How do you role-model a democratic workplace?

This was the question on Austen Cordasco’s mind as he set out to integrate new technology to improve decision-making within Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN).

Purpose and community

For more than 30 years, CAN, a workers’ co-op, has catalysed the movement of cooperatives and social enterprises across the UK, helping people work better together through principles of democracy, autonomy, and concern for community.

As a visionary organization committed to empowering and supporting other co-ops, it is important to CAN that they effectively role-model an “active democracy”, where their workers have a voice.

How do we move forward together?

However, as the organization grew, this was proving to be difficult. CAN’s team is geographically distributed across the UK and the time delay in-between meetings, combined with the chaotic nature of email, was leading to big losses.

Austen, a Director and Worker-Owner of CAN saw an opportunity for their board of directors to be more effective and efficient by adopting an online decision-making tool to aid with governance. They chose Loomio.

The power of making decisions online

“Quality of directorship is dependent on the quality of decisions we make, so Loomio has been game-changing for us,” says Austen.

Using Loomio helps CAN to do their decision-making online and organize different threads of conversation, while Loomio’s proposal tool helps CAN move conversations to clear outcomes, creating shared understanding and impact.

Austen adds that using Loomio enables CAN to “effectively have a director’s meeting open all the time,” which not only increases productivity, but also saves money for the organization.

“Our board group has been particularly transformative, enabling continuous governance, improving response times and increasing our agility, resilience and sustainability… Loomio saves us thousands of pounds every year” —Austen Cordasco

More effective co-ops in the UK and beyond

Overall, incorporating Loomio into their company toolbox significantly improves the speed and efficiency of their working together. Undoubtedly, as CAN becomes more agile in their decision-making, they will be able to help even more organizations in the UK put purpose and community at the heart of their work.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight, John Gieryn. You can see the original post here! and learn more about CAN on their website.

The post Helping UK cooperatives thrive appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Labour market trends that assess who is most impacted by precarious work all show up the same patterns; these folks are black and brown, often women, and often working class. Precarious work includes digital apps such as Uber, abuse of zero-hour contracts, or those most at risk from losing a job due to automation. As this ‘new economy’ thrives, we need to be aware that race inequality will worsen because white supremacy is a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism. This article suggests seven concrete steps that progressives can take towards a genuinely new and transformative economy for all workers. 

Play the race card 

Our economic system inherently disadvantages marginalised groups, and this trend is consistent through history. To better understand why this happens, we need to consciously develop a deeper analysis of the problem we are trying to address. In this case, how are Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers impacted by the rise of precarious work practices? 

Research conducted by the Resolution Foundation think tank shows that ‘minority ethnic’ families currently earn nearly £9000 a year less than their white British counterparts. This is supported further by the tuc’s Insecure Work and Ethnicity report that identified one in every 13 BAME workers were in insecure employment, compared to one in 20 for white workers. The same report also identifies that of the 3.1 million BAME workers in the UK, nearly a quarter were in insecure work or were likely to be underemployed. Additionally, the number of BAME workers in insecure jobs rose by 2% in five years, whilst the number of white workers remained the same. 

Wages and earnings aren’t the only issues here. Precarious work is often not a choice, but a result of systemic racism in which BAME workers find it harder to access stable employment. In addition, expecting digital platforms to deliver some utopian democracy ignores the reality of white supremacy. When your customer base is largely white affluent middle class, this plays into the race and class power dynamic, sometimes influencing who gets chosen for work. And as independent contractors, these workers are also at risk of abuse or attacks with very little protection. And in a society where the new norms are xenophobic rhetoric and hate crime, this leaves many unsupported workers vulnerable to discrimination, hurt, and shame. 

If you need any more evidence on the broader systemic failures around employment and work, the Race Disparity Audit commissioned by the government offers a sobering and heartbreaking reality check on the lived experience of the BAME population in the workplace. What is important to take away from this evidence is that marginalisation of communities is active, not passive. There are multiple systems at play that are responsible for race inequality; white supremacy, elitism, and patriarchy to name but a few. 

Decolonise economics 

How is this data shaped by the characteristics of neoliberal capitalism? For this we need to look to the origins of capitalism as an economic model and, as a result, how deep white supremacy is embedded in the functions of our society – even today. 

