Be your own master: Worker Coops

Most teenagers finishing high school dream of being not somebody working for somebody else from 9 to 5. They dream of being their own bosses. And then reality sinks in…

But worker coops are not new; they have existed across history. In Richard Wolff’s words they are old like Methuselah. I am going to concentrate here what are they now. The central idea of them is that they are a worker owned and operated enterprises. One person – one vote in deciding all the major decisions within the organizations. What to produce, how to produce, where to produce and what to do with the profits.

Chris Wright writes in his book Worker Cooperatives And Revolution “the conceptual starting point of the worker coop is that labor has power over capital, whereas it is the opposite in conventional business. That is, in a capitalist enterprise both ownership and control (and the right to a share in profits) ultimately belong to investors, and voting rights are proportionate to the number of shares of equity held.” I highly recommend his book, it is a great look at their history in the United States, their practices today and he also provides a good theoretical analysis.

Another great resource in this regard is Richard Wolff’s book of Democracy At Work A Cure For Capitalism. There are many more, it is hard to add to them. I build on this literature and I don’t want to repeat them here. Please, check out the Democracy At Work’s (https://www.democracyatwork.info/) new podcast All Things Co-op series. Very informative.

What I want to stress though is that they are not utopistique entities, they exist here and now in Canada too. The Canadian Worker Co-op Federation (https://canadianworker.coop/) congregates dozens of worker coops from all over Canada. But they are small in numbers, relatively. There are reasons for that. One is that worker coops tend to be in labour intensive industries and not capital intensive sectors. It is not so easy to bring capital to worker coops. Although there are counter examples to this. For example, the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. It is a federation of hundreds of coops and they are present in a wide array of industries with members around 70,000 people, the 7^th largest corporation in Spain.

So, what could we do to convert as many small businesses to worker coops here in Alberta? Not much without pressure from bellow. Without grass-roots organization. And this is the weakest part of all. But things can be fostered a little bit from above too. For example, we could enact a new law in Alberta, like the Marcora law in Italy. It says that if 9 unemployed people unite to create a new business the government gives them the full 1 or 2 year’s employment insurance payouts in one lumpsum. That would be something. Or if Mr. and Mrs. Smith want to sell their family business, they have built for 50 years because they are retiring. Their children are not interested in taking over the business. Give them the opportunity to sell it to their own workers. Where would the money come from? The government would lend them the money. You could enact laws, something like the Labour Party in Britain wows to do in their program. When they come to power, the following will be law (the right of first refusal): every corporation can operate as usual until either they want to sell the business to another corporation, they want to go public (IPO- issue shares), they want to relocate somewhere else or they want to close, they need to offer it to their own workers. Where the money would come from to buy it? From the government. If capitalist corporations can be subsidized by governments, than why could they not subsidize non-capitalist enterprises?

Similar things could be put in place in Canada. Nothing will happen though if there is no pressure from bellow. The masses of people need to organize and put pressure on governments. And we lack all of this.