Tag Archives: cooperatives

worker cooperatives and unions

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I’m interested in the work between worker cooperatives and unions.

Cooperatives are, arguably, the more democratic for-profit structure than your “regular” corporation. Labor unions are the foremost advocate for workers’ rights.

And the Basque-Spanish #Mondragon Co-op has been heavily investing with the USW to build unionized worker co-ops in the U.S. for the last few years.

But I also wonder about the role of the unionized worker co-op in the age of automation.

If automation is touted as this inexorable force for extraction of more resources, the production of more products and the provision of more services at the expense of existing human labor roles, while co-ops are for-profit entities entailed to the equal provision of shares of the profit to those who are members, how can automation be made to work equally for a co-op’s shareholders without the co-op losing member-shareholders?

Should the worker-shareholders own the robots, even if that means that the worker-shareholders do less of the work? And if the worker-shareholders are doing less or even little of the procedural work while they share the revenue from those robots, does the co-op degenerate from worker-type to consumer-type co-op, or does the co-op retain the worker as the primary shareholder by way of cooperatively owning the devices used in the operation of the business?

Models like Amazon Go’s cutting-out of human cashiers in brick-and-mortar grocery stores work to the benefit of the few shareholders and executives at the top of Amazon because their corporate structure is built to favor those at the top. But that same model can also be applied to benefit cooperative member-owners without undermining the worth of human labor.

If greater automation/digitization, co-op membership and worker-shareholder democracy can all be made to work in tandem, I think it would make life easier for a lot of people while avoiding reactionary tendencies against civil rights, labor rights and robots.

#1u #coop

Worker co-ops, consumer co-ops and labor/trade unions

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I wonder about how labor unions have increasingly come out in favor of mutualization of larger megacorporations, particularly in their favoring of worker cooperatives as a model for such mutualization.

I wonder about it because I’m a bit lost on whether worker co-ops are in philosophical conflict with consumer co-ops: both are mutualized institutions meant to at least provide a more transparent product and more democratic governance, but worker-owned co-ops are more limited in their demographic and democratic spread than consumer co-ops, and they are more bound by necessity to ensure job security for all worker-owners.

Job security, of course, is good: it not only fits within the labor unions’ ultimate goal of protection of jobs and worker welfare (by mutual assurance, if need be), but it also guarantees that any owning member will have a means of generating income for both oneself and for the other members of the co-op, giving worker co-ops a philosophical and financial advantage over consumer co-ops, which are larger in membership but provide seemingly basic, threadbare benefits in comparison.

Of course, even if the worker co-ops assimilate into each other to create a megacooperative conglomerate, it may only make a fraction of consumers into worker-owners. Its not like the labor unions will be able to announce "Hey, everyone aged 18+ in the country is hired, so come clock in on Monday! We’ll send everyone – including you – to a day job, get you educated, and get you settled into an apartment at the same time!" It would be nice to dole out job positions like nation-states dole out citizenship, but I doubt that worker cooperative federations or conglomerates will be able to ensure jobs and income for all adults in that way….at least, not with the way that worker cooperative federations are structured.