The resurgence of self-managed workers cooperatives (1): #France

1st of May protest, Tunis, Tunisia

From Istanbul to Barcelona, the co-operative movement is flourishing as employees revive what the bosses buried

Reports from in Marseille and Thessaloniki, in Mataró, Spain, in Istanbul and in Buenos Aires for The Guardian – Original Article – http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/01/may-day-workers-of-the-world-unite-and-take-over-their-factories

A 19th-century slogan is getting a 21st-century makeover. The workers of the world really are uniting. At least, some of them are.

The economic meltdown unleashed by the 2008 financial crisis hit southern Europe especially hard, sending manufacturing output plunging and unemployment soaring. Countless factories shut their gates. But some workers at perhaps as many as 500 sites across the continent – a majority in Spain, but also in France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey – have refused to accept the corporate kiss of death.

By negotiation, or sometimes by occupation, they have taken production into their own hands, embracing a movement that has thrived for several years in Argentina.

In France, an average of 30 mostly small companies a year, from phone repair firms to ice-cream makers, have become workers’ co-operatives since 2010. Coceta, a co-operative umbrella group in Spain, reckons that in 2013 alone some 75 Spanish companies were taken over by their former employees – roughly half the total in the whole of Europe.

A gathering in Marseille last year of representatives from worker-controlled factories drew more than 200 delegates from more than a dozen countries – including pioneers from Argentina, whose turn-of-the-century economic crash sparked a wave of fabricas recuperadas that today has left around 15,000 workers in charge at more than 300 workplaces. The fast-developing phenomenon is now a field of academic study; there are websites, such as workerscontrol.net and autogestion.coop, dedicated to it.

No two self-managed ventures launch in the same circumstances, and many face daunting obstacles: bureaucratic inertia and administrative red tape that can delay or even prevent production; legal opposition from former owners; a still-chilly economic climate; outdated machinery, or products no longer in demand. Lifelong union militants can find themselves, for the first time in their lives, making tough commercial decisions.

But many – for the time being at least – are making it work.

Twenty minutes’ drive from the old port of Marseille, on a green and well-groomed industrial park outside the Provençal village of Gémenos, is Fralib, the largest tea factory in France.

Every year, 250-odd workers here turned six tonnes of carefully cured leaves into more than 2bn sachets of Lipton and Eléphant brand flavoured and scented teas – lemon, mint, Earl Grey – and soothing herbal infusions: linden, camomile, verbena.

But in September 2010, having spent five years steadily shifting half the factory’s production to Poland, its owner, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever, summarily announced it was closing the site.

“It was … shocking,” said Olivier Lerberquier, a CGT union convenor at the factory. “Unilever France had just paid a huge dividend to shareholders. Fralib, this place, was profitable, even at half capacity. We decided to fight.”

It has been, by any standards, a long battle, but it seems nearly over: next month, 57 ex-Fralib employees, now reformed into a self-managed workers’ co-op, will switch on their machines again, and a factory silent for half a decade will once more produce tea.

Standing four-square in the cavernous main production hall at Gémenos, as long-underemployed operators checked pristine machinery and freshly trained technicians tested new quality-control equipment, Leberquier said few in France would have bet on the factory’s remaining workers getting this far.

“In the end, though, the length of the fight – 1,336 days, it was – almost helped us,” he said. “We got time to build solidarity, and a solid business plan. And even if, like our lawyer says, we’re now ‘condemned to succeed’, at least we know, for sure, that we have as good a chance as anyone.”

The workers also got money. Unilever submitted four successive redundancy plans for the 182 people still employed at Fralib in 2010. All – including one proposal to relocate to Poland on an annual salary of €6,000 – were thrown out by the employment tribunal in Marseille.

While more than half the workers, exhausted, eventually accepted a payoff, those who held out to the end were rewarded: first, the greater Marseille authority, keen to preserve jobs, agreed to buy the factory site from Unilever for €5m and pay a symbolic extra euro for the machinery. Then in June last year, the company agreed a remarkable €20m settlement to cover compensation for all unpaid wages, retraining, market research, brand promotion – and €1.5m of startup capital for the new business.

“I won’t lie – it was hard,” said Xavier Imbernou, a machine operator retraining in quality control and food safety. “We went months without pay; dug deep into our savings. Whole families suffered. But we had such support, from around the country. Our struggle became symbolic.”

Marie Sasso, who has been filling little sachets with Eléphant tea – the brand was first made near Marseille St Charles station in 1896 – since she was 17, said she never expected to find herself without a job at 55, “and never for a moment considered not fighting for it”.

She said she was “counting the days till the machines restart. All this time we’ve been maintaining them, running them once a month to see they’re working. This time, when they start, it’ll be for us. No bosses. That’s what kept us going.”

The Société Coopérative et Participative Thés et Infusions, or SCOP-TI, as the new venture is known, failed in two of its early objectives: Unilever rejected its suggestion that the factory continue to supply it with bulk tea on contract, and it refused to surrender the Eléphant brand.

“We had to rethink, radically,” said Leberquier. The co-op’s new plan has it processing 350 tonnes of tea and infusions this year and 500-600 tonnes by 2017: enough to pay its members a fair wage. It is negotiating contracts with French supermarkets to supply fairtrade teas under their own labels, but is also developing a more upmarket own-brand range. “These are premium, organic, local or regional products,” said Leberquier.

“The south of France used to produce 400 tonnes of linden a year; now it mostly comes from Latin America and the harvest here is barely 15 tonnes a year. We’ve already signed deals that will bring Provençal orchards back to life.”

The former Fralib workers’ road to self-management has involved almost everyone learning something new. “You have to realise: we did production,” said Gerard Cazorla, 57, along with Leberquier a leading light in the struggle, and recently elected president of the co-op. “Purchasing, transport, marketing, sales, distribution – all of that was Unilever’s responsibility.” Roles have been decided “democratically, and actually quite naturally”, he said, through a horizontal structure of frequent general assemblies and an elected (and instantly dismissable) 11-person managing board.

Some debates – salaries all equal or reflecting professional expertise? – have been tougher than others, Cazorla conceded. And the more militant members of the new co-operative – among them, he would be the first to admit, himself – have had to adjust to some uncomfortable realities.

There was disquiet, for example, at the necessity of working directly with France’s famously ruthless big supermarket chains, and soul-searching at the prospect of a self-employed sales team working essentially on commission. “We have to be pragmatic,” Cazorla said. “Sometimes I have to take my union cap off. We have a big factory to run and 60 salaries to pay. We’re not going to change society. There’s still going to be capitalism. But we try to do what we’re doing as best we can, and according to our values.”

Continue to Read the Full Original Article – http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/01/may-day-workers-of-the-world-unite-and-take-over-their-factories

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