Are Co-ops the Answer?
Around the world, people are democratizing the workplace.
Long before the Occupy movement sparked renewed protest of rising inequality, another global movement was quietly engaged in building a more democratic economy. From coffee growers in Kenya seeking a fair market price to worker-owned green businesses reviving the American Rust Belt, cooperatives are helping to spur a reinvention of work in a period of worldwide recession.
Globally, an estimated 1 billion people are members of cooperatives, and many believe that the scope of worker- and member-owned enterprises across the world represents a revolution already in the making. With combined earnings rivaling Canada’s GDP, co-ops could be the fastest-growing business model by the end of the decade. To promote awareness of their potential, the United Nations has declared 2012 the “International Year of Cooperatives.” Cooperative organizers, though they have generally worked on a separate track from protest movements, have called on Occupy and other mass movements to help build “an economy worth occupying.”
“It was really serendipitous that the ‘Year of Cooperatives’ happened at the same time as the Occupy movement,” says Cheyenna Weber of SolidarityNYC, a group that links social movements with “solidarity economy” initiatives. “There’s so much attention to this because people are intimately aware that the economic crisis is not going away on its own … they’re starting to get serious about doing it themselves.”
But do the swelling numbers of cooperative businesses constitute a force capable of transforming the broader economy? Governmental support for co-ops, though increasing at the behest of the U.N., is based on the principle that co-ops can create employment as part of a mixed economy, most often in sectors where capital has already retreated. And though most co-ops follow a set of seven principles – among them open membership, autonomy and concern for community – there are significant differences in how directly members or workers participate in decision-making and how explicitly they engage with broader economic justice movements.
When you are wealthy and successful, you have a choice. You can believe your success stems from luck and privilege, or you can believe it stems from hard work. Very few people like to view their success as a matter of luck. And so, perhaps understandably, most people on Wall Street believe they have earned their jobs, and the money that follows.
While there are many on Wall Street who come from wealthy backgrounds, there are also many people from very humble backgrounds. In my experience, it is often those who do not come from privilege who are the system’s fiercest defenders.
When I was a summer intern, we met with various executives who’d tell us about their careers and pitch us on the firm. The aim was to sell the firm to everyone, even though only a few of us would ultimately be offered full-time positions at the firm. It had an element of redundancy to it, since we were clearly already interested in the firm, or we wouldn’t be there at all. The effect of these talks, then, was to make a competitive situation even more competitive. Welcome to Wall Street. One executive described the firm as a “Golden Springboard.” If we began our careers there, his reasoning went, there wasn’t anywhere we couldn’t go. The executive was right. Background becomes irrelevant once you have “made it” to Wall Street. Once you’ve gotten in the door, you’re one of “us.”
Once hired, the cultural indoctrination begins in earnest, especially for those recent grads who begin their careers in “analyst training programs.” These programs are exclusively for college and graduate students, are often several months long, and are custom-tailored to the department you’ll ultimately join. The Sales & Trading analyst program is more competitive than, say, the Technology training program. And while most of the training is job-specific, there is also an air of finishing school. A trader friend of mine was instructed not only in the mathematics of the financial markets, but also in wine tasting and golf. You are trained, but also you are groomed.
The grooming is not all fun and games and country clubs. Most of the message revolves around how hard everyone works, and how hard you are expected to work in turn. Wall Street views its own work ethic as legendary. Sixty-hour weeks are standard. An ex-boss of mine used to brag that for one six-year stretch he never took a sick day or a vacation. The streak ended when he contracted strep throat, refused to go to the doctor, and eventually had to be hospitalized (at least so he claimed).
While not everyone was as manic as my boss (Wall Street has more than its fair share of laziness and incompetence), even those who feel less committed to the job still buy into a concept of “face time.” It’s not right to leave your desk before a certain time. An ex-colleague of mine used to ask anyone who’d pass by his cubicle before 7pm on their way out the door, “Oh, half day today?”
