1. Could you tell us a bit about your background?

I discovered libertarian socialism as a student at York University in 1976, where I was studying English with the idea of becoming a journalist. The mid-late 70s were a high point of working class confidence in the UK. There was also a government favourable to cooperatives and a rediscovery of ‘common ownership’ of enterprises. The decade between 1975 and 1985 witnessed fast growth in the number of worker cooperatives. By 1985 there were more than 2,000 in the UK. After university I joined one of the many collective publishing and print production projects that had sprung up and organized along cooperative lines.

2. You currently work as Client Services Director at Calverts Cooperative. What is this cooperative about?

Calverts  is a worker-owned creative design studio and print shop. It was founded by seven people in 1977. It was the product of a conflict between employees and manager-owners of a publishing and printing subsidiary of the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. It started as a ‘sweat equity’ common ownership worker cooperative, designing and printing community, union and political publications. I became a member of Calverts in 1985.

Over the years, Calverts grew meeting its members’ evolving needs and aspirations and investing all its surplus in skills and technology development. It is now a leading print house and design studio, working for universities, consumer brands, arts organizations and publishers. It is still, however, also a ‘movement’ resource, often working pro bono for grassroots community organizations with which our members are involved. It has also remained true to its founding principles of equality. Our members are all hourly paid, on the same hourly rate – from the Finance Director to the Cleaner. We have no line managers, working instead as interlinked team circles, with a General Meeting every month. We have a culture of ‘emergent strategy’, and most decisions are made by consensus, using a mixture of sociocratic and devolved process. We try to avoid conventional voting, except when it is required by statute. This efficient and empowering approach is quite common in UK worker cooperatives, which are in the forefront of cooperative democratic innovation.

3. What other activities are you involved in as a co-operator?

Worker cooperatives in the UK fell back after 1985, and by 1999 the sectoral organization – Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) – was no longer viable. In 2000, ICOM merged with the consumer cooperatives’ apex to form a new apex body called Cooperatives UK. At that time I had not really been concerned with the cooperative movement outside worker cooperatives. I participated in a national cooperative congress with the idea of selling Calverts services to other cooperative businesses. The people I met, the friendships I made, and the things I learned at the event made me want to deepen my understanding of cooperatives.

In 2004 I was elected to a policy forum called the Worker Cooperative Council, then served as a board member of Cooperatives UK from 2006 to 2011. By that time, I found out that I was, in effect, already a ‘barefoot’ worker cooperative organizer – because groups would approach Calverts to learn from our experience, with the idea of setting up their own cooperatives, and I would help them. I was also giving presentations on worker cooperation to groups of students, particularly in the creative industries, in the context of the increased social and economic pressure on young workers after the 2008 crisis.

I formalized this in 2012, when I set up Principle Six that provides support and advice on cooperative enterprise development in areas of membership strategy, campaigning, policy, branding, copywriting and editorial and strategic communications. Through Principle Six I became involved with a range of cross-movement bodies, including the board of a specialist cooperative lender (Cooperative and Community Finance ); the London regional cooperative council (Cooperatives London ); a consortium of independent coop business advisers (London Coop Development); and now a crowdsourcing platform for cooperative development (Platform 6 ).

At the moment, I am focussing more energy on grass roots, local and international worker cooperative organizing. I still work part time at Calverts, managing key client accounts and maintaining Calverts links with the wider movement. I also serve as a board member of CECOP , European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives and support its communications team.

4. What do you think are the challenges and opportunities for the cooperative movement? How have you been addressing these challenges within your work?

Growing the cooperative movement is not so much a matter of finding the right formula, but of understanding how changes in the composition of communities, and in the world of work, are producing forms of collective resistance in new places. We need to see where people are already cooperating, using solidarity principles to articulate their demands for a better life, to see how we can connect with them – bringing in the technology of cooperatives, and putting our experiences to work.

This has implications for where we put our limited energy and resources. For me, defending cooperatives is important, but lobbying governments for special treatment is not a core task. Similarly, we might think there are self-evident opportunities for cooperation in (for instance) social care, platform-based businesses, or self-employment – but we will not succeed by offering top-down solutions. We need an agile strategy based on a close analysis of currents for social change, associating with them and investing tactically to see ‘what works’. This is the opposite of formulating grand narratives and strategies, where we propose cooperatives as ‘the answer to everything’. In this spirit, my recent work has been focussed in five main areas.

1) Supporting disaffected young people who are articulating a desire to take control of their situation: I helped with the formation of AltGen, the campaign for youth cooperation, and I also mentor young worker cooperatives in London.

