From bullshit jobs to solidarity

Transcript of Ieva Padagaite's scene-setting speech at the Coop Ways Forward conference in Manchester on 20 January 2017 - the day of Donald Trump's inauguration. 

Ieva is a filmmaker with Blake House coop; a member of the Young Cooperators Network; an associate of Altgen, which works to inspite young people about cooperatives and cooperation. She served on Cooperatives UK's National Strategy Panel, and is a member of the UK Worker Coop Council.

"I’m very glad to be here on a day like today, even though the future looks grim and little seems to make sense. Because today is Blake House Filmmakers Cooperative’s first birthday, and I’m surrounded by inspiring people sharing ideas about creating a different future.

I co-started Blake House coop as an alternative to precarious, exploitative and unethical practices in the creative industries, because trying to win the rat race was too hard for me. Zero hour contracts, minimum wage, 14 hour shifts, abusive bosses, competition amongst colleagues and the complete non-existence of purpose in my work made me disillusioned, anxious and isolated. I saw my friends forced out of the city by rising rents, moving back with parents, in hospital with mental health crises. We blamed ourselves - we were not good enough, we weren’t talented enough, not beautiful enough, not male enough. We were unwanted.

I co-started Blake House because I wanted to create an alternative for myself and my friends to work with dignity and purpose. I wanted to use my skills, my craft, my time as an antidote to the reality we are conditioned into. Now, for almost half a year, I am getting paid a living wage and I couldn’t be more proud.

I don’t think people quite realise the extent of the connection between economic inequality and exploitation, and the mental health epidemic among young adults that is driving brilliant people from my generation into depression and self-medication. People suffer in silence because in society where everything is allowed and everything is possible, it can only be your fault if you are not clever enough to meet your needs and aspirations. Shame keeps people quiet.

As a filmmaker, working mostly on campaigning films, I interview many young freelancers, women and minorities about their dreams, aspirations and challenges. I hear heartbreaking stories that I can relate to on a personal level - stories about exploitation, poverty, sexism, psychological abuse and the collapse of peoples’ sense of self-worth. Stories where people open up about their mental anguish, and the shame of failure. One of these films, which we made for an Altgen campaign about freelancers’ coops, will be coming out in February.

And now we have Brexit, Trump, humanitarian and environmental crises, hitting us endlessly. We have a situation where people don’t just want change, they see the world going in the wrong direction - and they will not accept it. So more and more people open up, share their stories and come out of isolation, realising that they are not alone. They start to see their collective power, and that there is an alternative.

Here lies an opportunity and responsibility for cooperators and the coop movement to inspire, empower and amplify voices and actions of people wanting and trying to build a different world for themselves and others, one based on solidarity, kindness and equality.

I confess I wasn’t a natural cooperator. My whole upbringing led me to be the opposite. I was born in Lithuania, just a year after its independence from the Soviet Union. I grew up in a new America, where capitalism and neoliberalism seemed to symbolise freedom and open borders. Unlike my parents, I was supposed to be able to achieve anything, to be anyone I choose to be. I was told that if I followed instructions, got a degree, worked hard and strove to be better than others, I would be happy. I did everything that was expected of me. Yet I was still failing.

And then a slow shift started to happen. I read an article called Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, in the coop magazine Strike! This was the beginning of my encounter with the coop movement, where I found a place of belonging, solidarity and support. I heard Altgen say that I didn’t have to climb the ladder. I found young cooperators who refused to build their success on someone else's failure. Simon from Blake House taught me about mutual care and collective resilience. Marisol from Cultural Coops and people from worker coops told me I had the right to be angry, and helped me find the words and confidence to express my ideas. Their stories and ideas played a big role in my personal transformation. I feel very privileged and lucky to have had that.

It’s up to us to create spaces and opportunities for more people to become cooperators, especially now, when so many are questioning the status quo. We need to say: “how is it people can value and defend democracy and freedom, while they spend a third of their lives working at a job where they have neither?”

The right says say that making a big wall, a great wall, can solve your problems; that all the immigrants are stealing your identity and dreams. We need to tell a better story. We need a vision of a co-operative future that people can relate to on a personal, not just a theoretical level. We need to tell stories about personal change, before we talk about economic change. If we are serious about spreading cooperation and building a cooperative economy, we need to recognise that cooperatives depend on individuals being co-operators, and that cooperation consists of personal political acts. We can’t tell people to talk to faceless entities, or websites, or numbers at companies house. We have to talk to people on a personal level about what it means to be a co-operator, what it means for me and you.