This dueling masochism/machismo brings with it a tremendous superiority complex. People on Wall Street truly believe they work harder than anyone else. When confronted with the stark reality of, for example, a single mom working two jobs, the response is usually some variant of, “Well, if they’d only worked as hard as I did in school …”
But the key to truly understanding superiority on Wall Street is by looking at how it’s measured: with cold, hard numbers. Numbers can be amplified by honest work, but they can also be amplified by betrayal, manipulation, and cheating. And when everything is a cold cost-benefit analysis, why wouldn’t you break regulations—provided you knew the profits you stood to make would dwarf the fines you would pay should you get caught?
The Public Versus Publishers: How Scholars and Activists are Occupying the Library
Two recent events have dramatized the cost of privatization and offered paths of resistance. The People’s Library sprang up very quickly after protesters began to occupy Zuccotti Park. According to Mandy Henk, an academic librarian who joined the movement, the People’s Library represented “the idea of a Commons, of shared resources, of equal access—access mediated not by a market, but granted as a fundamental right that all people share by virtue of being part of the human family.” Using social media tools, the library gathered donated books, cataloged them, and scheduled cultural events. They made decisions by consensus and crafted a non-bureaucratic lending policy: “these books belong to everyone, so we trust everyone to do what they think is most effective with them. If you think you could put a book to good use long-term, by all means keep it. If you think others might benefit from it more after you’ve finished, we strongly encourage returns.”
Early on November 15th, the library was seized by police and city workers and most of the books were destroyed. Librarians of the People’s Library continue to meet and publish news of Occupy libraries online. Currently, they are sending to Tucson donated copies of books about Mexican-American history and culture banned by the school district there. Occupiers are also publishing their own texts – just as some public libraries are responding to the commodification of culture by opening “maker” spaces for their community to publish their own books.
Meanwhile, a thoughtful post by Field medalist Timothy Gowers about why he is boycotting Elsevier seemed to strike a nerve among scholars who were worried about pending legislation designed to strengthen the hold commercial interests have on science and culture. As I write this, over 7,000 scholars have publicly stated they will not submit articles, review, or do editorial work for any of the over 2,500 journals published by the publishing giant. The Economist has called the Elsevier boycott “the Academic spring.”
Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library.
What Isn’t for Sale?
Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.
We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.
As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.
The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation—an era of market triumphalism. The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it continued into the 1990s with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.
Today, that faith is in question. The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals, and that we need to somehow reconnect the two. But it’s not obvious what this would mean, or how we should go about it.
Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed, which led to irresponsible risk-taking. The solution, according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on greater integrity and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives, and enact sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.
This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger was and is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t.
The Disappearing Virtual Library
The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry.Last week a website called “library.nu” disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free.
And not just any books—not romance novels or the latest best-sellers—but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities.
The texts ranged from so-called “orphan works” (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.
To the publishing industry, this event was a victory in the campaign to bring the unruly internet under some much-needed discipline. To many other people—namely the users of the site—it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees?
They are students and scholars, from every corner of the planet.
The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn. This is what our world should be filled with. This is what scholars work hard to create: a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship. The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning who wanted to know, argue, dispute, experiment and write just as those in the universities do.
Maybe they were students once, but went on to find jobs and found families. We made them in some cases—we gave them a four-year taste of the life of the mind before sending them on their way with unsupportable loans. In other cases, they made themselves, by hook or by crook.
So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates—the people who create and run such sites—think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before.
But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu—these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university—are legion.
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.
“Leave your pride and your personal life at the door,” the lady at the chamber of commerce says, if I want to last as an online warehouse worker.”
The culture is intense, an Amalgamated higher-up acknowledges at the beginning of our training. He’s speaking to us from a video, one of several videos—about company policies, sexual harassment, etc.—that we watch while we try to keep our eyes open. We don’t want to be so intense, the higher-up says. But our customers demand it. We are surrounded by signs that state our productivity goals. Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience. There is no room for inefficiencies. The gal conducting our training reminds us again that we cannot miss any days our first week. There are NO exceptions to this policy. She says to take Brian, for example, who’s here with us in training today. Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired. Having to start the application process over could cost a brand-new dad like Brian a couple of weeks’ worth of work and pay. Okay? Everybody turn around and look at Brian. Welcome back, Brian. Don’t end up like Brian.
