The Cooperative Movement is on the Rise

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: The System!

But hope, as some famous poet once said, springs eternal. Two-thousand-and-twelve has been declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC), which has been “positive for the [cooperative] sector” in Canada, where the movement has really begun to “[wake] up,” said Corcoran.

THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT IN ARGENTINA

Since 1995, the owners of the Brukman Suit Factory in Argentina had begun to slash salaries unscrupulously, and eventually ended up firing about half of their labour force. By 2001, with business through the ground, they just decided to abandon the factory and leave the workers unpaid.

Seeing joblessness as an opportunity to band together, a group of 58 seamstresses bravely decided to walk into their factory and, like God did unto Adam, breathed life back into it. As they went along, the seamstresses also grasped how to perform administrative, accounting and managerial duties of a company.

In order to tell this and many other similarly heroic stories that were bourgeoning in the aftermath of the economic collapse in Argentina at the turn of the century, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis released La Toma (The Take) in 2004. The movie follows a group of Argentinian workers trying to legally obtain their abandoned factory at the same time that it depicts the rise of the Recovered Factory Movement in that country. Their story is not dissimilar to what many countries in Latin America and others around the world associated with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have had to muddle through.

At the cusp of the new millennium, as Argentinian President Carlos Menem welcomed the new year with a lavish party and champagne – the same political thug who just before the 2003 re-elections would be on House Arrest on Corruption Charges – IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus lauded that Argentina was indeed in a way to enter the “new century in a very, very solid basis.”

However, outside of those lavish parties, while the glasses still clinked, the country was slipping below the poverty line due to “business friendly” policies that would come to be known as “El Modelo,” characterized by massive downsizing, corporate hand-outs and the sale of public assets to private companies.

As rumours of an economic bust due to corporate failures spread like wildfire in the troubled nation, the currency began to drop quickly. Quite literally overnight, the wealthiest took out $40 billion dollars’ worth of Argentinian pesos out of banks in huge armoured trucks to send to offshore bank-accounts. Thrown into a grand panic, the government froze all accounts, in effect locking the working-class out of their savings while allowing the rich and the factory owners to hoist their money offshore. The people were left with nothing but an inept government, a crumbling economy and closed factories, which unleashed an epidemic of unemployment.

Suddenly, Argentina, one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America, plunged into poverty. But as tradition has it in Latin America, the only logical response to extreme poverty was to PROTEST!

Millions of people of all ages and backgrounds poured onto the streets with the force of a tsunami, all in angry solidarity over the government’s support of the counteractive IMF policies. In utter political and economic disarray, Argentina ended up declaring the “largest sovereign-debt default in world history” in 2002, a symbol, the movie says, of the widespread rejection by the people of the entire economic model itself, and not just of one politician or policy. Though years later, it’s been argued that that sentiment is exactly what the Occupy Movement is currently expressing.

A MORE PERSONAL MODEL FOR BUSINESS

Working class people exist in huge numbers in the Global North – people that have been screwed by management one way or another.

The purpose of the International Year for Cooperatives is to bring to the forefront something that has been working quietly and efficiently for longer than people know. Indeed, the cooperative business model has time and time again presented both economic and social advantages to those societies that have adopted it.

“On a very basic level,” Earle said, “co-ops give people an opportunity to be the protagonist in their own jobs, in their own life-stories.” Corcoran agrees, saying that “one of the reasons why co-ops are so powerful is [precisely] because people spend so much more of their lives and energy and focus as workers rather than as consumers, making work a really big part of their lives.”

When you join a co-operative, the main attraction is its democratic nature. Worker-cooperatives like Big Carrot, for instance, where they have something like 70 staff members, Corcoran explained, “have something like 50 or 60 worker-owners.”

What this means is that the people that work at the store also own it: “the principle that the members in control are the same member-group that shares the profits and that same member-group that decides on who the board members are,” Corcoran said.

General meetings for all members are periodically held at the discretion of each cooperative and it is at these meetings where they decide on all decisions based on a one-member-one-vote principle. The main principle by which cooperatives abide is solidarity and cooperation, both internally and externally, so when it comes to wages, cooperatives provide every employee with sufficient pay to live a decent life.