If you’re in a worker co-op, we need to know more about you and what you think.
The UK’s first Worker Co-op Census will paint a clearer picture of what it’s really like to work in worker cooperatives across the UK - where we come from and what we share as workers, the things that matter to us, how our jobs and workplaces compare to others. It will help build the real case for worker cooperation.
Take the census here (around 10 minutes) or scan the QR
Who can take part?
Anyone who works in a worker co-op - whether as a member, worker, employee, or volunteer. Your organisation can be fully or partially worker-owned, and it doesn’t need a particular legal status, as long as it identifies as a worker co-op.
Why take part?
Your responses will help identify opportunities for worker co-op support, training, development, collaboration and campaigning
Findings will be anonymised and reported only in summary form
The results will directly inform future work by workers.coop and the wider co-operative movement
Prize draw:
At the end of the survey, you can opt in to a prize draw to win one of six tickets to the Worker Co-op Weekend festival in May, plus £125 to help with travel and other costs.
Participation is of course voluntary. Your data will be kept confidential and securely stored, and individual responses will not be identifiable in any published outputs. Full details about data use and consent are included at the start of the survey.
The more of you who take part, the more useful and representative the findings will be - so please complete the census questionnaire - and please share it with your co-workers.
We refuse to fill out this form if it’s going to be hosted on Google. Google are to be boycotted due to their facilitation the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Please use an alternate tools such as Nextcloud forms.
We’re not being contrarian here for the sake of it. We in the worker’s movement need to take a stand against genocide and for the workers of these companies in struggle.
Agree that it’s good to use established tools we have in our bag rather than big corps especially for reasons highlighted. Saying that I’ve filled it in myself and hopefully there has been some uptake, and perhaps the person who made the form wasn’t fully aware of worker.coop tech processes. It wouldn’t be impossible to switch over existing data and the QR link to a nextcloud form in one go - how are responses going?
I’m just attending the coops uk federals meeting on how co-ops can participate in this - and the census data - even if it’s just some of it seems like a good way to get building blocks for a response to this
It could be, although the census is more about understanding worker co-ops from a social composition and worker perspective than the kind of sector size/performance data you’d typically want to present to policy people. What’s missing is survey data on worker co-op enterprises themselves. Co-ops UK gathers some of this kind of data but I don’t know if they’d be willing to share it. Suggest if we really want to get into it the fed needs to design and resource a survey, but dunno whether this comes from the research group or the board. We could certainly get rich enterprise data if we could devote intelligence and time to it. I think @samnord has a take on this question?
It was our volunteer researcher who I think proposed G-forms as something she was confident with, and the research group decided. Our open source and co-op/workers first tech policy is right, but sometimes we don’t have the puff to put people through training in apps that are novel or not too intuitively user friendly. It shouldn’t be a trigger for snotty proselytising and boycotting each other, whatever comradely terms it’s justified in.
@Sion training is something, @chris@samnord@seanfarmelo and myself talked about last week at our digital meeting, so fingers crossed this is something we can implement so we can move away from Google owned services
There’s one main problem that has started to appear with using the Google TechStack.
Google were found guilty in the USA courts, of running a cartel with Microsoft and Apple, but from looking at the closeness of those companies to the current USA political establishment, it’s probably a bad idea to rely upon the sentencing to deter them from behaving badly in future.
Add in that they are currently undergoing the Enshittification process, for their current paying customers.
If you are using Gmail, and someone from an independent third-party email-service provider tries to email you, then the email will be bounced, but you will not be told about it by Gmail. This is one of the cartel behaviours that Google were found guilty of.
I have been recommending that everyone who is using Gmail for commercial/personal use, to move to a different email-service provider.
As I said to one of my previous clients, “Do you know how many potential sales leads that this behaviour has cost you? Do you know how much money you have lost?”
Take the census here (around 10 minutes) or scan the QR
Prize draw:
