The Workers' Paradise

January 26, 2011

A Quick Review of “Solidarity”

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — John McNamara @ 9:22 pm

Recently, a post from last fall on the Theft of Labor, brought this comment:

“If the intern or the college athlete feels like they are getting an outstanding deal, is it your job to convince them otherwise?”

My spam filter held it up. At first, I thought it was a rather tricky robot trying to get its url posted, but then thought that this was a real person and, even if the poster isn’t, it still raises a good topic. It speaks to the value of solidarity. Why should we tell people how they should go about making a living? Because we share our world and no one acts in a vacuum.

The short answer is “Yes”. How does the college athlete or intern “know” they are getting a good deal? College athletes are barred from having agents to speak for them. Interns, by definition, are outside of a bargaining group. In addition, these are kids who still do most of their banking at the “Mom and Pop Savings and Loan”.

If it is a really good deal, then it won’t be a theft of labor. Getting a 4 year degree at a quality liberal arts college may be worth playing football for four years (especially if the team isn’t a Division I elite school). I certainly wasn’t arguing that we can only be a cash-basis society. I have no problem with bartering and Time Banking.

However, helping the UW or Miami generate hundreds of millions of dollars for a paltry $20 K a year education benefit (especially if one is a star athlete) seems like exploitation to me.

At the root though is that all of this “free” labor waters down the value of work. A lot of the work of interns might be done just as well (and more efficiently) by administrative assistants earning a living wage and benefits who can then send their kids to college.

Major League Baseball runs its own farm system at its own cost. The NBA and NFL use taxpayer funded colleges and universities to prepare their future employees. That doesn’t pass the smell test to me.

By ignoring this, we only continue the race to the bottom. Solidarity is based on the notion that if we stick together, we can improve society for everyone or, as our founding fathers so aptly noted, “if we don’t hang together, we shall surely hang separately.” If I come in an undercut your salary to get your job, then what is to stop someone else from doing that to me?

We are all in this together and finding short term advantages for individuals does not build a sustainable society.

September 21, 2010

The Agency Dilemma in Worker Co-operatives

Filed under: Movement,Worker Rights — Tags: , , , , , , — John McNamara @ 8:00 am

Last week at my other blog, Breathing Lessons, I discussed the Rochdale cul-de-sac as it applies to consumer cooperatives. This week, as part of this discussion over the future of US worker cooperatives, if not the labor movement in the United States, I want to put the spotlight of the Agency Dilemma on our movement.

It would be a mistake to presume that worker cooperatives, by their nature, enjoy an immunity to the agency dilemma. Race Matthews notes that even Mondragon has its issues. In the US, we have a lot of issues that arise from our culture as well as from the Agency Dilemma.

A More Critical View of Mondragon

First, while I am impressed with Mondragon and loathe to point out the cobwebs up in the corners, it is worth mentioning that perfection is a goal that we strive for, but can never attain. Thus, the criticism of Mondragon (and our own co-operatives) should be accepted in the effort to make them better.

The single biggest criticism of Mondragon has been their outsourcing labor to the developing countries without developing worker co-operatives. This not only runs counter to their principles but invokes the legacy of Spanish imperialism especially when they are engaging the South American economy. However, even within their co-operatives, Mondragon can succumb to elitism and a class separation among their workforce. Matthews cites research conducted by groups within and without Mondragon. Specifically the work of Cornell University anthropologist Dayvydd Greenwood and the ethnography of Sharyn Kasmir . Matthews also taps the work of Mondragon insiders José Luis González (at the time, the Director of Human Resources at FAGOR), and  Mikel Limenez. The work that Matthews uses is from his 1990 position as the Director of Sociological Research for Ikasbide, the predecessor of Otalara Institute. Mikel generally leads the tour groups.

While the workers love their co-operatives and appreciate them, they also recognize that there are “those above” and “those below” (Matthews, 1999, 225) They also speak of issues that should resonate with those of us in the United States, “we are less equal among ourselves than the workers in a capitalist firm; being members, many of us often have to put up with things that workers in other firms would not tolerate.” (Matthews, 1999, 225) Certainly, the 1974 strike revealed a very real rift along gender lines in the co-operatives. While the official discussion of the strike resulted in limiting the size of co-operatives (the factory co-op that suffered the strike had over 2,500 members), it did not talk about how the strike leaders were treated. According to Kasmir in The Myth of Mondragon, twenty-four leaders from the strike were fired (2/3′s of them women). Twenty-two were re-hired except for two women. They were unable to find decent employment in the Basque country for almost five years (public pressure finally forced their re-hiring). (Kasmir, 1996, 110-120) Kasmir’s work provides a Gramsci-esque critique of Mondragon. I can tell you that it is not well received by academia and considered flawed. It is an ethnography so her work does have certain limitations, but I think that it does raise some issues that shouldn’t be ignored.