2) Organizing around housing and public space: I work with the London Radical Housing Network  that brings together housing cooperatives, tenants of municipal housing and unions of private sector renters to promote access to decent housing.

3) Creating a better technology sector: Recent technological changes are transforming the world of work. I work with CoTech, a growing network of worker cooperatives providing technology, digital and creative services. The members of the network can use their collective experience, skills, and resources to promote the worker cooperative model that can create better workplaces, better products and better value for customers.

4) Connecting the cooperative movement with organized groups of super-exploited workers and new, small, and industrial unions, to see what scope there is to bring together these different strands of worker cooperation in a productive way.

5) Strengthening the existing network of worker cooperatives, creating accessible resources of knowledge, practical support and funds to spread and deepen cooperation. An example of this is the Worker Coop Solidarity Fund , which has collected more than £120,000 in four years in the form of micro-contributions from individual members and supporters. This means we can independently underwrite small worker cooperative education projects, fund co-learning and mentoring activity, and sometimes just give tiny amounts of money where it will make a difference. One example is that we have been able to sponsor CECOP’s 40th anniversary General Assembly and conference to be held in Manchester, which we hope in turn will result in meaningful conversations and learning between worker and social co-operators in the UK and across Europe.

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Spotlight interviews with cooperators is a series of interviews with cooperative leaders around the world, whom ILO officials have encountered in the course of their work with cooperatives. This article does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Republished from ILO.org

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Siôn Whellens, Co-Founder of the Worker Co-op Solidarity Fund, Dave Boyle, Founder of The Community Shares Company, and Alex Bird, Chair of Co-operatives and Mutuals Wales, leading a practical session on How to start a co-op, covering legal entities, model rules and governing documents.

A hands-on session looking at the various legal models co-ops can take and how easy it is to set up as a co-op, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and access Sion and Alex’s deep knowledge of the UK co-op sector.

Siôn is a member of Calverts, the London branding, design and print co-operative, and a co-op business adviser with Principle Six, a development partnership focusing particularly on workers’ and community co-operatives.

He is a founder member of the Worker Co-operative Solidarity Fund, serves on the Worker Co-operative Council, and represents the UK at CECOP, the European Federation of Co-ops in Industry and Services.

Siôn has also served as a director of Co-operatives UK. He is active in Co-operatives London, the network for all kinds of co-ops in the capital.

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In his recently republished Cooperative Manifesto, Tim Huet explains why he came to the conclusion that ‘There Is No More Important Social Change Work You Can Do Than Cooperative Development’. Huet was one of the first organisers of the Arizmendi Assocation of Cooperatives, which Ed Mayo describes as a great example of coop replication.

For Huet, coops become relevant when they are part of a wider movement against capitalism. They provide answers to ‘the military question’: while closures, crises, strikes, protests and occupations can create the possibility and space for change, how do people self-organise to consolidate that space and expand it, by developing bases of economic and social power?

The difficult question of times

When cooperatives take a great leap forward, it’s usually in times of social crisis. This is when the relevance, necessity and potential of cooperation become clearest to people. In the ‘hungry 1840s’, the Rochdale cooperators’ fifth object was to ‘arrange the powers of production, distribution, education and government’. Providing decent food,  building houses, providing decent work and acquiring land were immediate tasks and also steps towards a hegemonic cooperative commonwealth, to be established ‘as soon as practicable’. Expressed in different language in different times, this is the invariant programme of cooperatives as a movement. So when is ‘practicable’, and what is practical now? These are strategic questions, throwing up yet more questions. What are the possibilities in these times? What resources, self-help and solidarity can we mobilise in this situation?

The political shell

Cooperatives seek to be self-reliant, therefore independent of lobbies and parties that seek to influence through private corporations or state action. The instinct of governments and sectional interests is to enrol, recuperate or suppress autonomous movements, including cooperatives. Coop organisations, therefore, have a strategic defence and propaganda role. In the present time of political turmoil, when parties make policy blandishments towards mutuals and coops, the principle of autonomy guides strategy and tactics. Cooperative movements exercise political ‘neutrality’ in order to maintain strategic freedom to resolve the real questions of social and economic power in favour of people.

Necessity, the mother of cooperation

We cooperate because there is no better or no other way. Meeting peoples’ self-defined needs and aspirations is the relevance test. We know that the movement is re-invented and grows fast in times of widespread social and economic conflict, if people have the means and opportunity to adapt the technology of cooperation. Lancashire in the 1840s, Ireland in the 1890s, post war Italy, Spain in the 1950s, Argentina in the present century.