Many people argue that the modern economy has brought us substantial material benefits, better rights for workers, and flexibility in work practices. Whilst this may be the case, these benefits have, by design, been disproportionately distributed amongst a privileged few. For the global majority (non-white people/people of colour), capitalism is a system that is historically tied to colonialism and racism. Colonialism is a project that led to the demolition of sacred land and cultures, extraction of natural resources, sale of black bodies as property, and sent brown bodies to war for the British Empire. 

The colonial mindset continues to this day and is justified by the pursuit of economic growth that is centred around white superiority. We can connect capitalism with white supremacy, and come to understand racism as the tool by which white European colonisers wielded economic power over large parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Well known critical race theorist F.L. Ansley helps us understand the colonial mindset here:

By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

500 years of colonial rule and settler colonialism has created an economy so entrenched in systems of oppression that we must connect this to the reality of inequality today. In Britain, a colonial mindset dominates the way institutions control our media, legal system, education, financing and policing, and the way we respond to them. As a result, white supremacy is normalised as an invisible force that is subtle and powerful. The evidence for structural racism is clear, and the only justification that is viable is the lasting legacy of white supremacy. Future alternatives to neoliberalism need to be informed by confronting our economic history of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism. 

How to centre race in the new economy

Neoliberalism is a particularly vicious form of capitalism that has destroyed so much of the fabric of our society, including public services, decent housing, and stable employment. No one should be surprised that BAME workers are the first to be impacted by precarious work. If anything, it is evidence that neoliberal capitalism is functioning as intended: through the exploitation of people of colour. In responding to this, however, we cannot escape the rapid development of technology and the way this is reshaping our work practices. Wage equality and workers rights can only be realised if we centre the BAME community at the heart of our efforts to build alternatives, so that we can truly challenge the foundations of neoliberal capitalism. We can do this in many ways. 

Stronger movements

In the past century, people of colour in Britain have fought for equal rights alongside white-centred movements, be it through the Suffragettes or labour strikes. They’ve done this in the margins, achieving part but not all of the rights that have been afforded to their white British counterparts. By centreing the lived experience of BAME workers in all our actions, be it labour strikes, protests, or workplace organising, we can be sure to attend to those that are feeling the impact of the gig-economy now, not just the fear of it hitting us in the future. Investigate which sectors are predominantly BAME in identity, and understand their concerns, and do this without essentialising or tokenism of any one identity. Use your time to follow groups such as Hotel Workers Branch and Justice for Domestic Workers, and interrogate campaigns that are whitewashed or lack depth and integrity. 

Intersectional analysis

In our work, we need to recognise the overlapping – or intersecting – nature of discrimination that plays a role in our understanding of wage inequality. In this article I’ve concentrated on ‘people of colour’ as one group without doing the necessary work of breaking this down into gender, ability, class, sexuality, migration status and the many other social factors that influence how society influences the workplace. Uncovering this evidence will open our eyes to the reality of inequality, and a deeper understanding of the structure of the economy. Be mindful that using intersectionality as a tool to better understand different lived experiences does not absolve us of our privilege and the work we need to do on ourselves. 

Challenging narratives

An intersectional analysis also allows us to challenge ideas that are designed to divide us. An example of this is the widespread use of the term ‘white working-class’, which routinely excludes the reality of black, brown and Asian working class communities in Britain. Evidence consistently shows that a higher percentage of the BAME community are working class when compared to the white British population. Let’s also challenge the narrative of ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ that comes from a Eurocentric view of our globalised world. Whilst I have embraced this terminology in this article, a vision for a new economy should use terms such as people of global majority, people from formerly colonised nations, or people of colour in order to free us from our colonial mindset. 

Relevant alternatives

The progressive ‘new economy’ scene in the UK is full of ideas for alternative practices to neoliberalism when it comes to work and wages. Consider ‘new economy’ projects that build co-operatives or use the gift economy. They are often designed for a lived experience that is so disconnected from those who need it, it renders them inaccessible and irrelevant to the broader goal of economic systems change. The irony here is that many of the alternatives are rooted in a non-European indigenous history, and have been appropriated by those who already have social power. When designing alternatives, take inspiration from some excellent organisations who are decolonising these ideas to make them work for black and brown communities. Explore why Black Lives Matter adopted Universal Basic Income as a central demand in their manifesto, and how one black community in Jackson, Mississippi is using technology and data to reinvent their local economy. 