Today, what is the state and role of organisations and institutions in cooperative and solidarity movements that were built on desperation, honest need and a courageous vision of equality that people were prepared to fight for? Why is it so hard to relate to them today? Why do they seem faded and bloodless, justifying themselves by their history and tradition, turning into museums - rather than actively responding, progressing and transforming, together with people’s needs and values?

People newly discovering cooperation and their political voice need support, they need a springboard to launch themselves and to inspire others. They have energy that you can’t replicate. And what happens if, at this time of awakening and creation, people are met with alien, passionless language, and yet more hierarchy, bureaucracy, disconnection, even hypocrisy?

We need less management and more facilitation; less top down strategy and more grass roots culture; less branding and more platforms for people to co-create and transition. We need to seriously rethink what cooperatives mean today.

Now, I identify myself proudly as a worker cooperator. Why use this word, ‘worker’? It’s a stretch, because of how most people use the word worker in everyday life. When we went through school and university, none of us identified ourselves as wannabe workers. Workers went into factories - now we have robots. You didn’t identify as a worker in a service based economy because you were too busy making up definitions of your very special and unique job title, that would add to your personal brand and justify the £50k of debt you were getting for having an education. The word ‘worker’ just wouldn’t do.

So, to allow more people to recognise worker coops as the most sensible, exciting and responsible technology you can use to pioneer solidarity economy in the 21st century, we need to elaborate on what a worker today is, what workers are collectively. We need to reclaim the future of work, so that people in the growing creative, tech, freelance and other service industries can identify as workers, without cringing. Yes we are entrepreneurs, creatives, freelancers, technologists, developers - and we are workers. It’s a political and technical term, and takes time to grasp. We need to put new emergent and evolving values into our culture and expectation of work, such as our demand that work should be meaningful; that we should have choice about how and when we work; that work should be creative.

Young people are not the spoiled, entitled narcissists we’re often accused of being in media. Our values are quite in line with the culture of coops. We care more than the world lets us express. So it is important in this time of division and growing inequality that cooperators take it upon themselves to be storytellers, to be an antidote, to counteract toxic narratives with courage, curiosity and compassion. We need to say and show that the future of work is ours to build.

It’s not so much cooperatives that are pioneers in the 21st century, as the cooperative people in them, and beyond. To build roads forward, we need to work for a shift in peoples’ consciousness; to show that there are many different paths to move in a common direction, with a shared vision."

See Ieva's video statement about cooperative solidarity and the political character of cooperation.

The precarious generation of creative workers

Despite hits from tuition fees and the rising cost of living in centres like London, there was a 25% increase in the numbers of students doing design and creative arts degrees in the UK between 2003 and 2010 – up from 139,000 to 174,000, which is around 7% of the total numbers of students.

So about 50,000 design and creative arts graduates are coming onto the labour market each year. Although many of them are overseas students, and despite the superficial vigour of the creative industries sector, this enormous number of new workers is far more than the creative industries can absorb. In 2011, more than 1/3 of creative graduates were without full-time work three years after graduation. In addition, the UK – and particularly London – is at least temporarily home to many mobile, underemployed young creative workers from EU countries where their economic prospects are dire. And these statistics of course exclude non-university educated workers coming into the creative industries fray.

Traditionally, fine art graduates worked for gallerists as unpaid assistants or apprentice curators for low or no wages, in an industry which could be seen as one of the last strongholds of pre-C18th employment relations. This at least partly explains why the creative industries are playing such a prominent role in spreading temporary, part-time, unpaid or super exploited labour. Over the last 10 years, they have crossed over into design and the applied arts, the professions and other industries.

Many design agencies and arts organisations use a constant churn of skilled and productive long-term interns, sometimes comprising a third or more of the workforce, with only the more senior employees earning what would have been considered a decent income twenty years ago. Along with changes to the benefits system and the rise of workfare, this is one jaw of a pincer movement which has produced in a substantial layer of precarious young workers, sometimes called permalancers, carrotworkers or lifestyle hackers (GuyStanding).

‘Proletarianised’ creative (and other) workers have responded by developing agile, collaborative and creative approaches not just to work, but to the necessities of life including accommodation, leisure and social support, relying more or less entirely on their own resources and networks.