“There’s no time off on Election Day. “What if I want to vote?” I ask a supervisor. “I think you should!” he says. “But if I leave I’ll get fired,” I say. To which he makes a sad face before saying, “Yeah.”
120% Work: The Paradox of Google’s Twenty Percent Time
Theories of workplace control typically have little to say about freedom. The workplace is often understood as a totalizing environment, saturated with obvious and subtle forms of coercion, so the struggle for freedom is best confined to realm of leisure, or more typically, left off the agenda entirely. Yet emergent neo-normative control theory posits that freedom is now the defining element of the contemporary workplace. Under neonormative control, firms encourage self-expression, embrace behaviors that would ordinarily be considered deviant, and permit employees a high degree of discretion over the structure and content of their labour (Fleming, 2009; Fleming and Sturdy, 2009; Cederström and Grassman, 2008). Companies like Google have created a work environment that resembles a playground more than a prison camp. But neo-normative theorists are quick to point out that this freedom is deceptive, for it operates as a cover for the intensification of exploitation, all while making employees believe they are truly free. In this essay, I offer a partial challenge to neo-normative theory by showing that workplace freedom has a tendency to extricate itself from the contractual social relation and reinvent itself in ways that suggest a more pure form of gift, almost in the sense of Derrida (1994). I conclude by arguing for what I call a strategy of amplification: The intentional misuse of freedom to generate more freedom.
The boundary between work and play is growing increasingly blurry under post-Fordism (see Kavanagh; Goggin, in this issue). Undeniably, the workday is being restructured in new ways that mimic the exigencies of the market. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Google Inc. which consistently ranks near the top of Fortune Magazine’s annual ‘Best Companies to Work For’ listing (Fortune, 2010), and has become the darling of the business press in part because of its unique approach to integrating ‘work’ and ‘play’. The centerpiece of the much-touted ‘Google model’ is a provision that allows its engineers to spend 20% of their workday on projects of their own choosing. Colloquially called ‘20 Percent Time’ (formally ‘Innovative Time Off’), this approach has won the accolades of management experts and popular media commentators. While the idea of 20 Percent Time is not new (the electronics and adhesives manufacturer 3M has had a similar program in place for decades), Google’s policy is the first to gain such widespread attention (3M, 2010).
20 Percent Time is only one component of a unique and often quixotic managerial philosophy some commentators have labeled ‘The Google Way’. In an interview for the trade publication Fast Company, Google VP of search products and user experiences Marissa Mayer lists nine ‘principles of innovation’ that guide Google’s management policies. While the majority center around Google’s openness and willingness to experiment (e.g. #2: Ideas Come from Everywhere; #4: Morph Projects, Don’t Kill Them), others emphasize the repressive aspect of workplace control – especially #8: Creativity Loves Constraints. On this point, Mayer explains, ‘This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box…’ (Salter, 2008) This reflects Google’s general approach toward innovation: Creativity is encouraged, but only within certain predetermined and fairly rigid confines.
This idea is reconfirmed in axiom #3: A License to Pursue Your Dreams. Describing the company’s 20% rule, Mayer says, ‘We let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they’ll build interesting things’. This is a loaded statement that merits some analysis. The two clauses in the sentence (‘we let…’; ‘we trust…’) explicitly frame 20 Percent Time as a kind of social contract (i.e. we allow employees a certain degree of freedom, but in return they are obligated to use it appropriately). Of course, the phrase ‘interesting things’ is deliberately vague, and Mayer does not specify the basis by which an idea might be judged interesting or uninteresting. So far from absolute freedom, Google grants its employees a provisional freedom which can apparently be recalled should their projects be deemed uninteresting. Managerial consultant Bernard Girard goes as far as to suggest employees experience this ‘freedom’ as a form of debt: ‘I owe something to the company because I’m given the free to invent and develop my own ideas’ (Girard, 2009: 67). Later in the same text, he notes, ‘what Google gives with one hand, it recovers with the other’, further highlighting the contractual nature of the arrangement (Ibid.: 66).
