Building the cooperative workplace.

Abstract

Cooperatives have attracted attention from scholars and political activists as potentially subversive institutions that challenge the private ownership of capitalism as well as the centralized planning long associated with state socialism. This study shifts the focus from evaluating cooperatives as self-contained alternative economies to examining them as small, yet meaningful, pockets of resistance within the larger socio-economic system. This is a case study of Pascual, a soda factory and the second largest industrial cooperative in Mexico. Unlike most cooperative workplaces in developed countries, which typically attract a highly educated and ideologically-driven membership, Pascual was founded during a violent 2 year labor struggle by ordinary, poorly educated working people whose goals were less utopian than pragmatic. But after acquiring control of the factory in the early 1980s, the workers have come to reassess how their jobs and their enterprise should be run. This study examines the organizational, and phenomenological changes at Pascual over the past decade, relying mostly on interviews and field notes. The findings point to the significance of Pascual's pre-history, particularly the protracted labor conflict out of which it was formed. Those who participated in this collective struggle were deeply influenced by cultures of solidarity and participation that have continued to shape the organization ever since, affecting the way decisions are made, how jobs are divided, and how non-members are treated. At the same time, there are competing structural and ideological forces driving Pascual toward greater oligarchy and income inequality, on the one hand, and greater democracy and equality on the other. This clash gives Pascual its dynamic character while highlighting the diverse ways of organizing and expressing the goals of cooperativism. The broader lesson of Pascual is that it is possible to constitute a more humane work environment within the context of a competitive market economy.