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5 - Worker co-operatives and economic democracy
- Edited by Henry Tam
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- Book:
- Tomorrow's Communities
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 11 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 July 2021, pp 71-90
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Summary
Insecure jobs and weakened communities
The piecemeal ‘gig economy’ – no guaranteed work, hours or income – has become ubiquitous in Europe since the financial crisis in 2008. Casual work, temping, zero-hours contracts and diverse forms of selfemployment are characteristic of an expanding marketplace of atypical, precarious and increasingly unprotected work, with a pervasive lack of legal rights. In the United Kingdom (UK), some seven million people in employment (one in five of the workforce) are in precarious forms of work – considerably more than the 5.4 million public sector jobs (Conaty et al, 2018). This has a devastating impact on many communities plagued by job insecurity and poor pay.
Under European Union regulations, temporary and agency staff are entitled as ‘workers’ to sickness and holiday pay, but this is not the case for self-employed freelancers. In the UK today, 4.8 million people are self-employed (15 per cent of the workforce) and they have generated two thirds of new jobs since 2008 (Conaty et al, 2018).
While a proportion of the self-employed do well financially, they are today the exception. Indeed, the stereotype of the self-employed as small businesses is less true now than ever before. Eighty-three per cent of self-employed people in the UK work alone and 70 per cent are living in poverty (Conaty et al, 2018). Their median annual income plummeted by a third from £15,000 in 2008 to about £10,000 in 2015 – below the level when income tax is payable (Conaty et al, 2016).
Low pay, however, is only part of the picture – an absence of worker rights and support services aggravates hardship and makes matters far worse. Without a regular salary, housing access is limited and rents are often extortionate.
Labour market expert, Ursula Huws (2014), estimates that up to five million people in the UK are currently being paid for work through online platforms. This is rapidly transforming the future of work. Intuit Management Consultancy forecast in 2018 that 43 per cent of the workforce in the United States (US) will be contingent on ondemand labour in a few years. McKinsey forecasts that platform labour services will account for a global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $2.7 trillion by 2025 (Conaty et al, 2018).
2 - The case for community economic development
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- By Ed Mayo, Pat Conaty
- Edited by Henry Tam
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- Book:
- Tomorrow's Communities
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 11 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 July 2021, pp 19-36
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Summary
Every generation of people looks for ways in which they can prosper in the settlements and localities in which they live out their lives; and arguably every generation ends up rediscovering the tools of community economic development. This chapter looks at the field of community economic development, to understand how that process of rediscovery could be eased and conversely why it might repeatedly be obscured.
There is no better introduction to community development than the story of Tony Gibson, who made his name on the Meadow Well Estate in Tyneside in the United Kingdom (UK), which was constructed in the 1930s. Starting with a talent survey of random houses in 1991, residents came together to respond, with the idea of ‘a new heart for Meadow Well’ in the form of a development centre built on a discredited youth centre. The response, though, was inertia. Despite the efforts of one sympathetic local employee from the council, a senior officer was heard to say: ‘those fuckers couldn't plan a pram shed’. A decision was taken, instead, simply to close the youth centre (Gibson et al, 1997).
As this dragged on over five hot summer months, the residents started to drop out and then a group of local young people burned the youth centre down. What followed was two days and nights of riots, with fires, a burnt-out corner shop and pot shots at a police helicopter cruising above. The riots forced everyone to think again. The working party held estate-wide elections to form a group that could negotiate with outsiders. They used Tony Gibson's Planning for Real approach – which creates a mock-up of the neighbourhood, from litter on the ground to buildings up high – on a table that people could then walk around, explore and together discuss options for improvement. This led to the development of a new community building, launched with a fun day. The first of many community-led improvements, it was the first building scheme in the borough that had taken shape from day one to completion without a single case of vandalism or theft.
Founded in 1994, Meadow Well Connected operates a community café, a freeto-use technology suite that supports local people to acquire the skills to get the jobs they need, as well as a community garden, joinery workshop and after-school club.
