Yesterday in London a delegation from catalan came to visit SPACE4. They then headed on to see Better Gym on their co-op tour. Most of us were surprise to learn that Better claim to be worker-led and are a Community Benefit Society, so I did a little digging and thought I’d share what I found:
So GLL/Better has 11,000 workers and a board made up of 12-15 worker members, 6 independent trustees, the CEO, secretary and 3 councillor trustees. So it is slightly weighted towards worker members.
The board delegates power to 3 sub-committee - audit, executive & remunerations. Remunerations is kind of interesting as it is made up of the 6 independent trustees/ non-worker members only, but it is accountable to the worker board, so it’s kind of reasonable I guess.
That said the CEO took home at least £250,000 last year, which is over 100x what the lowest worker was paid. Also in 2023 there was a dispute with their unionised workers about pay, which isn’t a great look, if you are worker-led…
I don’t like that the pay ratio is so big, but it seems like the majority of formal power sits with the workers, even though I’m sure the exes use a lot wangling to get what they want.
Where do people stand on this type of “worker-led” organisation?
Some useful background is that GLL was formed from an externalisation of swimming pools and the like from Greenwich Council. In common with many of the public service mutuals that also externalised from councils about a decade ago, they perpetuate the hierarchical nature of the councils they externalised from and they often look more like management buy outs than genuine worker buy-outs.
The more I learn more about cooperating, the more it feels like there is a maximum size for a single co-op to still function democratically in a practical, meaningful sense. Principle 6 seems to be the key to functioning beyond this: more, smaller collectives working together where it makes sense might not be the most efficient in a pure capitalistic sense but seems to me to be a better, fairer division of resources than a relentless pursuit of efficiency that allows a handful of owners to extract all surplus value for themselves.
But… I’m very new to co-ops in the real world, in that I have long believed organisations should function democratically but only recently discovered the depth of theory and experience in the co-op movement. So I’d be interested to know how people deal with these issues of organisational size.
Size is definitely a big factor and co-ops are doing innovative things to maintain a share culture and democracy - including Suma (2 weeks of workshops before general meetings), and Unicorn (fortnightly trainings) to name a few.
I’d suggest taking a look at “Dunbar’s number” and E.F. Schumacker’s Small Is Beautiful. They give some good clues as to optimum sizes in terms of efficiency (it’s not what you think, efficiency decreases after growth to a relatively small-medium size) and also human interactions.
Federated secondaries or “strawberry patch” development is one option rather than growth of one co-op into an overly large entity. Unicorn wrote a guide to setting up your own Unicorn to encourage others to replicate their work rather than growing to a behemoth. The Arizmendi group of bakeries in the San Francisco/Bay area is often cited as an approach where new co-ops are helped to establish by a secondary which provides services to all the co-ops in membership. From my understanding there is some standardisation across the group but each business is run as a co-op in its own right.
Does this highlight the need for a statement (from eg workers.coop) on the diff between eg “a co-op” and a “a workers’ co-op”. It’s a bit hard to parse for people who aren’t deep into the co-op lore… people who we need to get on board.
Though of course one day I would like to pop to the co-op for a pint of milk and find that its closed because a sociocratic general staff meeting has overrun.
Other issues aside, what - if any - is a fair pay gap? For example, this paper surveyed 55K people from 40 countries, and concluded the ideal on average is a 1:7 ratio (responses by country varies between 1:2 and 1:10).
Labor market economics would seem to dictate that coops with too low of a pay gap wouldn’t be able to acquire the same amount of talent as coops with a wider pay gap, all other things being equal.