The Spectacular Rise and Fall of U.S. Whaling: An Innovation Story
An extinct business offers surprisingly current lessons about the triumph of technology, the future of work, and the inevitable decline of industries that might not be worth saving.
One hundred and fifty years ago, around the time Herman Melville was completing Moby Dick, whaling was a booming worldwide business and the United States was the global behemoth. In 1846, we owned 640 whaling ships, more than the rest of the world put together and tripled. At its height, the whaling industry contributed $10 million (in 1880 dollars) to GDP, enough to make it the fifth largest sector of the economy. Whales contributed oil for illuminants, ambergris for perfumes, and baleen, a bonelike substance extracted from the jaw, for umbrellas.
Fifty years later, the industry was dead. Our active whaling fleet had fallen by 90 percent. The industry’s real output had declined to 1816 levels, completing a century’s symmetry of triumph and decline. What happened? And why does what happened still matter?
The Role of Brands in Human Culture
In England, if you give someone a gift, they will likely thank you. In Germany however, you will almost certainly be arrested. Why? In the minds of English speakers, it is generally agreed that a ‘gift’ is a thing given out of kindness while in the minds of German speakers, it is generally agreed that the word ‘gift’ means poison. Understanding the semantics of language reveal the profound power of words. Hate, strength, pain and war… each of these conjures up emotions and meaning in our minds, giving them unique personal significance (supported by a definition and context which is largely agreed by the other ‘consumers’ of our language). At a deeper level, the very shape of each letter within each word has meaning. 愛 (the ‘ai’ symbol in Japanese text) means very little to a non speaker, but to a reader of Japanese, it means love.
Language provides us with a perfect metaphor for brands. Words themselves are nothing, in truth they exist as thoughts with their physical manifestations simply being a relatively organised clump of shapes on a given substrate. The act of thinking itself creates meaning to the various sensory and emotional inputs our biological system receives. In fact, we could argue (as Descartes did with his statement ‘cogito ergo sum’) that our very existence hinges on the significance of the fact that we are able to think.
These intangible meanings also have a very real economic significance. The top 10 global brands (as measured by the Interbrand index) have a combined value of $432 billion (against their total market capitalisation of $1.7 trillion). This means that (conservatively) just over 24% of the real economic value of these organisations manifests from the thoughts of their market.
The truth is (as Thom Braun writes in his 2004 book ‘The Philosophy of Branding’), “…brands and branding are fundamental to the way we experience modern life- and the way we give ‘meaning’ to it.” He goes on to describe how brands represent the world to us, “..they quite literally ‘label’ for us what might otherwise be a chaotic array of messages. Brands and branding are a feature of the way the modern (western) mind thinks. It is impossible for the modern mind to think without recourse to the sorts of models we commonly refer to as brands. We continually look for ways in which we can ‘edit’ the world around us. Today, however, it is far more pronounced than it has ever been in the past - simply because the number of inputs is growing at a frightening rate.” So how has branding become such an intrinsic part of human culture?
In January, Eastman Kodak filed Chapter 11 documents in U.S. bankruptcy court. Its debts exceeded its assets by approximately $1.7 billion. The New York Stock Exchange delisted it. Three weeks later, the company announced that it will stop making digital cameras, camcorders, and digital picture frames some time this year in an effort to cut costs and further reduce its workforce. Apparently Kodak believes there are people somewhere who will still buy whatever it will still be selling at that point, but according to all the experts, the company that created a mass market for personal photography has officially morphed from viable commercial enterprise into picturesque curio, another victim of the Internet’s punishing economies.
