Government intervention in co-ops is the route for bureaucratic and political capture. Co-ops come under the control of Registrar of Cooperatives, and of the ruling party or parties, whose functionaries in government wield control over the registrar. The only co-ops that serve its members, rather than assorted politicians, are the ‘Amul-model’ cooperatives, insulated from government interference.
India’s trade unions do have a history of organising co-ops. Indian Coffee Board Workers’ Cooperative was formed by communist trade union leaders, led by A K Gopalan, after the Coffee Board shut down coffee houses and laid off workers. The cooperative has run Indian Coffee Houses successfully for decades.
In Kerala, laid-off bidi workers were organised into a co-op that launched a rival bidi brand, called Dinesh, in north Kerala. Kerala Dinesh Beedi Cooperative was a successful operation so long as smoking was mainstream, and the bidi, a popular smoke.
But Kerala’s co-ops predated unions. The movement has its roots in social reform. At the turn of the 20th c., social reform movements, against caste and against outdated traditions within castes, changed conservative Kerala society forever. These social reform movements unleashed societal dynamics that allowed Kerala to realise the Constitution’s goal of democracy to a greater extent than in other states.
A reformer named Vagbhatananda advised young, unemployed youth who approached him for guidance to form a cooperative and bid for public works projects. They formed Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society in 1925, and bid successfully for some road works. It never looked back. Today, the co-op has a turnover of ₹1,400 cr, has built and owns a cyber park that serves as an SEZ, office complexes, tourism projects and a craft village. It’s the preferred contractor for public works.
Today, emergence of gig work not just creates an opportunity to give gig workers an organisational structure from within which to operate, but also an imperative to form an organisational structure that would provide them with at least some of the protections that regular employees receive – healthcare, safe working conditions, retirement benefits and other bits of social security.
The new labour code on social security does cover gig workers. Given the informal arrangements within which much of gig work takes place, it would be challenging to enforce official norms. It would be simpler to organise gig workers into a cooperative that provides for all worker protections, and builds cost into the fee for services of the gig worker that the co-op charges the platform.
A strike by gig workers on New Year’s Eve had triggered much online debate about their exploitation at the hands of platforms that engage them. Notably, the money not spent on the gig worker’s welfare goes to enrich not the platform but the consumer, who gets the service at a rock-bottom price. If cost of the gig worker’s welfare is included in the cost of the service, it takes away nothing from the platform’s revenues, but only serves to increase the cost to the consumer by a tiny fraction.
Platforms are affected only if such costs are borne by some of them, but not by their competition. If the law could uniformly be enforced, and all platforms pay their gig worker benefits as prescribed, it would be a level playing field for platforms and consumers would pay for workers’ benefits. If gig workers were agglomerated by a cooperative, which gave them their benefits and built the cost into fees it charges platforms for gig worker services availed of from the co-op, the effect would be the same as successful enforcement of the code on platforms.
Drivers, house help, electricians, plumbers, beauticians, home nurses and assorted other functions are eminently amenable to being offered by worker co-ops. Workers might have much enthusiasm to offer, but may not have the knowledge or skill to successfully run co-ops. This is where unions come in handy. Organising workers is their job. They can hire professionals, leveraging the scale they have.
Why have unions not ventured into forming co-ops except as stray forms of relief for laid-off workers? This has to do with ideology rather than practicality. Unions are conditioned to see employers and workers as ‘class enemies’. If the cooperative owned by workers is their employer, that enmity becomes unreal. As direct producers who also control the production process, co-op members must reckon with the responsibilities of management and even entrepreneurship. Unions would much rather shirk this complexity, and save themselves from being branded as ‘class collaborators’ and betrayers by some of their comrades.
It is time unions turned their attention to giving participation in the process of globalised growth the broadest social base possible. Even as they continue with traditional union work in formal sectors, if unions form cooperatives that own and run units in the informal sector, workers would be better off, by far, than they are at present.
Who is afraid to be owner, worker and comrade all turned into one?