Change was in the air in the 1970s. A wave of coop formations in the UK and US was inspired by a mix of libertarian socialism, anarchism, anti racism, the rising ecology movement, second wave feminism, community organising and other currents. Cooperatives gave people new infrastructure and tools in a period of social contestation. That wave fell back in the times of reaction which followed, particularly in the 1990s. In that phase, any strategy to rapidly expand coops had its work cut out. So, is now our time?

Of course, we don’t know yet. We know there is social conflict and political disintegration; we know people are in need; that people want change. But are they moving towards self-organised ways and means to get it? Do they have the time, social capital and savings to invest? Are they confident enough? Hindsight is easy, yet experience suggests that productive strategy won’t be a matter of helicoptering legacy coop models onto disparate people and situations, so much as directing solidarity to those expressing a desire to change their situation by acting together, and who feel that change is realistic, possible and necessary, even if they haven’t heard about coops. Where the human and material resources – cooperative capital – come from is another strategic challenge, especially in a country whose coops squandered their assets and failed to invest in the movement for decades.

Strategy has to aim at developing a framework in which cooperators can respond quickly and intelligently to what’s going on around them. Coop advocacy needs to work close to the heat, designing and disseminating relevant information about ‘why’ as well as proposals for ‘how’. Whatever language we use towards governments, policy makers and ‘influencers’, we need authentic language to speak to people. The effort to develop a real, uncompromised cooperative politics is especially urgent in times of cultural dissonance and rampant ideological cretinism.

Not all cooperation is good for you

Not all modes of cooperation are in themselves positive. We can understand the complex cooperation of workers that enables private firms to extract profit, the cooperation of prisoners with their captors, or the enthusiastic collaboration of consumers with extractive platforms, without justifying them as behaviours that meet peoples’ mutually defined needs and aspirations. Cooperative messages have to inspire, but they can’t just be feel good platitudes. They need to express what we cooperate against, as well as for. Our language should be sensitised to the fact that few would-be cooperators want to self-identify as ‘business’ people, for instance. Jargon words like ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ mask mechanisms for increasing inequality and intensifying exploitation. The more we scramble our messages by trying to reclaim alienated vocabulary – perhaps to appear progressive, mainstream or unfrightening – the more we obscure the potential of cooperation as part of a movement for social change and the less relevant coops will seem to people. Good communication is strategic.

Show us the money

If the purpose of the coop movement is to create new cooperators, we can’t be defensive or patronising when they articulate a radical coop vision literally, even bluntly; or when they challenge the coop establishment. They’re correct, if not always polite. Years of work, negotiation and experience may yield useful knowledge and resources, but they don’t confer superior wisdom, ownership of the movement, or special insight into the goals and methods of coop strategy.

In a sense, any new wave of coops and cooperators begins to fail at the point it stops growing and starts consolidating. In movement terms, a coop that disappears is not necessarily a failure, and coops that go on forever are not all successes. Whether they go back 20 or 150 years, established coops tend to make their peace. They mutate from radical groups, to incorporated bodies, to businesses; move from meeting needs and aspirations, to hitting commercial targets; from self-help to charity. This is predictable. You can create coops, but you can’t make a commonwealth one coop at a time. Raising the game of intercooperation is strategic.

Strategy should to seek to update and adapt the coop development repertoire in response to times and situations. We should be open to the new, the unfamiliar, and the alarming. Strengthening established coops should be an object of strategy, where those coops are able to renew themselves and contribute to the renewal of the movement. In this wider renewal, younger generations often do the heavy lifting. They articulate new needs and aspirations, or old needs and aspirations in a new context. They put in the sweat equity. Many new coops are proposed or advised by old hands, and helping new cooperators make the right alliances and avoid old traps is vital. Yet we should not be in the business of judging whether there is a ‘market’ for their ideas and approaches. Coop renewal often means attempting things that are impossible, according to received wisdom. This is part of coop realism.

We will need to engage with many projects that don’t develop, to find the ones that could change everything. New cooperators are often our most passionate and connected advocates. In the recent uptick of formations in London and in the tech community, for instance, coop methods are being used by social activists contesting the use and ownership of new technologies; looking for new ways to combat exploitation; defending the commons; combatting fuel poverty; resisting landlords; radicalising food culture and politicising cultural work. Their views about the utility of what worked for people five, thirty or a hundred years ago are respectful and open, but critical. They look beyond the formal movement, and beyond the UK, for ideas and inspiration. The dimensions of the social crisis are global and local, rather than national. Deepening cooperative internationalism, and looking beyond the existing legal and national frameworks, are strategic for local development.

The places to look for the next wave of cooperators are all around us, if we’re willing to engage. The next game-changing coops may be on the verge of coming into existence.

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