Like many other media behemoths that fell before it, Kodak had trouble embracing the notion that the products it had sold effortlessly and profitably for so long would become worthless so quickly. So a few horny geeks had started trading 256-color images of old porn mags on CompuServe. So what? So digital cameras were getting cheaper and more powerful. Who cares? Hundreds of millions of people around the world weren’t going to just stop buying film overnight. “You come back in 10 years, there will be a film business here,” a Kodak executive told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 2009. Six months later, the company discontinued the last remaining version of its iconic Kodachrome line.
“They were a company stuck in time,” Ryerson University professor Robert Burley explained to Bloomberg News. But if any company should have recognized what 2012 would be like in, say, 1988, Kodak should have. After all, it pretty much invented 2012 in 1888. That was the year that company founder George Eastman introduced the Kodak No. 1, catalyzing a new way of looking at the world, a new mode of existence that would make Kim Kardashian a millionaire and Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.
Climatologist James Hansen on “Cowards in Our Democracies”
The public has the right to know who is supporting the foot soldiers for business-as-usual and to learn about the web of support for the propaganda machine that serves to keep the public addicted to fossil fuels and destroys the future of their children.
The threat of human-made climate change and the urgency of reducing fossil fuel emissions have become increasingly clear to the scientific community during the past few years. Yet, at the same time, the public seems to have become less certain about the situation. Indeed, many people have begun to wonder whether the climate threat has been concocted or exaggerated.
Public doubt about the science is not an accident. People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science. Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage.
The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.
Why is the public presented results of the scientific method and the talk-show method as if they deserved equal respect? A few decades ago that did not happen. In 1981, when I wrote a then-controversial paperabout the impact of CO2 on climate, the science writer Walter Sullivan contacted several of the top relevant scientific experts in the world for comments. He did not mislead the public by dredging up and highlighting contrarian opinion for the sake of a forced and unnatural “balance”.
Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability.
25 Things I Learned From Opening a Used Bookstore
1. People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.
2. While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves.
3. If someone comes in and asks where to find the historical fiction, they’re not looking for classics, they want the romance section.
4. If someone comes in and says they read a little of everything, they also want the romance section.
9. No one buys self help books in a store where there’s a high likelihood of personal interaction when paying. Don’t waste the shelf space, put them in the free baskets.
10. This is also true of sex manuals. The only ones who show an interest in these in a small store are the gum chewing kids, who will find them no matter how well you hide them.
11. Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets. Parents will show up.
16. Most people think every old book is worth a lot of money. The same is true of signed copies and 1st editions. There’s no need to tell them they’re probably not insuring financial security for their grandkids with that signed Patricia Cornwell they have at home.
18. People use whatever is close at hand for bookmarks—toothpicks, photographs, kleenex, and the very ocassional fifty dollar bill, which will keep you leafing through books way beyond the point where it’s pr0ductive.
21. A surprising number of people will think you’ve read every book in the store and will keep pulling out volumes and asking you what this one is about. These are the people who leave without buying a book, so it’s time to have some fun. Make up plots.
22. Even if you’re a used bookstore, people will get huffy when you don’t have the new release by James Patterson. They are the same people who will ask for a discount because a book looks like it’s been read.
State of Green Business Report
The fifth annual edition of our State of Green Business report continues our efforts to measure the environmental impacts of the emerging green economy. In addition to documenting what progress companies are making — if any — in improving their environmental performance, we track larger trends that will affect corporate America in 2012.
This free, downloadable report measures 20 aspects of environmental performance, from carbon emissions to paper use and recycling, and attempts to answer the question, “Are we bringing a green economy into being?”
For the first time, this year’s report includes essays from industry experts, including Amory Lovins, Jigar Shah and many others, exploring the trends that shape the commitments and success of the business world.
There’s good and bad news in this year’s report; the good news is that companies continue to dedicate time, money and staff to setting and meeting ambitious environmental goals.
The bad news is that, despite this, our research shows a slowing of momentum — or even backwards motion, in some cases — on some of the indicators. Among the downgraded topics include investments in clean technology innovations, overall energy intensity, certifications of LEED buildings, and paper use and recycling.
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