So, ask yourself now “where is this work happening in the UK, and who knows about it?” We all want to commit to building a new economy that works for everyone. To do so we need to get our analysis clear, and recognise that capitalism will always be one step ahead of us unless we are willing to centre people of colour in the solutions we build.

If we do so, we will have built the foundations for alternatives that are powerful enough to uproot neoliberal capitalism for good. If we don’t then the ‘new economy’ will be little more than the successor to what we already have.

Gurpreet Bola is an organiser, trainer, researcher, and writer. She is committed to political and social systems change. Her economic analysis has supported activists to identify the root cause of social inequalities and oppression.

This is a print first feature published in STIR magazine.

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Watch the video if you haven’t already and visit our site for further info:
www.we-guild.co.uk

Remember that it’s a project in the making and it needs your support! So you can help make it happen by doing all that social media stuff (liking, following and especially sharing it!) and join the mailing list.
Or if you can think of other ways to support us we’d love to hear from you.

Let’s make We-Guild happen!

Reposted from  We-Guild’s website

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Wed 21 November 2018, 18:15 – 20:30 GMT

Makespace Oxford: 1 Aristotle Lane, Oxford OX2 6TP, United Kingdom

REGISTER HERE

Building upon Shareable’s years of experience covering the ‘sharing ecosystem’ and the 137 model policies and case studies curated for the new book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” Tom Llewellyn, strategic partnerships director of Shareable, will show how the real sharing economy is already connecting people together, empowering community-led disaster recovery efforts, and working under the radar to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Tom Llewellyn is a lifelong sharer, commoner, and storyteller who travels the globe inspiring and empowering communities to share for a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world. He’s the Strategic Partnerships Director for Shareable.net, executive producer and host of the podcast documentary series The Response, and co-editor of the book “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons”.

Following the presentation, attendees will participate in an interactive ‘World Café’ style discussion, working together to evaluate Oxford by exploring the state of things, the available resources, the needs of residents, and what the steps might be to meet those needs together.

This workshop is for anyone interested in exploring how we might activate Oxford’s urban commons together to address some of our city’s most pressing needs. Please bring your enthusiasm, ideas, and any examples of projects you’re already aware of to share and connect with others.

This event is in partnership with the Solidarity Economy Association, an Oxford-based organisation supporting the growth of the UK’s solidarity economy through education, research, and awareness raising projects. The solidarity economy is made up of grassroots organisations, informal meetings, local community groups, co-operatives, associations and networks of organisations in every sector of our economy. They have been created to meet a need within their community, or broader society, that isn’t being met by our mainstream economy, or because those needs are being met in unethical or unsustainable ways. These initiatives all share a set of values that include equal decision-making, equity, sustainability, pluralism, and solidarity, and they are working towards a just and sustainable world, one that puts the real needs of people and our planet first.

The post Sharing Oxford – Activating our Urban Commons with Tom Llewellyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.

LAUNCHING FOR ADMISSION SEPTEMBER 2018
MA: Design for Cultural Commons – The Cass (London Metropolitan University)

Although a movement and a model of practice there are few courses dedicated to the Commons and even fewer for Cultural Commons. This course is not only to reward you with a post graduate qualification but also to support the movement of the commons through expanding its practitioners and its network. The course is 1 year full time and 2 years part-time (the part-time route allows you to work to earn money and set up your future organisation)

What are Commons and why relevant today:

The Commons discourse is informed by ideas, which have been around for hundreds of years. In current context of much inequality, the Commons discourse offers alternatives and models of sharing. Commons are about the assets that everyone should have the right to, forming resources that should benefit all, rather than being enclosed to just a few.

What you achieve:

In this course you’ll learn how resources are shared, protected, reclaimed, created, governed, used and distributed without overuse and abuse.You will create and develop a live project (anything from a novel to a supermarket) for your new operating organisation. The organisation will be formed, it’s governance designed, its financial structure set out and all policies written using Commoning as a model.