This is the other half of the ‘innovation’ story, and it’s where we should look to understand why creative workers may be particularly responsive to the utility of a model defined as ‘men and women coming together to meet their shared economic, social and cultural needs through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise’ - the co-operative.

“The people in my network don’t really understand the difference between employment and self-employment. I know that being employed brings rights which self-employed people don’t have, like holiday and sick pay, protection against discrimination and unfair dismissal, redundancy pay and so on. I sometimes think that our generation hasn’t fought for or defended those rights, so we don’t understand them.”

Those are (more or less) the words of an educated ‘GenerationY’-er. It’s suggestive of the extent to which her cohort has become so detached from traditional educated working class discourse, attitudes and protocols that it regards them as almost irrelevant, along with trade unionism and representative politics.

The following remarks are based on my experience of working with groups of young creative workers as a co-operative business advisor, and also my conversations with individuals and groups of students, teachers and graduates about the nature and benefits of co-operative approaches to work and creative life, at institutions including City University, The University of the Arts (Camberwell, LCC and Central St Martins), East London, Bristol and Brighton Universities, the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths.

• Collaborative practice is taught in many design and arts schools. It is therefore familiar and normal for many students and graduates, although the primacy of individual genius and effort go with the territory, especially and obviously in fine and applied arts.

• Most if not all of these institutions, and many schools, now include some form of ‘PPD’ or business education as part of their offering; for instance, University of the Arts holds an annual ‘Creative Enterprise Week’.  As in the UK’s business schools, the co-operative model  is marginalised by default in these programmes, although other forms of social enterprise are often included. There is a rich opportunity for co-operative practitioners, activists and business advisors here, but they have to be both proactive and credible in finding platforms and opportunities to get their message across, and they need to be able to back up talk with ongoing support and advice.

• Like the graduate cohort in front of them, the unpaid or underpaid internship model is now regarded by many students as axiomatic, whether they think it desirable or not. Advocating collective and ultimately co-operative working as an approach to the prospect of exploitation, isolation and underemployment is a very fruitful line – for instance, I am currently advising two co-operative startups  (ceramics designer/makers and set designer/makers) as the outcome of a single seminar at St. Martins. Some design and arts teachers, perhaps more familiar with previous waves of creative co-operation, and in the face of the industrialisation of higher education, are as receptive as their students - even to the idea of the co-operative university (Goldsmiths).

• Many in this cohort are disengaged from mainstream political ideas and institutions, and receptive to ideas of self-organisation, new forms of democracy, the commons and fundamental social change (the Occupy aftereffect). They are internationalists. They are as animated by motives of personal self-development, sustainability and community good as they are by their prospects for individual material gain. They are not as imbued with a love of ‘entrepreneurship’ and business as everyone is telling them they should be, but they are strongly influenced by the ideology of ‘innovation’. This is both a barrier and an opportunity for getting over a co-operative message, and it depends whether we pitch it as a ‘business model’ or a technology for meeting needs and serving desires, collectively.

• There are some parallels with the context for the last wave of worker co-op formations in 70s and early 80s, most of which were founded by people looking to fulfil political, social or environmental goals as well as looking to create decent jobs on a basis of equality, solidarity and autonomy. There are important differences which present barriers to co-operation and co-operative startups. This generation has less collective confidence and lower expectations in terms of its place in, engagement with and rewards from the formal economy. Perhaps more importantly, with the usual issues around capital, sweat equity is harder to accumulate because the dole doesn’t provide a breathing space. ‘Necessity’ means something different. Effective co-operative advocacy must comprehend this.

• While sharing a vague knowledge of co-operatives with the rest of the population, they regard co-operatives as a good thing and contemporary rather than old-fashioned. They are as unaffected by the decadence of parts of the existing co-op movement as we were.

• Medium term, to influence this cohort and see results, we need to focus on pre startups. The most fruitful area will be working with existing collectives, networks and informal enterprises who want to go from mutuality to co-operation, from small to larger scale, from barter to trading, from individual risk to collective protection and getting the benefits of limited liability.

• We should class and treat any consortium of self-employed creative workers as a worker co-operative, if its main shared purpose is to enhance work. The people I talk to readily self-identify as workers, even if they’re not in a position to, or don’t wish to, become employees. The current Co-operatives UK and CICOPA definitions, which suggest that only employees can be members of a worker co-op, are not flexible enough. It’s also a reason to use the language of worker co-operation, not employee ownership, when talking to this cohort.

