, on the other hand, is where workers represent themselves "as workers" dealing with issues of working conditions, wages, etc. Both councils are made up of people from the same pool--the worker-owners--but act in a way that acknowledges a kind of "split" (that can be a real tension at times) in interests. This dual structure was developed as a response to various disputes & struggles over time.

In the case of the USW/Mondragon deal, Girard (from USW) suggested that this "social council" model might be one direction to go in.

But all that said, not every union co-op has such a dual structure. Smaller co-ops may not need it, since that negotiation of "split interests" can occur at a more face-to-face, direct level. In this case, the union can function more as a way to link the co-op with workers in a broader industry sector and--potentially--to help mediate disputes within the co-op as they arise.

In a worker-managed non-profit structure, the staff can be unionized (and cooperative) and "negotiate" collectively with the Board of Directors (that's one model, at least).

-Ethan

Ethan Miller
217 South Mountain Rd.
Greene, ME 04236
(207) 754-7575
---------
http://www.jedcollective.org/
http://www.ussen.org
http://www.geo.coop/
http://www.riotfolk.org/
---------

"They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." - Ursula K. Leguin

[Jane Livingston]

a great model of a unionized co-op shop is Red Sun Press in Boston, they've been doing it for 30 years or so. In the past I have found them willing to share their experience.

----- Original Message -----

From: Larry Dansinger

To: cooperat...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 12:29 PM

Subject: Re: [Cooperative Maine] Fwd: Economic Cooperatives