The point is that our co-operatives can easily succumb to the dominant paradigm of capitalism. Even Mondragon can create an environment where mental and physical labor has separate value within the organization. We are not immune from creating agency theory. If our Human Resource department only has the corporate world of human resources to use for educating itself, it shouldn’t be a surprise that our HR departments talk and act like other corporations. Unless we create a structure that either flattens hierarchy or contains and channels its power, we are susceptible to it overcoming our democracies. If Mondragon cannot eradicate it despite their principles and culture, then it will be doubly hard for our US Co-ops.

The US Agency Dilemma

Our coops have few, if any, resources as worker cooperatives. While the Worker Co-operative conferences offer some skill sets and workshops, it can be difficult to translate between industries. We often have to turn to our industry and their “best practices.” As I have mentioned before, we need to critique the “best practices” rather than simply accept them. In whose interest are these practices best? My guess is that they work best for the managers first and the stakeholders second. The workers are far down the pecking order.

Because US culture bases itself on control and power, it creates an environment where it can be quite easy for our worker co-ops to mimic them. We often haven’t the time or energy to explain and debate every detail of the operations to the membership. It is easier to let individuals specialize in their area and run it. However, that needn’t take away from the democracy of the organization. For the smaller co-ops, it is easier to maintain a collective attitude; however, as co-ops grow, they cannot always follow the Rainbow Grocery or the Arizmendi models due to the needs of their industry. These co-ops do need some level of structure and we shouldn’t see hierarchy as an automatic failure or example of Agency. We shouldn’t simply hire managers to run our co-ops and then complain about their decisions.

The Danger of Agency

One of my current fears regarding the Agency Theory and US Labor Movement comes from the two sources. First, the traditional labor movement has largely given itself over to Agency long ago. Corporate officers and union leaders make as much as the CEO and have little in common with the rank-and-file. SEIU’s growth strategy has resembled Wal-Mart more than a people’s movement. In our movement, we are seeing social workers and “community developers” find ways to co-opt the movement to include well-heeled consultants and advisers. Elsewhere, worker co-operatives are being created to outsource unionized government services with lower paid and benefit-poor positions.

The Cleveland Model offers hope, but also offers dangers. It is an agency development model that focuses on good jobs and keeping the neighborhood intact. However, it is based on the benevolence of a couple of large institutions and has a control structure that will fill the key decider roles from the established philanthropists (at least initially). Capital, in Cleveland, is creating worker co-ops to serve it, but doesn’t really adopt the concept of the sovereignty of labor or the subordinate nature of capital. This might end up being a revolutionary act and greatly aid the development of large scale co-operatives, or it might be a wonderful act of charity that really can’t be replicated (and subject to the goodwill of the benefactors). The real test of this project will come when the primary financiers step aside and allow the workers complete control over their destiny.

How Do We Move Forward?

We need to create a set of best practices for worker co-operatives regardless of their industry, size, and structure. Certainly, the CICOPA Declaration on Worker Co-operatives can provide a lot of guidance in this effort. Worker Co-op Best Practices need to be aimed at diffusing the control and power of elite groups within the organization as well as preventing cliques and informal processes from overcoming the democracy of the organization. This can and should be a role for the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives or its “project” the Democracy at Work Institute.

We need to recognize that few workers come to our co-operatives with the illumination of the co-operative movement. We need to create the means for them to understand and develop. We need to follow Arizmendiaretta’s belief that our movement is an educational movement with an economic basis. We can’t simply teach people how to read a balance sheet or write a cash-flow statement and think that we are done. We need to teach critical thinking an analysis. We need to develop a work force where every member has the knowledge and intellectual skill to engage as a fully vested member of the co-operative.

This means working to overcome our culture of treating people and labor as mere machinations of the marketplace. We need to find a way to develop a new path through our co-operatives that provides a real answer to neo-liberalism. If we only try to democratize capitalism, then we really fail. We can only be a parody of our capitalist competitors: children playing dress-up as opposed to engaging as a true adult and providing a counter-weight, a true Third Road to Socialism and Capitalism.

To overcome our Agency dilemma and develop a true Distributist society, we will need to challenge our institutions and our co-operatives to step forward, to be leaders of the labor movement. My next post will discuss the idea of how to do that and creating a neo-syndicalist movement to counter the neo-liberals.