I have focused here on young workers in design and applied arts. The wider creative industries context has much in common with other industry sectors, as does the situation of young workers here and elsewhere in the world.

What’s perhaps special about creative industries and creative workers is their degree of familiarity with sharing technologies and shallow-hierarchy enterprise models, strong social clustering and peer networking of workers, geographical clustering of businesses, and the relative parity of status and skills.

We can’t predict the desire or capacity of any group of people participating in an industry to create a wave of co-operative formations, but I do believe that this is as good a bet for us as any. As part of a sector-by-sector co-op development strategy, it would mean honing careful messages and delivering them to potentially receptive audiences using a network of competent activists, using resources developed centrally, then following words with practical support.

Co-operative Capitalism: A Straw Dog in a Paper Kennel

As part of its Think Piece series, Co-ops UK recently published a pamphlet by star Cambridge economist Noreena Hertz. It sets out a view that the current era of what Hertz calls 'Gucci Capitalism' will and should be followed by the ascendancy of 'Co-op Capitalism', which is characterised by four ideas in action:

- Community is valuable of itself
- The network has worth
- How we interact matters and
- Collaboration can trump competition.

This is interesting, because as far as I know capitalism is a system  for valorising, monetising and capitalising on human creativity, community, collaboration and networks. The nature of the beast is that the portion of peoples' work (not to mention natural resources) capital doesn't compensate for in the form of a social wage, is what it takes and transforms into profit.

To put it another way, if we all worked to our contracts and didn't donate unpaid labour to the masters of the universe by collaborating, co-operating, thinking creatively and generally behaving like human beings rather than robots, capitalism would fall over tomorrow. Hertz and those moral economists and pundits, from Will Hutton to Phillip Blond, who see co-operation as a cure for capitalism's malfunctioning - well, they've got it the wrong way round. Co-operation is both absolutely necessary for capitalism, and one of the last aspects of humanity that capital hasn't completely worked out how to colonise.

Isn't it interesting that the word 'capitalism' is back in the papers, after its twenty-odd year retreat to a cave somewhere on the tundra of the left? Only now, it's capitalism's supporters and improvers who use its name, not so much its opponents. Although usually the term isn't seen on its own, but qualified. So the main debate in the papers and blogs isn't about capitalism as such - it's about 'good' versus 'bad', 'predatory' versus 'sustainable', 'short termist' versus 'long termist', 'ethical' versus 'exploitative' capitalism. Which tends to crowd out any talk of anything else, and that's probably the point.

I don't think Co-operatives UK was completely wrong in putting the pamphlet out. These Think Pieces are part of its mandate to 'mainstream' the movement and stimulate fresh thinking (God knows, we were starved of that for a long time). Hertz is, they say, a heavyweight economist, though I don't rate her as a commentator (she was prescient on the debt crisis! Big deal!) 'Gucci' versus 'Co-op' capitalism is a prime slice of mystification pizza. But it got me thinking. It scrapes on the reef of one or two movement taboos. The co-op movement is a 'broad church' - a political home for all kinds of socialists, anarchists, millenarians, liberals, greens, feminists and displaced persons, as well as normal people; but the deal is that nobody mentions the c-word. When we really do start to take lumps out of Barclays, Tescos, Ben & Jerry's and Powergen, it will be interesting to see how our co-operative unity is tested.

To get to that point, we should worry not at all about making capitalism more co-operative, and focus minds and acts instead on making co-operatives more co-operative, so we can make them a better vehicle for meeting peoples' real and self-defined social, cultural and economic needs. The values and principles are a very powerful formula. Developed over decades and continents through trial and error, as Ed Mayo says the real movement is 2% theory and 98% practice. Hertz's pamphlet demonstrates little understanding of co-operation as a social change movement, but maybe our own is a bit perfunctory in the day-to-day. Scratch a bit below the surface of action principles like democracy, autonomy and member economic participation - get below the 'lowest common denominator' definitions of co-operative identity - and you'll find ideas and methods, not just for running half-decent capitalist enterprises, but also for understanding capitalism and the ways humanity can overcome it.

The pioneers didn't only set out to run a good shop; their stated and realistic desire was also to overturn the system of politics and economics.

You can download Noreena Hertz's pamphlet at
http://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/Co-op%20Capitalism_0.pdf