Seven - Democracy and Work
- Edited by Martin Parker
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- Book:
- Life After COVID-19
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 12 August 2020, pp 63-72
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Summary
As the UK adjusts to life during COVID-19, one of the unexpected features is that it has created a better appreciation of workers in low-skilled, poorly paid and precarious work. For example, the BBC One Panorama programme ‘Lockdown UK’ referred to hospital cleaners and supermarket workers as ‘minimum wage heroes’ and food delivery drivers were added to the government's list of key workers. Yet as Jason Moyer-Lee of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain points out, although these workers are doing essential jobs, they have the least rights and little or no job security.
As Chapter Six showed, the world of work has already been changing over the past decade, with a rise of in-work poverty, low-paid work and insecurity, caused by low-paid self-employment, temporary work and zero-hour contracts. COVID-19 has accelerated the move to online work, created new kinds of precarity and increased the risks for workers who are already engaged in low-paid jobs serviced by digital platforms.
So apart from a better public appreciation for workers who do low-paid, stigmatized or dirty work, what have we learned from COVID-19? That decent work is a right for everyone but that lockdown has made the possibility of finding and keeping decent work harder, especially for those working in the gig economy or in low-paid, low-skilled work.
These are issues that trade unions can and should address, but unions are facing a number of serious and existential challenges that frustrate their efforts. These include: difficulties in recruiting and retaining members; a decline in activism; ageing membership; and diminishing union density, bargaining power and representation. Furthermore, many unions have been pursuing a member-servicing approach at the expense of more traditional organizing tactics.
In this chapter, we consider decent work for life after lockdown by reimagining industrial democracy. We do this by proposing a ‘union co-op’ model of work. This is a fully unionized, worker co-operative, owned and controlled by those who own and work in it. Workers’ control, democracy and equality are built into the model, which offers a solution to inequality and injustice both in and outside the workplace.
14 - Developing Public−Cooperative Partnerships
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- By Pat Conaty
- Edited by Henry Tam
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- Book:
- Whose Government Is It?
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 27 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 27 February 2019, pp 229-244
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Summary
The era of curtailing state power by passing more and more of it to private corporations could be coming to an end. In the UK, the country that has championed privatisation in all forms since the 1980s, contractors of public services have increasingly been found to be totally unreliable. The collapse of Carillion, for example, not only revealed a balance sheet overwhelmed with £900 million of liabilities and a company pension scheme deficit of £590 million, but has called into question the future of PFI (private finance initiative). Along with other failures, it is leading to growing policy work on alternatives to relying on the private sector to meet public objectives (Press Association, 2018). Innovative public policy action has indeed been emerging in the UK, the US and cities from Barcelona and Bologna to Cardiff and Montreal. And they all share a strategic focus on the development of public‒cooperative partnerships to meet basic needs, create better employment and improve public services.
The vocabulary varies. In the US the term ‘pluralist commonwealth’ is used, while in regions of Italy, Spain, Portugal and France ‘solidarity economy’ and ‘commons’ are deployed (Alperovitz, 2013; Bollier, 2017). What these approaches have in common is the goal of creating forms of democratic ownership that provide agency and control to the partners and those involved in the development and provision of services. Public‒cooperative partnerships were first proposed and experimented with in the UK during the 1920s, and then revived but again curtailed in the 1980s. This chapter explores the past and recent history of public‒cooperative partnerships and draws out the lessons to be learned for informing a new social contract between the state and the public – both to improve public services but also more fundamentally to meet basic needs where deregulated markets are failing in respect to housing, social care, health services, energy, finance and decent work.
Public services that ‘take back control’ for democratic Stakeholders
Since the early 1990s the promise of outsourcing has rested on the policy argument that the corporate sector is more efficient and would deliver cheaper public services. A National Audit Office report released three days after Carillion went bust revealed that Whitehall still has no means of measuring if PFI contracts are value for money.