References:

Kasmir, Sharyn The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town, State of University of New York Press, Albany, 1996

Matthews, Race Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society (Alternatives to the Market and the State), Comerford and Miller and Pluto Press. Syndney and London. 1999

September 20, 2010

Roadblocks on the Path to Mondragon: The Theft of Labor

Filed under: Society,Worker Rights — Tags: , , , , — John McNamara @ 8:00 am

The three English countries (UK, Canada, and the United States) have, at their core, a culture that promotes and accommodates the theft of labor in a way that simply didn’t exist in Euskera (The Basque Country). Really, it is a problem for all of North and South America, but for this discussion, I will limit to North America; however, the effects of slavery culture and US imperialism have certainly caused its share of problems in worker development in the south as well.

The most obvious example of this theft was the slave trade and US slavery that was ended with the Civil War. The United States economy and society was built on slavery and the white form of it: indentured servitude. All of English society benefited from this theft of labor). In fact, this can be said for the entire Americas as all of its modern nations were based on the slave trade. In Paraguay, they even call their currency the Guarni (the name of the indigenous peoples who served as slaves).

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic, has an excellent blog post on this subject called The Big Machine. Go read it and then come back. . I’ll wait. While Coates comments on race relatons, my focus is one economic class.

With the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, the theft of labor became a matter of principle. David Ricardo, an 18th century economist, even argued for The Iron Law of Wages which suggested that it was part of a natural economic order that workers only earn enough to sustain them to continue to labor. It was this point when the value of work was divorced from humanity and made to be simply another marketplace. Of course, as in most of the propaganda regarding “free markets”, it was a rigged system in favor of those who held capital. In the UK, workers who attempted to unionize or organize for better wages were deported or jailed. In the United States, they were murdered and blacklisted. Even Canada has its history of shooting and jailing workers.  Capital, in the English speaking north, has always trumped labor.

It would be nice to think that our culture of subsidizing our society through free labor was a quaint artifice of the past. However, it isn’t. Every summer, college students are expected to work for free (to better their future prospects). In the taxi industry workers are deemed “independent contractors” and expected to pay for the ability to work (NYC cab drivers often average only about $30 a day through this system). Of course, in college and professional sports, millions are made off of the labor of the athletes. Only a small percentage (the superstars) ever sees a share of that profit and in the college, the system takes extreme steps to ensure that the player doesn’t see a dime. A friend of mine who did legal work for migrant farm workers has dozens of tales of wage theft and outright chattel slavery in Ohio during the 80′s and 90′s.

This idea is so embedded in our culture that even the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives uses the apprentice/internship model for its Democracy at Work Network of peer advisors.

I don’t want to say that all volunteerism is wrong. Don José famously refused any compensation for his role as “advisor” to the Mondragon co-opeative. The workers even had to steal his bicycle so that they could justify buying him a new one that was motorized! Volunteerism has its place in truly fair and cooperative society, but in our society, we need to understand the fine line between volunteerism and exploitation. (Dr. Laurie Mook has a great book–What Counts? Social Accounting for Non-Profits and Cooperatives–on how to quantify volunteer hours with an expanded value statement that every coop should use).

The key point: The devaluation of labor in the US makes it a lot harder for the distributist model to take hold. Our culture establishes a base of distrust between the worker and the organization that uses their labor. It creates an environment where workers express solidarity with each other by enabling them to “get one over” on the machine. We can create worker cooperatives, but to change the culture of the workers from the asymmetrical survival strategies that they have spent a lifetime learning requires more than simply writing some by-laws.

We need accountability structures because we have a society based on theft. The original theft is from the worker who can then justify behavior as a means of fighting for their rights. We can’t really divorce ourselves from that culture without taking some extraordinary steps or developing our cooperatives from a different paradigm and working to only accept workers who have achieved that level of understanding (this might be why Cheeseboard and Rainbow Grocery can operate as they do). In the US, we had a strong labor movement until the neo-liberals under Reagan went on the attack. While they destroyed private sector unions, what replaced it was an Intifada of assymetrical class war that involves slacking, cigarette breaks, and Facebook. I’ve read some estimates where close to 25% to 30% of the work week (or white collar workers) is spent doing non-work things (chatting, smoking, web surfing, etc). On the other hand, blue collar workers at the lowest end are expected to wear diapers to work so as to keep the line moving. It is really a messed up work culture.

A Long Term View

As I will be writing over this week, we need to take a long-term view. We need to keep in mind that Mondragon was not created overnight. It started with the creation of a poorly funded school. Arizmendiaretta spent a dozen years educating students who then went to University. They then took jobs with the large employers and finally returned to Mondragon to establish their own company based on the values that they learned at their Priest’s school. Arizmendiaretta famously argued that theirs was an educational movement with an economic structure, not the other way around.

