Excerpted\ from Ned Resnikoff:
(Part seven of a seven-part series in which Al Jazeera looked at how California’s tech boom affects the working class)
“After nearly 12 years of bouncing around various Bay Area startups, Taran Ramage was feeling burned out. A corporate IT technician who had been working in San Francisco since 1996, he found himself growing weary of what he called the “cynical and selfish gambling of this hot startup market.”
“Although the pay, benefits and work environment in the tech sector are generally excellent, I was starting to feel a lack of meaning, a lack of contributing anything useful to the world,” he said.
Ramage said that from 1996 to 2008, he worked with three startups experiencing rapid growth. By the time the third one had established itself, he was ready for something different. And that’s when he discovered TechCollective.
Founded in 2007, TechCollective is a worker-owned cooperative providing technical support and consulting. Workers own equal shares in the business and have equal votes in management decisions. Like all new hires at TechCollective, Ramage was not given a vote when he was hired in 2008. But after a six-month trial period, the other workers unanimously voted him into full membership.
The startup is part of the Bay Area’s small yet burgeoning tech cooperative community — a sort of miniature Silicon Valley run along collectivist principles. Think of it as an alternative sharing economy: Whereas there is little in practice to distinguish sharing economy businesses like Airbnb and Uber from other top-down firms, businesses like TechCollective are founded on the principle of equal work for an equal share.
“There’s the sharing economy, which is a buzzword, but then there’s a solidarity economy, which is the real thing,” said Sabiha Basrai, a member of the worker-owned Design Action Collective in Oakland. “It’s worker co-ops, people excelling and doing business that also supports other people. Investing in each others’ success versus competing with each other.”
Worker cooperatives exist across industries. And the Bay Area, with its long history of left-wing social experimentation, has a particularly rich cooperative culture. The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NOBAWC), founded in 1994, has 29 member businesses, according to its website, including Design Action and TechCollective as well as grocery stores, bookshops and even a health clinic. (The nationwide Tech Co-Op Network has 27 members, including three in San Francisco and three in Oakland. Outside the Bay Area, the largest concentration of its members is in New York City, where it lists five cooperatives.)
Tech co-ops are a comparatively recent phenomenon. Adam Bernstein of the cooperative Electric Embers says he noticed the first ones popping up after the collapse of the first dot-com bubble.
“I don’t know in the end how relevant it is, but it does seem like there was a timing there, for sure,” said Bernstein. “There was a huge dot-com boom, hundreds of thousands of people started flocking to the area, and then it crashed. And soon after that, we kind of started springing up like mushrooms.”
Suzi Grishpul, who works at the Oakland cooperative Radical Designs, said she thinks the worker-owned model is becoming more attractive to young people as changes in the economy foreclose a more traditional route to financial security.
“Needing to get a job that then allows you to pay off your mounting student debt and buy a house and do all these quote-unquote normal lifestyle pursuits are just too rigid for the realities of our economy, especially in the Bay Area,” said Grishpul. “So I’m seeing a lot more people finding creative alternatives to the quote-unquote normal structures of housing and family and career. When there’s a lot of creative, intelligent people clustered together, you get some interesting projects coming out of that.”