Roses bloom where bread is broken.

Chapter 7. Part II. Organising for ownership strategies - incubating new enterprises.

"The Squated Autonmous Culture Center Hanau * Squat Politics *" by Sterneck is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

A revitalised union movement capable of meaningfully countering capital’s authority must undermine the relation of managerial direction from different directions simultaneously . Organising for ownership is one such way, and it will require structural changes within unions to be a meaningful and effective strategy. I will return to these changes in a later post but first I will delve into what this practice of organising looks like.

I can think of three ways of organising to build up the total number of workers in LMFs (labour-managed firms). There is the incubation of new LMFs, the expansion of existing LMFs, and the transition of existing enterprises over to an LMF model. There is, in practice, differing combinations and overlaps of these three strategies.

This post will look at the work of organising for the incubation of new enterprises. Note this not incubating the new enterprise itself but the organising work of building up an environment where workers both want to and can meaningfully establish their own democratic workplaces.

Incubating new enterprises

An LMF network in the private sector can be a base that no market-oriented government could attack without fatally wounding the structures necessary to support private business itself. This is a long play, however, that can only work where there are shorter term measures to triage worker health through the overlapping crises of capitalism.

Incubating new enterprises would most not reach the volume of new members and worker owners that could be reached through contract fights that expand some of the existing enterprises that I will detail in the transition phase. Nonetheless, the relatively small amount of worker-owners incubation reaches is offset by the educational and strategic value such examples play in assisting workers taking control of their own lives.

This goes beyond a prefiguration of socialist relations of production within capitalism. Incubating new LMFs can contribute to the infrastructure of organised class struggle as well as raising expectations.

For example, small cooperatives in hospitality particularly cafes, bars, restaurants and bakeries might not amount to much on their own but collectively are sites that can transform the character of a community. Hospitality has relatively low barriers to entry. In addition, there is such a high turnover in this sector that opportunities will be readily available. More frequent transition opportunities by themselves, however, are not what makes this a strategic site for worker ownership.

Rather, what makes this strategy is that examples of successful worker ownership are more within the influence of the movement, and these small examples can have a disproportionately large impact on renewing labour movement confidence. Hospitality workers within venues can anchor social relations, and it is the deepening and widening of such relations that powers the solidarity wedge.

Three factors make the success of LMFs of this nature more within the movement’s influence. First, hospitality establishments can be located within or near union or NGO offices or where there are large volumes of supportive workers or students. This means that already organised groups of people can help transform an otherwise marginal hospitality enterprise into a well-frequented establishment. Second, these establishments are of a scale where a manageable volume of volunteer labour whether through working bees, graphic design, business advice or help with bookkeeping can have a considerable impact on the viability of the LMF going forward. Third, worker ownership provides an opportunity for talented and experienced hospitality workers to keep more of the proceeds of their labour, innovate and generally have a better quality of life. A cooperative transition of this sort would attract skilled workers who could be instrumental in driving up an establishment’s quality.

Regardless of these potential success factors, it remains the outsized impact of otherwise small hospitality LMFs in renewing the union movement which is the source of its real strategic value. Unions thrive in an environment where collectives and communities already exist. Building physical sites where relations organically form between workers make the task of organising easier. In these contexts, organisers can focus on building trust with key people in strategic communities.

In an atomised society, however, groups are smaller and organising becomes more difficult. One must organise workers one by one or in much smaller disconnected groupings. The task then becomes one of developing groups and building leadership therein.

History shows, however, that communities can form around bars, pubs and cafes. Pubs were an important site of trade union organising in Britain and Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These were places where communities of workers gathered to share the pain of working life. Likewise, coffeehouses were sites of political unrest and organising in the Enlightenment period. Both pubs and coffeehouses were places where groups of people got together to share lived experiences, draw out commonalities and form groups on that basis.

Building the 21st century version of such physical spaces provides a platform from which to propel further worker organising. Roses bloom where bread is broken.

Using bread to grow roses

Today as sites of socialisation have become increasingly corporatised the opportunities for group formation have been checked. RSLs are shutting down around suburbs and small towns. Pubs are more often full of people not talking to each other while they sit on poker machines. One must pay for meeting rooms whether it is in libraries or the back of pubs. Overall, the rise of social isolation in Australia over the last fifteen to twenty years shows that conditions are generally hostile towards group formation. The human need to nurture in person and social relationships is going more and more unfulfilled.

A network of hospitality LMFs can work as an institutional support for group formation, and broader union organising. This works through a number of avenues. The establishments themselves can work as a space for group formation through socialising.

A worker cooperative bar would be a friendly space for worker education that can happen outside classroom-based learning for those workers who cannot otherwise access trade union training leave. Each week for an hour or two unionists might gather to learn about the history of strikes, worker ownership or share experiences of organising their co-workers.

A cooperative cafe and bakery might be a space for community members and workers to come together for meetings or to plan how to set up a cooperative child care in their neighbourhood. The opening up of one collective space can provide a window through which other collectives and collective spaces may in turn be opened up. In addition, in a situation where many workers have either less and less time because they are overworked, or less and less money through the experience of underemployment, spaces where workers can socialise at an accessible cost are important. Organising, moreover, in a situation where people are having fun leads to less burn out and is more sustainable over the longer term.

In hospitality cooperative spaces, worker education can also occur on a more passive level. Imagine the impact on worker confidence where some of the rituals of daily life could occur in a cafe where a prominent sign hangs on the wall that says, “proudly worker owned and run”. That one modest sign, as thousands of people walk past the cafe each day or hundreds stop by to order a coffee, both educates and raises expectations. The simple sign is a way of broadcasting to the community around the cafe that another, more democratic, way of ordering society is possible. The positive impact little markers like one sign can have on everyday working-class culture and broader industrial confidence is incalculable. This is especially compounded when one considers that the hospitality industry sits at the end of the highly strategic food supply-chain, and that worker cooperatives can be set up in or around critically important sites for worker organising in the health and education sectors.

All of this, however, is dependent on having a sufficient layer of educated unionists amongst hospitality workers, who both understand and strongly support the LMF sector. Trade union density amongst hospitality staff is notoriously low. As a result wage theft, insecure and uneven work, harassment and bullying are rampant in the hospitality industry.

Further, the highly decentralised and fragmented nature of hospitality, with many employers coming and going on a regular basis, also makes it more difficult to hold bosses accountable outside of a comprehensive class-based organising strategy. This reality makes it simultaneously more difficult to build the necessary number of educated hospitality unionists and raises the stakes on what a hospitality worker can gain, in terms of their quality of life, from becoming a worker-owner. Incubating a small number of LMFs in the hospitality sector, itself depends on an intentional commitment to cultivating a robust union culture within the sector.

Organising for ownership opens up relatively marginal spaces when it comes to economic leverage. Such spaces can be claimed, held and then used to provide a space from which other forms of organising can occur that builds industrial power in sectors such as logistics, healthcare and education or in particular working class communities. Economic leverage and social relations work to intersecting but differing logics. One of the advantages of the solidarity wedge is that power (as grounded in relations of cooperation) can rapidly flow from one point to the next in a way which capitalists find hard to detect, predict and contain.

A small number of worker-owners in the hospitality sector can as a fulcrum in organising a larger mass of workers in a given city through opening up the space and time for workers to form connections and learn what they might achieve together. This opens larger possibilities for both industrial organising and wider organising for ownership struggles.

This post is the second post of chapter seven which is the second chapter in part three of the overall project. Part Three is Solidarity Beyond Wage and takes a look at the possibilities of solidarity beyond wage labour within the capitalist system. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.