You will gain expertise in applying creative thinking towards asset sharing, mutual resources, self-governance and peer to peer economic models. Collaborating with cultural institutions and government agencies which we will facilitate, will enable you to develop related policies, projects, collaborations and open up new networks to position your Commons organisation. In the UK, co-production is being referred to in some government policies and tenders and the commons have been discussed in policies in the EU parliament. Beyond teaching you to initiate your commons projects and practice, you’ll learn how to raise funds, and make your common sustainable in the long term. On completion of the course, students will have an operational practice/organisation. There will be an array of optional modules, ranging from comparative public policy to social theories and citizenship, micro-economies and digital media. This is complemented with art and design teaching, visual communication and performance to architecture and photography. There is the opportunity to tailor your learning and construct your own unique curriculum.

If you are interested in the MA or wish to join the mailing list for talks, events on Commons contact tDOTkhonsariATlondonmetDOTacDOTuk

Apply by following the link: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/design-for-cultural-commons—ma/

The post Last Call: Applications due Sept 18! MA, Design for Cultural Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Aaron Fernando: On July 3, the Co-operative Party in the U.K. launched a report at parliament outlining a strategy to double the size of the U.K.’s cooperative sector by 2030. The report, written by the think tank New Economics Foundation (NEF), was commissioned by the Co-operative Party and comprises a vision of the party’s goals. The report, titled “Co-Operatives Unleashed” reviews the current state of the co-op sector in the U.K., features case studies from other European nations, provides a snapshot of existing hurdles for the co-op sector, and offers policy recommendations for advancing this sector.

The report outlines the economic benefits of economies with healthy co-operative sectors. It cites statistics showing that co-ops have a 25 percent higher chance of surviving their first three years of operation than conventional businesses. They also have lower staff turnover and  lower pay inequality. The report notes that “the five largest co-operatives paid 50 percent more corporate tax than Amazon, Facebook, Apple, eBay and Starbucks combined.” In 2017, the U.K. had approximately 6,000 co-ops with 13.6 million members — lagging well behind most other OECD countries, according to the report. Meanwhile, workers in the U.K. have seen wages stagnate for 150 years and any economic growth has mainly benefitted a very small portion of the population, the report notes.

Yet “Co-Operatives Unleashed” stops short of advocating for co-ops as a total replacement for traditional businesses, and acknowledges that co-ops can face issues regarding scaling and may not be suited for “sectors involving high capital intensity… due to the higher cost and risks that members would bear.” Rather, the report advocates that co-ops should function as complement to traditional businesses. “When you look at the UK economy in light of Brexit and the challenges faced in the U.K. economy, a lot of those problems are symptoms for the fact that in the U.K. there isn’t a strong enough mix of different types of ownership,” says Ben West, communications officer with the UK Co-operative Party.

The UK Co-operative Party was founded a little over a century ago in 1917. A decade later it entered into an electoral pact with the Labour Party, agreeing not to run candidates against each other and sometimes running joint candidates under the Labour and Co-operative banner, says West.

Under this alliance, the 2017 Labour Party Manifesto contained the express commitment “to double the size of the co-operative sector in the UK,” the detailed strategy of which is laid out in this report. Though Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, is currently the opposition, “this piece of work is saying that if a future government of whatever party wanted to take on that commitment and make it happen, [these] would the steps be in order to actually deliver that,” West says.

It is noted in the report that the governments of counties with highly-developed cooperative sectors are obligated to recognize and promote co-operative businesses just as they would traditional enterprises — and that the same practices should be adopted in the U.K.

“When you look at other European countries, within their economies, a lot of their success is that there’s a really broad mix of different ownership types,” West says, citing the German energy and banking sectors specifically, where there is a mix of municipal entities, private firms, and socially-owned cooperatives.

The report puts forth a specific strategy of five interlocking steps for achieving this goal in the given timeframe:

1. A new legal framework for co-operatives

2. Finance that serves the co-operative agenda

3. Deepening co-operative capabilities through a Co‐operative Development Agency

4. Transforming business ownership

5. Accelerating community wealth building initiatives

These steps include the development of a legal framework which supports the development of future cooperatives and removes disincentives for cooperative growth. Specifically, this would involve the creation of legal structures, financial instruments, and mechanisms that co-ops can choose to use which would allow them to do things like lock in assets and wealth earned in the co-operative economy so that it stays in the cooperative economy.

