What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Work
Imagine this: liberatory workplaces!
Quite a few years ago in Chicago, I became part of a startup, a new consumer tech magazine called rather prosaically Online Access. It was aimed at convincing owners of personal computers they should go out and buy a new gadget: a PC modem.
In this primeval period, modems were used almost entirely by academic or scientific researchers, plus a group of computer hobbyists who gathered on a dialup network called CompuServe.
We pioneers at Online Access had a compelling answer to the question not yet being fully answered even by PC Magazine or PC World: Why should I buy a modem? (So, yes, this is a moment in the late 1980s.)
Whatever the mission, being the founding editor of a venture-backed startup magazine was incredibly energizing. Our little team—which had huge fun working together—put in long hours getting the publication ready for launch. I woke up every morning just buzzing to get downtown to our offices in the Chicago Loop’s historic Monadnock Building.
Being an employee of a VC-backed effort, I had no ownership equity in the magazine—or perhaps a tiny percentage, hardly enough to recall. But I offer this memory of a happy workplace for a reason. Meaningful and especially creative work with a team of delightful people is surely about as good as it gets. Or almost.
In the world of the solidarity economy, I’ve noticed we spend plenty of effort talking about the advantages of cooperativism—the way it offers ownership, a democratic workplace, better job quality, etc.
What I rarely hear is the testimony of worker-owners to the fact that they jointly own a workplace which quite simply brings them joy and satisfaction. This is not merely one more feature of worker coops—in some ways, I think it’s almost the whole point.
We are here talking about the real-world possibility of creating something which sounds very utopian: liberatory workplaces! A contradiction in terms, many would claim!
But as economist Kenneth Boulding used to like to say, anything that exists is possible. Meaning: If you can find a particular activity going on in the world, that indicates it is viable, a real option elsewhere in the world.
Liberatory workplaces have always existed. I think of them particularly with regard to the cooperative principle which essentially states that a co-op is a workplace of education, a school of life where we learn how to become free. This is profoundly the view of Mondragon founder Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi, for example.
In my new work trying to imagine how we could import the model of social co-ops to the U.S., I’ve been struck by the point Italian cooperators make: co-ops are not merely equitable workplaces, they are engines of open (as opposed to closed) innovation. Social co-ops, in regions like Emilia Romagna, argue that they have an innate advantage over government-delivered social care in their more agile, innovative, bottom-up processes of co-creating care. This is collective entrepreneurship.
These community-facing enterprises also measure success differently: they strive to keep purpose, mission and identity in balance. For the Italians, the organizational model is as important as the business model.
That helps them in their long-standing practice of bringing liberation to their work as successfully as the dominant system allows anywhere in the world today.
See you next time—peace.