A Co-op Solution--Fighting the "New Normal" w/ Workplace Democracy

[Dan Clore]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

[The original has many links.--DC]

http://campusprogress.org/articles/a_co-op_solution_fighting_the_new_normal_with_workplace_democracy/
A Co-Op Solution: Fighting the ‘New Normal’ with Workplace Democracy
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
by Shay O'Reilly
Workplace Democracy through Co-Ops

Judy Davis, a worker-owner at Glut Food Co-Op in Mt. Rainier, Maryland,
jots down notes at the checkout counter. She has worked at (and owned)
Glut for 30 years.

On 34th Street in Mount Rainier, Md.—just over the state’s border with
DC—Glut Food Co-Op’s windows advertise an array of natural foods.
Shelves cast dingy shadows in the clouded glass, belying the interior’s
warm yellow glow. Inside, a tribute to the late Gil Scott-Heron hangs
over an entrance to the bulk spice room; customers peruse fresh produce
or scoop seeds and nuts out of bins, carefully labeling the bags with a
unit price (as per the hand-written signs).

Minus the Scott-Heron poster, this is a scene that has been enacted for
40 years in this same spot.

Judy Davis has worked here for 30 of those 40 years. “Too long,” she
laughs. Davis has lasted this long ringing up groceries and doing
inventory, she says, because of the nature of Glut: It’s a worker-owned
enterprise in which all decisions are made horizontally, through the
democratic process.

Her coworker Ziah Ayubu leans over. “The schedule is flexible,” he says,
and that’s why he likes it. When Ayubu wants a day off, he doesn’t have
to approach a manager; the 13 staffers, plus more volunteers,
collaborate on the schedules—just like they do on everything.

Glut Food Co-Op represents a massive reversal of the usual paradigm, in
which overseers, managers, and bosses set the working conditions for all
lower-level employees. And that current paradigm, and its illusory
benefits for average Americans, is crumbling.

At times, the future of the American worker seems relentlessly
dystopian; as wages languish at sub-living levels, productivity,
corporate profits, and executive pay have been increasing steadily. A
“jobless recovery” has further concentrated wealth in the hands of those
bankers and lenders responsible for the initial crash.

But some workers, activists, academics and lawmakers are touting
alternatives to the relentless privileging of capital over labor. The
most vigorous of these alternatives is worker cooperatives like Glut, in
which workers own their shops and factories, collectively, and make
decisions through the democratic process.

While such ventures have always existed, worker cooperatives have drawn
more attention in recent months due to the impending kickoff of the
United Nations’ International Year of the Cooperative, a trenchant
opinion piece in the New York Times, and a congressional push for a
cooperative development office. All of these focus on the ability of
cooperatives to transform the current economic model into something more
just, more equitable, and more sustainable—something far from the
present wholesale ransacking of working and middle classes alike.

And it is a ransacking, what Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian calls “the new
normal.”

In a prominent piece for Foreign Policy magazine, El-Erian argues that
the economic collapse is not a one-time plunge but a reduction of the
baseline. The hallmarks of the coming years will be slow growth and high
unemployment. El-Erian’s piece focuses on the downsides for investors,
but cooperative advocate Dennis Kelleher points out the missing
component of this economic analysis: What it means for workers.

“Where I find it to be particularly negative, is that [the new normal]
will put continuing downward pressure on wages,” Kelleher told Campus
Progress. “This ‘new normal’ of low economic growth is going to continue
helping corporate profits … if your wages are low, then you can continue
to squeeze your employees, forcing them to work harder but not paying as
much.”

Kelleher, a former City of Chicago Deputy Treasurer, runs the site
RebelCapitalist.com. His awakening to economic democracy came with the
crash of 2008, which confirmed his skepticism toward Chicago-school
economics.

“In a way, the old normal is no different than the new normal,” Kelleher
said. “The only thing that's different now than pre-2008, or pre-Lehman
Brothers, is that there’s no debt.”

It’s a grim picture: An economy in which debt for years substituted for
stagnant wages, now in a crisis that will slow that same debt. The
illusion of a thriving middle class is crumbling; massive debt and high
unemployment means a disparity in power that equals the disparity in income.

It is this disparity in power, manifested in workers’ lack of control
over the circumstances of their labor, which cooperatives confront. All
cooperatives follow the Rochdale Principles, seven guidelines that serve
as the praxis for cooperative theory:

1. Voluntary and open membership

2. Democratic member control

3. Member economic participation

4. Autonomy and independence

5. Education, training, and information

6. Cooperation among cooperatives

7. Concern for community

Organizing around these principles provides a glimmer of hope in the
form of an alternative economic model.

Union Cab has operated as a worker-owned business in Madison, Wis., for
more than thirty years. While worker-owners receive a living wage and
complete coverage of health insurance premiums, the more intangible
benefits also stand out.

Operations Manager David Lee likes the ability of the worker-owners to
set goals, and ideals—and to decide how best to enact their principles.

“We wanted to make sure we were running a safe company, so we made sure
our vehicles worked properly, our communications worked well,” Lee told
Campus Progress. “At the first [cab] company I worked at, there was a
sole owner. He didn't seem to have as much concern.”

Union Cab also sets a limit on top salary—the highest-compensated
employees can make only three times as much as an entry-level employee.
This is a far cry from the 325:1 average ratio [PDF] of CEO-to-worker
pay at companies in Standard & Poor’s 500 index, all of which use a
hierarchy-based organization. By virtue of worker-ownership,
cooperatives are freed from the negative wage-pressure exhibited by
other businesses in El-Erian and Kelleher’s depressing “new normal.”

