An underestimated model with the potential for business building across Africa. From Shareble:
via p2p foundation
Most of us are used to work the way it has been since the first factories: one person, hired to perform specific tasks, with little say as to what's going on in the rest of the company.
A new documentary by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work, delves into an entirely different way of working - worker-owned cooperatives - finding companies that may not look different on the surface, but whose structure changes the way people work, and feel about their work, in a quietly radical, empowering way.
Worker-owned cooperatives are just that: companies owned and managed by the workers, who often "buy into" companies after a year on the job. The largest is the giant Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, 256 linked coops in Spain employing more than 83,000 people; Shift Change devotes extensive time to this 50-year success story, with interviews of post-war leadership and current cooperators about the culture that the coops have built - especially in the Basque region, where 60 percent of workers are employed by a coop. Coop factories, coop grocery stores, coop schools, coop social services...
The rest of the film focuses on American coops, which have diverse stories but are tied together by the altered workplace environment. In interview after interview, dozens of cooperators describe their experience of work as fundamentally different from "normal" jobs, that partial ownership makes their work more collaborative, decision-making more democratic, and gives them a voice...[continue reading]