If we want to create something that looks like Mondragon and makes us feel good, we need to do more that simply try to model Mondragon. We need to first develop a legitamate belief in the value of humans and the value of work—not the false Work Ethic along the lines of Ragged Dick and the myth perpetrated by Horatio Alger that lures people into supporting capital with false promises of becoming rich themselves. We need a humanist ethic—one that has already been written down by the International Co-operative Alliance and Mondragon. We might even need to create a different pathway to a Distributist society. While the Spanish (and even the Maritimes) had their common religion and inspired priests to guide the people, we don’t. To create a culture that honors work, we need to create a means of honoring the human doing the work. Fortunately, there is already a model for that as well: syndicalism.

September 19, 2010

Mondragon in America?

Filed under: Worker Rights — Tags: , , , — John McNamara @ 11:48 am

Can Mondragon Really Happen Here?

The Great Recession has brought renewed interest in worker cooperatives in the United States. It has also generated a lot of interest in Mondragon as an example of how to move worker coops beyond small shops and into the big time. The number of people who tour Mondragon is staggering. It has increased to a level where they need to manage the traffic flow. People come away very impressed with what they created but is it something that can really be replicated over here? The people in Cleveland are giving it a go and even Mondragon has made an agreement with the US Steelworkers to try and create something along the Mondragon model in the US. However, I think that whatever industrial coop base arises in the US will need to look beyond Mondragon. As I will discuss over the next couple of posts, we may even need a renewed period of syndicalism to achieve the distributist vision of Arizmendiaretta.

I bring this up for three reasons:

1)    I just finished Jobs of Our Own by Race Matthews who calls for a new distributism movement and cites Mondragon of the example in the world of how a distributist economy/society would work. Of course, Matthews also takes about how other cooperative models fall into the Rochdale cul-de-sac and the Agency Dilemma while also pointing out that even Mondragon has some Agency issues of their own.

2)    My friend and colleague, Rebecca Kemble recently toured Mondragon. She made a very quick post on Facebook with the following description:

“Today our group of cynical, competitive Americans walked into the Star Trek episode, “Errand of Mercy,” our Basque hosts cleverly disguised as Organians, patiently waiting for us to “get it.”  What other explanation for a society with a long history of oppression and violence in which, of the 33,000 members in their worker coops, only 3 people have been fired in 50 years, nobody has left except to retire, and the fact that they will not produce anything that will be used in military or nuclear equipment is so “self-evident” (their words) that it they hardly dignify the question with discussion and they haven’t bothered to write it down in policy anywhere?  Members of our group keep asking questions about rules, laws, accountability structures, and how they punish and control individuals and co-ops that don’t fall into line with expectations.  Mondragonians look at us as if we’re 5 years olds who haven’t learned the first thing about getting along with other people, dialogue, respect or trust.  They are speaking a language that even the most enlightened and progressive folk in our group find it difficult to grasp, because the society in which we live is so heavily determined by class, race and gender inequity, and our government and business structures are so corrupt, driven as they are by the demands of capital.  We have a loooooooooong way to go in the worker co-op movement in the US to attain anything like the integrity, openness and honesty that pertain in the Mondragon Cooperatives.

3)    The Board of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives will be meeting at their annual retreat this week to discus the big ideas facing our movement in the US.

Today, I want to focus on one of the key differences between Mondragon and the world. I will also discuss the role of Agency in the United States (especially when it comes to community development and anti-poverty efforts) and finally discuss how we might start building a distributist society through a combination of distributist and syndicalist efforts. I invite people to jump into this conversation. Please post a comment and if your comment goes more than a couple of hundred words, then please register and ask me to assign you contributor status.

Basque Exceptionalism

It is easy to fall in love with Mondragon. It can also be easy to criticize them for not living up to the ideals of US intellectuals. But to answer the question, “Can we create Mondragon in the United States?” we need to consider some to the historical discussion. The first consideration responds to Rebecca’s comments by discussing the concept of Basque exceptionalsim.

The Basque people populate six provinces (two in France and four in Spain) in the Pyrenees mountain chain. They have lived there almost forever. This culture existed prior to the indo-Europeans. Some have even suggested that they are the fabled “Thirteenth Tribe of Israel”. The name for their people Euskerra simply means those who speak Basque. The Basque historically met under a tree in Guernica as the seat of their government. One of their primary goals in life has been to be left to govern themselves. This has been difficult due to their occupying a major trade route from Africa through the Iberian Peninsula and into northern Europe. In fact, as noted shipbuilders and sailors, the Spanish Armada set sail from Bilbao and it is likely given that I am “Black Irish” on my father’s side, that part of my lineage is from a Basque sailor rescued from the sea in 1585! Abutting the Basque is the medittereanean port of Barcelona, which had and still has a rich and vibrant history of anarchism and promoting the rights of the worker. This would not have been lost on the Basque especially during the civil war.