Another strategy involves legally formalizing the ability for employees to buy existing businesses and transform them into co-ops. According to figures in the report, there are approximately 120,000 family-run small and medium enterprises that will undergo an ownership transfer in the next three years. If only 5 percent of those businesses transition into some form of co-operative model, the U.K.’s cooperative sector would double in size. As such, one of the strategies involves streamlining this type of transition.

Other policy recommendations in the report include technical support and information sharing for the sector, tax advantages for cooperative businesses, and the establishment of a National Investment Bank with “a mandate to supply patient risk capital specifically to the co-operative mutual and social enterprise sector.”

The strategy is multifaceted and ambitious, but the goal is for it to take place gradually over the next twelve years. “The mission now is as it was in the beginning: to stand up for the interests of the co-operatives that exist in the U.K., where there are laws that are holding back their expansion,” West says. “We want to create a favorable environment for cooperatives.”

The full report is available here.

Header image is screenshot from the report.

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Her commitment is to grassroots politics that release the power of people and communities in ways that sustain the planet.

She is concurrently a journalist (The Guardian, Huffington Post), a psychotherapist (Human Givens Institute), founder of the Soft Power Network (consulting to Finnish, Brazilian, Danish and British governments), Buddhist, Futurist, School Governor and Mother.

Recent publications include Is The Party Over? and New Times, and e-book Soft Power Agenda.

Indra launched The Alternative UK together with author and musician Pat Kane in March 2017 with the support of Uffe Elbaek, leader of Alternativet, the fastest growing party in Denmark with 10 seats in Parliament after only five years.

A/UK produces a Daily Alternative of global socio-political initiatives, together with a weekly editorial which joins the dots of personal, social and global innovation – I, We and World. Together with artists, musicians and technologists of all kinds, they also design and host political laboratories which ‘enliven’ community meaning and belonging and reconnect people with their power and purpose at a local, municipal and regional level.

These laboratory processes give rise to citizens networks that develop culture and practice for the community, eventually giving rise to policy which will shape a living manifesto at the national level.

@indraadnan, @AlterUK21

The post Indra Adnan On Is Politics Broken? (And Here Is The Alternative) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Julia Toynbee Lagoutte and Samir Jeraj discuss housing rights in the UK.

The pitter patter of a keyboard hums in the dust-speckled London space. Two tattered sofas in the corner are dwarfed by 70 square metres of open office space. Matthew, a thirtysomething freelance documentary film-maker, is working from home. One floor down, along from an old reception area, is a makeshift kitchen shared with 12 other people. Matthew is a property guardian, one of many thousands living in European cities such as London. Property guardianship started out in the 1990s in the Netherlands as ‘Anti-Kraak’ (anti-squat), a way to counter squatting. The owner of a building would employ a company to manage the building until it was sold, demolished, or redeveloped. That company would find people – often students and artists who needed cheap living and working space – to live in the building for below market rents and very short-notice agreements. The building would remain occupied, and thus secured against squatting. Some of these companies are set up for the sole purpose of property guardianship while for others property guardianship is one option in their portfolio of security measures. These businesses have since spread from the Netherlands to other parts of Europe; industry pioneer Camelot Europe has offices in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, and France.

Whilst initially seen as a marginal and stopgap solution for students or artists, property guardianship in London and elsewhere has become increasingly normalised, formalised, and expensive. Amidst the largely positive press, criticisms from lawyers and guardians themselves have joined those of squatter and housing organisations, pointing out that the legal grey area guardians occupy – as neither security guards nor tenants – opens the door wide open to exploitation of this new class of ‘sub-tenants’. On top on this, this practice represents a symptom of a problem; a symptom that has managed to market itself as a solution.

Where are my rights?

