“Much can be gained by cooperatives working with trade unions on a range of work related issues, including mutual sharing of experiences, collaborating on improving working conditions and worker rights, and actively ensuring that worker voice in relation to worker interests is maintained in a cooperative setting. Beyond the traditional concerns of industrial relations, the relationship between these two sets of actors may be essential for rethinking how services are provided and how non-profit views of the economy are developed. Underpinning this dialogue, a set of policies and practices for the relationship between trade unions and co-operatives is therefore required.”
Our own ‘movement building’ perspective on union dialogue and collaboration would also include developing prospects for worker takeovers and startups, where workers are already organised and fighting. Realistically, this suggests working with smaller ‘base’ unions who are organising in low-paid sectors such as care and logistics, or among freelancers; and more consistent/bigger picture dialogue with unions that don’t share a traditional Fabian hostility to worker cooperatives (such as the bakers’ union, which cosponsored this report with Suma, and BECTU). @CoopAlex thoughts?
At union-coops:uk we’ve (well just me back then) worked some time ago with the Musicians Union, Equity and Community Union, all of whom have supported worker co-ops in the past. Equity and MU have actively encouraged their members to join together in co-op Agencies, and MU even wrote a guide to doing so.
We’ve also presented to NASUWT and the Association of Educational Psychologists at their conferences, but got no real result. GMB, Unite and the RMT all support taxi co-ops, but that seems to be where their interest stops.
Community lost interest, but now they have renewed their interest, set up a self-employed section, and passed a motion at conference supporting a worker co-op for the self employed. We’re currently working with them on a project.
Our efforts in the past to work with the new unions have so far come to nothing, so any help here would be appreciated.
We’d welcome the chance to work with workers.coop to develop unionised co-ops. We recognise traditional unions can be hard to work with, largely because it’s difficult to find the centre of power, but they have resources, contacts, and inside info that’s really useful.
With the new unions I suspect they simply struggle with lack of resources, but we still need to show them co-ops can be a solution to some of their members difficulties.