The point of all of this is that Mondragon is a Basque organization whose mission is to create and maintain jobs for the Basque. The worker-members share a common culture based on their historic ideal of self-governance and solidarity as well as a common religion (Catholicism). A religion that, despite its failings,  has a strong commitment (at least in their teachings) to education, the value of human life, and the value of work. The Basque also have a strong commitment to education. The Jesuit Order was founded by the Basque general turned priest Ignatius Loyola—who took his vows at the church overlooking Oñati just south of Arrasate (Mondragon). It was the Jesuits who fought against slave holders in South America seeking, instead, to create farmer collectives among the Guarni and thereby save their souls. The movie, The Mission, uses this struggle for worker and human rights as the backdrop for its story.

Finally, the role of Franco’s fascism and his Phalange Party cannot be dismissed. Had Franco lost the Spanish Civil War, Don José María Arizmendiaretta likely would have been assigned to Bilbao instead of Mondragon. A more liberal government might have created educational opportunities for the children of the working class and the specific conditions that gave rise to the FAGOR plant may never have materialized. Even so, by the time that Mondragon had formed, the economic vitalisty of the Phalange had already begun to wane. The Communists had re-grouped in the south and the Anarchists had reorganized in Barcelona. Franco simply had too many distractions to worry about a crazy priest and a group of people that could easily be called “entrepreneurs.”

We cannot dismiss the exceptional role that the Basque region and Spanish history played in the creation of Mondragon.

While the Basque certainly had some unique things going for them, we must also recognize the difficulties facing us in the United States when it comes to worker cooperatives. While the Basque live in a culture that goes back thousands of years and value the Basque community, the English speaking countries have a very different culture especially in how it relates to the value of humans and their work.  While, like the Federation in Star Trek, we may think that we have it all figured out, we need to take a hard look at our own culture to see why creating something like Mondragon will be such a struggle.

The next post will talk about how US culture (and perhaps that of the Americas as well) has created significant barriers to creating a workplace like Mondragon.

November 27, 2006

More on Food Coops

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — John McNamara @ 7:06 pm

One of the major critics of Co-operative grocery stores on The Daily Page in Madison goes by the name of “Dogmeat”. Here is his decision-making process for grocery shopping (he had been accused of being a plant for Whole Foods):

“I’ve been to Whole Foods a grand total of 4 times. I can’t afford to shop there. That’s my only reason for not shopping there, unlike some who boycott Whole Foods because its non-union. I actually prefer to shop at places that are non-union. If a union muscles its way in the door, that means the company wasn’t doing the right thing in the first place. And of course, once a union is in place its number one priority is to protect the power of the union, not the good workers or the companies viability. I really like going to places where bad employees can be fired.”

What more is there to say? Should the co-operative movement really listen to critics who want to exploit workers? Is cheap food the only real goal and screw the community that raised it? As I mentioned in a previous post, the incidence of cancer and the rise of chemical farming and foods are not exclusive of each other. Cheap foods with chemically produced flavors may impress “foodies” but they really don’t do anything for society.

Still, the consumer co-operatives in this country need to get a handle on organics. They need to start develop co-operative farms and systems. Working people can’t afford good food anymore. We really can’t afford to pay $6.89 for 9 oranges. Granted, they are good oranges, last year at this time, they were $3.49. Right now, the organic farming community is planting the seeds for its demise. If only rich people can afford the food, then working people will abandon the co-ops that sell it. In the end, the wealthy like deals just like everyone else. When Wal-Mart develops factory organic farming, they will undercut the co-operative stores. What will be the co-operative difference then?

We need to be the movement that is larger than our companies. Co-operatives need to work together and with their community. Ultimately, they need to provide value–that means quality at affordable prices, with educated, informed and well-trained staff and members. We need to pool our resources. In the US, the co-ops are splintered and seperated by large distances, they need to start building a mass of co-operative stores and re-build the Wholesale Cooperative structure that fell apart in the 1990′s. We can’t stick our noses up and tell people that they should suck up 70¢ oranges. We need to create a strategy that gets the deals into the consumer and worker’s hands without exploiting people. It doesn’t sound easy, but when a capitalist grocery store can undercut a cooperative grocery on a cooperatively produced product, there is something seriously wrong with the movement.

We need to start living the principle of cooperation among co-operatives.

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