Property guardians in the UK are legally classed as ‘licensees’, not tenants (they pay a ‘license fee’, rather than rent). They are not protected by tenant rights, such as those regarding privacy and tenure. The average contract between a guardian and the property guardianship company would include: the right for the company to visit all areas of the property at any time without warning; no pets or children (even to stay one night); no guests in the building without the guardian present. Some properties are not subject to HMO (houses of multiple occupancy) laws about about how many toilets and showers are needed for a certain number of people, for example*. In one old doctor’s surgery in South London, nine guardians shared one shower and one kitchen. Many properties don’t have internet or phone lines and often guardians are not allowed to install washing machines or ovens – the short notice period means this is often not worth the cost anyway. The deposit guardians have to give to their property guardianship company (up to 800 pounds) is not legally protected, and companies such as Camelot are notoriously bad at returning them. Initially, guardians were given as little as 24 hours to move out but this has increased to 28 days after lawyers highlighted this was not legal. Many contracts also prevent guardians from speaking to the media about their experience.

In order to legally protect themselves from having to provide tenants’ rights, property guardianship companies ensure guardians cannot claim ‘exclusive access to a space’, one of the key conditions of being a tenant. This they do through unannounced visits to the guardians’ rooms whenever they want, often once or twice a month. Mirela, a mental health nurse from Romania, explained, “I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger coming in my room and finding a note when I come back. Someone has been here. I feel like my space is invaded and also because I’m quite tidy I wouldn’t like people to know if I have clothes around. I’m paying, at least give me my privacy.”

Guardians are not protected from sudden rent hikes: one morning Matthew received an email informing him his monthly ‘fee’ would increase from 350 to 550 pounds the following month. Guardians have no idea whether they will stay 28 days or three years in a place. Alice, an archaeology graduate working in tourism, was given notice to leave within two weeks of moving into a new place, shouldering time and financial burdens that she could ill afford. The lack of security built into being a guardian affects their homemaking; they tend to make less effort or have less furniture and a more makeshift and temporary feeling leads to many never really feeling at home, even after years of inhabiting a place (especially knowing a stranger could enter at any moment). This is particularly visible in larger properties – such as ex-care homes or old office buildings – with locks on cupboards, new guardians coming and going without input from other residents, and the anonymous feel of a hostel.

Many guardians report feeling anxious about the possibility of having to move on and uncomfortable with the lack of privacy and rights. Alice remarked of living in a property guardianship that “I didn’t feel secure, I never felt stable.”

Pop-up people

Looking at the characteristics required of a guardian, we can begin to see how property guardianship represents an extension of deeper contemporary socio-economic trends into the area of housing. For the characteristics required of them – reliable, flexible, disposable – are also those of the growing group of people who make up what economist Guy Standing has dubbed the ‘precariat’. For this ‘class-in-the-making’, work is increasingly precarious, short-term, and flexible. The rise of zero-hour contracts exemplifies this: in the UK today there are 1.7 million zero-hour contracts, making up 6 per cent of all employment contracts. This is four times higher than in 2000.

This shift towards temporary jobs and being ‘independent contractors’ underpins what many have called the ‘sharing economy’ but in reality is better described by the term the ‘access economy’. This includes platforms that enable people to monetise temporary access to their assets – such as their property (Airbnb) or their cars (Uber and Lyft) – and platforms that just connect service users with service providers, such as Deliveroo. Property guardianship as a platform linking service users with service providers to extract money from the use of temporarily empty properties, and the provision of this service by people on insecure and right-less contracts, is the epitome of these processes. It is a new manifestation of these under-the-surface dynamics that foster ever more imaginative efforts to bring new areas into the market and extract profit from them; bringing it to a level at which even the spaces in between the owner’s usage – when assets are apparently unused – can be used to extract money. In a new twist, guardians also pay for the privilege of providing the service of guarding properties.

The rights of the ‘pop-up people’ who maintain these new structures have been watered down if not dissolved. Just as guardians don’t have tenants’ rights, Uber drivers or Deliveroo couriers as independent contractors shoulder the financial investments and risks of their trade and don’t have rights such as sick pay or insurance. Just as Uber doesn’t have the responsibilities towards its drivers that taxi companies do towards theirs, property guardianship companies do not have the same obligations towards their guardians as a landlady towards her tenants.