“You got plenty of people who roll up their sleeves every day, go to
work. But if there’s someone way up there on the chain that collects all
the extra money, that’s not fair,” said one worker at Isthmus
Engineering in Wisconsin, a worker-owned business featured in Michael
Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (which some cooperative development
networks credit with a surge in interest).

Distribution of wealth among workers through worker-ownership is not
only equitable, say cooperative development organizations, but it is
also more sustainable—more insulated from the careening market.

The International Organisation of Industrial, Artisanal and Service
Producers' Cooperatives, a European network, found in a report released
this summer that worker cooperatives were weathering the financial
crisis better than traditional enterprises. Cooperatives reported less
volatility in employment than hierarchical organizations, with very few
jobs lost in existing cooperatives. In keeping with the principle of
inter-cooperative solidarity, signs of recovery were most pronounced in
cooperative-heavy countries like Spain (home of the behemoth MONDRAGON
Corporation).

Worker cooperatives may even stabilize the overall economy, as they
aren’t driven by bankers or trading on derivatives. Instead of
emphasizing short-term profit, every worker-owner is invested in the
long-term establishment of the organization.

“Worker-ownership just cuts Wall Street out of the loop,” Attorney
Thomas Beckett told Campus Progress. Beckett works to develop
cooperatives in North Carolina, hoping—among other objectives—to revive
the desiccated textile industry. “We have a business, we create value,
and we get to decide what to do with the proceeds, and we pay ourselves
better, and we take care of our community better, and the stuff we
create stays where we live—that’s the basic model.”

But perhaps most importantly, worker cooperatives are part of a push for
economic democracy. The particular changes that workers make to their
workplace may be less important on the national scale than the power
they hold to exert these changes.

As democratic theorist Sheldon Wolin writes, it is impossible to have a
democratic political system when no other spheres of
society—particularly not the economic—are under democratic control.

“If you have an economic system that is very unequal, you have a lot of
income concentrated in one place, your politics are going to reflect
that,” Kelleher said. “I think it’s economics that drives everything. …
You look at how much time people spend at work. If they work in a place
that's very democratic, I think they'd bring that home, I think they'd
bring that back to their community. I think it would actually strengthen
democracy, if we had more worker cooperatives.”

In short: A taste of democracy in the workplace enhances one’s appetite
for it in civic life, making cooperative workplaces good for politics,
for workers, and for economic well-being.

Academics and politicians are catching on. The mayor of Richmond,
Calif., a town with a 16 percent unemployment rate, recently unveiled a
renewal project that centers cooperatives as engines of economic growth
and empowerment. Gayle McLaughlin’s initiative takes cues from both
Spain and Cleveland, Ohio, whose Cleveland Foundation distributes grants
to cooperatives like the Evergreen network.

In Congress, Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Penn.) has proposed the National
Cooperative Development Act. The bill establishes a federal
organization—the National Cooperative Development Center—that would
provide start-up capital for worker-owned enterprises, training for
development organizations, and grants to cooperatives around the
country. The act allocates a modest $25 million to the center, but
advocates say every little bit helps.

Federally-funded loans would help a common problem of worker
cooperatives: Acquiring start-up money.

“A typical bank doesn't even understand cooperatives, the concept,”
Beckett said. “They're not dealing with one person who will put their
house up as collateral.”

More disquieting is the bill’s lack of support among members of Congress
more interested in quibbling over other matters.

“It perturbs me that we could only get three cosponsors for this bill,”
Kelleher said. “I'm hoping that they'll come around to this very modest,
job-creating proposal. [The act] can be effective—it can certainly be
effective.”

The National Cooperative Development Act was introduced just in time for
the United Nations’ International Year of Cooperatives, which urges
governments worldwide to sponsor cooperative development and kicked off
earlier this week. The U.N. declaration specifically recognizes the
benefits that cooperatives offer for marginalized people and their
massive potential for ameliorating poverty.

This consciousness-raising has found yet another loud voice in the U.S.
in recent months: University of Maryland Professor Gar Alperovitz, whose
op-ed in the New York Times, “Worker-Owners of America, Unite!,”was
followed shortly by an article for Occupy Boston’s newspaper. In the
latter piece, Alperovitz calls for a democratizing of ownership, and
expresses hope for a cooperative future. Constituencies, he writes, must
“come to understand why these new economic models are important to a
democratic future.”

That democratic future, if cooperative advocates are right, would have
none of the booms and busts that have rocked the world economy. It would
involve, Kelleher said, people being “active participants in the
political system regardless of their socioeconomic status.”

Asked to dream big, Kelleher does: “The purpose in a cooperative economy
would be to serve people. To serve needs, economic needs, social needs,
the physical needs of people, and profit would not be the primary motive.”

But for now, worker-owners and advocates are enjoying the immediate
perks of cooperatives: control over their own working conditions,
greater pay, economic security, and a good level of empowerment. There’s
a human benefit, too: Cooperatives are local businesses that bolster
community and, through their emphasis on worker dignity, encourage good
relationships between worker-owners and customers. Personal attachments
are common.

Nisey Baylor, the eponymous owner of Nisey’s Boutique, credits Glut for
the location of her business: She saw the neighboring space for rent
after shopping at the co-op for years.

“Co-ops like Glut have customers that have been coming for 40 years
straight,” Baylor told Campus Progress. “They’ve got loyalty on their side.”

Back inside Glut, Abuyu says he drove a rig cross-country before he
started working at the store 11 years ago. His tenure means he knows all
the regulars, and as Abuyu rings up the last customers of the night
under the watchful eye of Gil Scott-Heron (“Rest in Power”), one man is
eager to share his feelings toward the place.

“It’s like family here,” the customer says.

Shay O'Reilly is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on
Twitter @shaygabriel.


--
Dan Clore

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"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_