Alternative Work Organizations

There is a shared view among business people that it is common sense to organize work in a hierarchical, management-led way. Notwithstanding fashionable managerial programmes about employee participation and involvement (which in the best of cases collapse like sandcastles in the storm of economic crises), within capitalism, ‘management has the right to manage’. That somebody needs to be empowered in the interests of the business to make quick decisions and impose the execution of these on working people is a principle hardly contested and indeed commonly accepted by workers themselves as the normal state of affairs. This acceptance is further reinforced by a system of work organized on the basis of a separation between planning and execution that concentrates knowledge (and consequently decision-making power) in the hands of a few. This conception about the accepted, effective and thus ‘natural’ way of organizing work in our societies is so embedded in the way we live that to think about a different, more democratic, equalitarian, less hierarchical and authoritarian way of organizing work is at best treated as a utopia. Thus, in building a convincing argument about alternatives, the first point to make is about the pervasiveness of dominant social relations in shaping the organization of work. This necessarily implies a theoretical effort to criticize the existing organization of work before practical alternatives can be envisaged.

In 1971, following government withdrawal of financial support for the industry, shop stewards announced that they had taken over control of the gatehouses at the four Upper Clyde Shipyards in Glasgow, initiating a work-in. The work-in, as the British Cabinet at the time feared (CM-71, 12 October 1971), served as a catalyst for a wave of workplace occupations – work-ins and sit-ins – by UK workers (Coates, 1981; Sherry 2010). The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) proved the inspiration for more than 2601 further occupations in the following decade, used by workers against the impact of capital restructuring. This capital restructuring, as well as bringing redundancy and insecurity to the labour market, was to represent a major shift in hegemony which saw the decline of traditional industry – and traditional labour organization – alongside the emergence of a more assertive market ideology of neo-liberalism, replacing the idea of a Keynesian economic management of a mixed economy (e.g. Gamble, 1988, 2009). The focus of this chapter will be these occupations staged by workers in reaction and resistance to closures and redundancies; the impact on them of capital restructuring; and particularly the alternative they began to pose, in workers’ control and alternative plans, to the increasingly neo-liberal ideology of the restructuring. Instead of the intensified commodification and the increased subordination to the exigencies of the market, this alternative began to articulate an economy based around social utility.

This chapter addresses the nature and limits of an alternative model of work organization in a UK coal mine. It charts the history and progress of the Tower Colliery coal mine in South Wales as an historic form of industrial democracy – the worker-owned producer cooperative – across its 13-year existence as a productive mine under the ownership and direct control of its workers. It further explores the argument that workers’ cooperatives are significantly different to typical work organizations, in that they are social movements, and that research into their experience can make a relevant contribution to the discourses of work and the sociology of social movements.

The Mondragon Cooperative Experience (MCE) is a general but recognized term that refers to the totality of contexts surrounding the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country, Spain. The centrepiece of that movement and institution is the Mondragon Corporation (hereafter called simply Mondragon) – a large, diverse conglomerate of cooperatives federated into a cooperative group. There are 120 cooperatives in total, the majority of which are medium sized, representing four sectors: finance (banking and insurance); industry (including automotive, machine tools, appliances and electronics); distribution; and knowledge (including primary, secondary and tertiary education, plus 12 technical schools). Mondragon is currently the largest private firm in the Basque Country, in terms of both employees and sales, and the seventh largest private firm in Spain. The headquarters of the group, and indeed the seat of cooperative movement in the Basque Country, is the small city of Mondragón (in Spanish) or Arrasate in Euskara, the Basque language.

The social transformation process currently taking place in Venezuela is radical: it has declared overall human development as its main goal, and it recognizes that people’s experience of democratic practices is crucial to attain such a goal. These ideas appear in the Venezuelan Constitution (Article 62), as well as in the discourse of government officials and institutions. They are reflected – although not without contradictions and shortcomings (with regard to cooperatives see Piñeiro, 2009) – in state policies that promote participatory democracy, not just in the political sphere but also in economic, cultural and educational realms.

Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERTs) began to emerge in the early 1990s. They became consolidated in the late 1990s to early 2000s as more and more smallandmedium- sized enterprises (SMEs) began to fail or declare bankruptcy as a result of the country’s sharp neo-liberal turn. Traditional union tactics were unable to address workers’ needs, and an impotent state was on the defensive as social, economic and political crises rendered it incapable of responding to soaring immiseration and business failure. In this climate, some workers took matters into their own hands by occupying and reopening failing or failed firms, usually as workers’ cooperatives. By late 2009, almost 9400 workers were self-managing their working lives in over 200 ERTs across Argentina’s urban economy, in sectors as diverse as printing and publishing, metallurgy, foodstuffs, waste management, construction, textiles, shipbuilding, tourism and health provision (Ruggeri, 2010: 7).

Cooperatives as a form of economic organization represent one of the main alternatives to shareholder-based capitalism. There are over 1 billion members of cooperatives worldwide, and they employ more than 100 million women and men – 20 per cent more than multinational enterprises (International Cooperative Alliance, ICA, 2011). The ICA (2011) defines a cooperative as ‘an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise’. The United Nations estimated in 1994 that the livelihood of nearly 3 billion people was supported by cooperative enterprise, underlining their significant economic and social roles in their communities. It is a testimony to their economic and social significance that the International Labour Organization has declared 2012 to be the International Year of Cooperatives.

Nairobi1 is one of the most unequal cities in the world. It has been described as ‘a paradox’ (Dafe, 2009: 5), ‘a city under constant de(re)composition’ (Katumanga, 2005: 518), and a place where ‘the North and the South live a few yards from each other’ (Floris, 2006: 19). Looking at Kenya’s capital through Google maps or other satellite reconnaissance gives us a clear idea of the city’s disparities. The western high ground – the old colonial settlements – consists of affluent residential estates of detached houses with green gardens, while the eastern side appears as a vast stretch of overcrowded shanty houses. The city has ‘about 60% of its population currently living in informal settlements but occupying only 5% of the residential area’ (Dafe, 2009: 16). Urban density varies enormously among the 360 inhabitants per square kilometre of Karen estate, and the 80,000 inhabitants of some parts of Kibera – a density comparable to cattle free lots (Davis, 2006: 95).