Ep 8:1 Worker Cooperatives — Widening Spheres of Democracy c/o Upstream

Overview

The 21st century has seen an explosion in Worker Cooperatives—particularly since capitalism's 2008 crisis. In Part 1 of this 2-part series [from Upstream Podcast], we'll explore how worker co-ops present a radically different kind of ownership and management structure—one that has the power to bring democracy into the workplace and into the economy as a whole. We'll take a deep dive into the cooperatively owned and run bike/skate shop Rich City Rides, exploring how they have created a community hub that puts racial & economic justice front and center.

We'll also take a trip to the Basque Country of northern Spain to explore how their rich cooperative environment compares to that of the United States and the San Francisco Bay Area specifically.

Key Takeaways

On the definition of a worker co-operative in relation to other corporations:

“A worker co-operative is a firm that is owned and managed by its own employees. Worker cooperatives can be found all over the world with varying degrees of influence. They rose to prominence during the industrial revolution as part of the labor movement. Since their inception, there have been a set of principles at the heart of worker-cooperatives called the Rochdale principles, enshrining their common values of democracy, transparency, collectivity , and concern for the community into the work as a movement. 

In a worker co-ops, employees are called members and they vote in all strategic decisions similar to shareholders in a corporation, but the difference with corporations is that in a worker co-op one person only gets one vote, just like in a democracy.

An interesting and important aspect of most worker co-ops is their pay ratio, the difference in pay between the highest and lowest paid workers. In most co-operatives the pay ratio is 1 to 1, meaning that everyone gets paid the exact same amount. Sometimes it's a bit higher than that, but not nearly as much as in traditional companies. For example, in the united states, the average pay ratio for non-cooperative companies is 271 to 1.

A worker cooperative is also different from other kinds of cooperatives, like consumer co-ops for example which are owned by customers. Many grocery co-ops are actually consumer co-ops not worker co-ops. Finally there are also housing co-ops and banking co-ops too which are known as credit unions. There are also worker self-directed non-profits which are mission-driven charity organizations which are worker-managed but not owned. But these are all different from worker co-ops.” —Sofa Gradin, politics professor at King's College London

On the undemocratic nature of modern capitalism:

“But in your workplace, here comes the punchline, you have no power over those decisions. You have no participation. The end result is, you are in a place, the workplace in modern capitalism, where there is no democracy. And that has been true from the founding of the united states right through this minute. And it means when you refer to the united states as a democratic society you either understand what you’re saying and thereby exempt the economic space of society, or you don’t know what you’re saying because you've never faced what I’ve just said. And yet the economic space of society is crucial because for most adults that’s where you spend most of your life. 9-to-5, 5 out of 7 days of every week, you’re at work. So if you actually believe in democracy as the way to do things, then you are in a society where you are spending most of your time, most of your living hours, in an undemocratic, non-democratic space.” —Richard Wolff, economics professor at New School in New York City

On why we need cooperatives and how they serve to combat capitalism:

“Everybody’s labor is valuable. All wealth is generated through the work of the living world. Making money off the movement of money is just extraction of wealth from other people. So the idea of people, all of us, being able to voluntarily co-participate and control our own labor, to meet our needs and the needs of our communities and to share that wealth, to create commons of wealth, and commons of resources is what we think is a necessary element of the transition that we need to be in. The dominant economy extracts wealth from the living world and it begins with extracting wealth from our own work. And so in order to both confront that, but also to build a new kind of muscle memory in how to be in the world to actually practice self-governance on a daily basis we need institution’s infrastructure that can do that.” —Gopal Dayaneni, co-founder of Cooperation Richmond

On the challenges and scope of cooperatives in the US:

“As of 2015, there were only 323 worker co-ops in the entire united states, and only 48 here in the bay area. Compare this to approximately 2,000 in France, 25,000 in Italy, and 100,000 in Venezuela. One of the biggest barriers faced by the cooperative movement in the US is that people simply don’t know they exist. Other challenges can be finding the initial capital to get started and navigating legal issues.”  —Della Duncan, host of Upstream Podcast