What this represents in the broader picture is the creation of new structures of work and living which appear the same as before, but lack the same rights and protection and require a huge level of flexibility and insecurity of the person providing the service. Property guardianship represents the creeping of these processes of flexibilisation, precarity, and decreased rights into the new area of housing. In this scheme, which seems more emblematic of neoliberal logics the more one learns about it, housing becomes a by-product of providing a service, not a right. These pop-up people are also commodified as products as well as service users: guardians’ bodies are effectively replacing infrastructure (security companies would previously have boarded up the buildings and installed CCTV). Guardians like Matthew, Alice, and Mirela are also products marketed to property owners; “we provide reliable and trustworthy guardians”, as Ad Hoc Property Guardians company boasts. Guardians often have to provide references and, in some cases, proof of a social conscience and willingness to invest in the local community (such as with Dotdotdot Property Guardians).

Whose city?

More than most cities in Europe, London shows us how extreme the housing crisis can get. Private renters there spend around 70 per cent of their income on rent, sterile luxury developments are being built in areas once known for being affordable and vibrant, and social housing is being demolished and neglected, and replaced with private housing – with young professionals displacing working-class people who are pushed further and further out. Property guardianship plays a role in facilitating this.

Research by Green London Assembly Member Sian Berry found that 24 out of London’s 32 local governments were using property guardians in their empty properties, with over 1,000 people in over 200 publicly-owned buildings in 2016. East London’s iconic social housing building, Balfron Tower, was recently transferred to a housing association. Since its social residents were moved out in 2014 for so-called ‘refurbishments’ guardians have lived there, and the housing association has now announced it will be renovating the flats with a property developer and selling them on the private market. By preventing neglect and squatting for years, property guardians unwittingly – for they are victims of these same processes – played a role in facilitating its passing from public to private hands, easing the process by allowing the housing association to sit on it without doing anything for several years.

This is actively encouraged by the state – through recent legal changes such as criminalising squatting in residential properties and loosening regulations about changing a building’s use from commercial to residential (to let guardians stay there), as well as the deregulation of the housing market that started under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Almost all properties managed by property guardianship company Ad Hoc are in council-owned estates. Property guardianship also obscures and normalises the fact that there are so many empty houses in cities like London, private as well as council-owned, that have been emptied of residents in order to sell to private developers.

The point here is that property guardianship is not a natural and inevitable consequence of market forces in which people who need housing fit neatly into naturally empty spaces, but is part of a wider process where buildings that are in use are emptied of their residents and turned into vehicles for monumental levels of profit. Its increasing profitability is due to state intervention in some areas – in supporting property owners in extracting more rent from their properties – and the withdrawal of state intervention in others, when it comes to ensuring affordability and protection for tenants.

Whilst some guardians liked the idea of living in large and unusual spaces, most we spoke to were motivated by the high cost of renting. In this situation, renters in London are forced to trade in rights and security by becoming guardians for rents they can afford. And whilst the state is the main engineer of this process, the winners are private actors and companies for whom the London housing market is an increasingly lucrative cash cow – whether by buying up London’s public housing stock and turning it into unaffordable private accommodation or now through property guardianship (Camelot Europe having a yearly turnover of five to six million pounds). This slow takeover of publicly-owned properties and assets by private actors, supported by the state, is a classic feature of neoliberalism and bears out Naomi Klein’s argument that neoliberalism, rather than weakening the state, is highly dependent on it.

Confusing symptom with solution

Property guardianship is a symptom of London’s broken housing market – but its appearance as a win-win solution which both solves the blight of empty properties and provides cheap housing means it is confused by many with the solution. It thus obscures the extent of the problem and provides an excuse for politicians not to act. Owning empty property used to incur costs, but now it is increasingly profitable, and this will surely have an effect on property owners, just as research has shown that Airbnb drives up property prices. Whilst reinforcing the narrative that the ‘invisible hand of the market’ will eventually sort out all problems, property guardianship is actually state-led and it is part of the problem, not the solution – not only that, but it contributes to it, by normalising corporate control of housing, lower tenant rights, and insecurity, by easing the process of gentrification, and masking the extent of the problem. It is a new way of extracting rent from properties, exploiting people like Mirela, Alice, and Matthew’s desperate need for housing in London.

When David Harvey, in his seminal book Rebel Cities, wrote about the city as the factory for a new type of class struggle that would birth real revolutionary movements, he argued that it was against new types of urban rent extraction and human desperation such as property guardianship that these movements would arise. This edition explores how cities foster new forms of political and social experiments – yet these cannot be understood without identifying what they are reacting against. And whilst a key characteristic of the ‘precariat’ – and of guardians – is being fragmented, dispersed, and not rooted anywhere, which makes it harder to organise and demand their rights, groups of urban precariat workers, such as Deliveroo couriers and Uber drivers, are starting to stand up for their rights, as are guardians such as Rex Duis who has published a charter for property guardianship companies.

A recent court case in the British city of Bristol has called into question whether property guardianship will continue in the UK. Regardless of the outcome, this practice has exposed certain processes at play within European cities, such as the tendency to put the needs of corporate actors before even something as basic as the right to decent housing. It raises questions about urban space: how are neoliberal economic processes reshaping and curtailing people’s access to urban space, and how can this access be safeguarded? What will happen to the already feeble political will to solve the deep yet politically resolvable housing crisis of London and other European cities if the expansion of property guardianship is seen as a viable alternative? Instead of being a solution, property guardianship must be a catalyst to examine and respond to the worsening crisis it springs from.

*This article was updated on the 31st January 2018 to reflect new information.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 5th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by diamond geezer

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Join us for this intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and Synergia Institute. This course offers participants a practical guide on how we can shift our economy to put people and planet first This programme brings together international scholars and experts who will explore all key areas of society; food, democracy, housing, social care, the commons and social finance. This course is useful for people involved in developing social enterprises and co-operative organisations, students, activists and academics.

An intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and the Synergia Institute

What is the ethical economy and how does it work?

• Comprehensive exploration of economic democracy and sustainability as viable bases for system change at local, regional and international scales.
• Unique combination of history, theory, and practice.
• Strong focus on personal & professional experience & participation as key elements of the course.

The Synergia Programme will include

The Problematic with John Restakis
How might we frame the historic moment in which we find ourselves from a political economy perspective? This session presents both a historic retrospective on the movement for economic democracy and how the current configuration of global capitalism demands new perspectives, models, and action strategies for change makers world-wide.

The Partner State with John Restakis
The current crisis of the welfare state is the culmination of a process of de legitimation that has been in the making for more than a generation. For many, the very notion of the state as a force for the good is untenable. But is there a way to reclaim and re conceptualize the state as an institution in service to the common good? This session introduces the concept of the Partner State as an extension of the principles that characterize co-operative economic democracy as a political, economic, and social ideal.

Labour and the Precariat with Cilla Ross
With the emergence of revolutionary digital and informatics technologies, traditional forms of labour are rapidly being replaced with the rise of a new class of precarious and atomised work that threatens not only the livelihoods millions but also the very meaning of work itself. This session examines the implications of this revolutionary shift in the forms of labour, what this entails for the well-being of workers, local communities, and society, and how co-operative and human-centred models of work can challenge the dominant paradigm.

The Commons with Michel Bauwens
Over the last decade, the idea of the commons has emerged as a powerful antidote to the prevailing private property and free market notion of how economies, markets, and social relations might be organized. In particular, the rise of digital platforms and the restructuring of online work through the operation of peer-to-peer networks has offered a revolutionary re think of how co-operative and commons-based principles are redefining both economic and societal relations in service to the common good. This session examines what the idea of the commons means for re visioning models of political economy as alternatives to the status quo.

For more information and registration, visit the Shumacher College site

The post The Synergia Programme – Transition To Co-operative Commonwealth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From their website:

“We want a strong, growing and self-reliant network of successful workers’ co-operatives.
We will achieve this by creating a permanent common fund, paid for by members.

• You help SolidFund to strengthen worker co-operative solidarity
• You’re a member of a common wealth resource, paid for by individual and group subscriptions
• You support industrial democracy and collective ownership
• You help SolidFund develop worker co-operative support activities
• You and other members discuss and decide on the Fund’s activities and future growth”

Find out more at their website: https://solidfund.coop

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