The following commentary is not the official position of the IWW (we have not yet issued a formal position on collectives and cooperatives). It is written by member x344543 in order to offer one opinion on why it is in the best interest of workers in collectives and cooperatives to join the IWW.
Workers in Collectives and Workers' Cooperatives often ask why they should join the IWW when they are already a member of a collective or cooperative.
The clue lies in the two a priori assumptions contained in the question:
(1) that collectives and/or cooperatives are somehow more revolutionary than the IWW; and
(2) that collectives and/or cooperatives are somehow incompatible with the IWW.
Neither assumption is necessarily true. This page deals with the myths contained in both assumptions
In order to debunk these myths it is first necessary to distinguish between the different types of localized "employee ownership". There are four or five different entities that often get mistaken for the same thing:
(1) Workers' Collective - A business where each member of the collective has (in theory) equal voting power and all significant decisions are made by consensus or majority vote. Members in workers' collectives are welcome to join the IWW under certain conditions.
(2) Workers' Cooperative - A business where each workers has some degree of voting power, but it is not equally distributed among all workers and decisions are made by an elected board of directors. Workers that do not have executive power in these organizations are welcome to join the IWW, but the elected board is part of the employing class and therefore not allowed to join.
The substance of this page deals with these first two entities. The following are also sometimes included in the discussion. . .
(3) Consumer Cooperative - A business where the consumers can buy shares in the corporation by becoming dues paying members of the cooperative, where the directors are elected by the consumers (or at least by the consumers who have majority voting power) and they make all the decisions. Workers employed by such organizations are just workers; they are welcome to join the IWW and they have the power to organize union just as they would in any other workplace.
(4) Employee Stock Ownership Programs (ESOP) - A business set up essentially the same as a corporation where some of the workers are encouraged to purchase stock in lieu of receiving higher wages and benefits because (in theory) ownership of company stock serves as an incentive to improve individual performance. In such organizations, rank and file workers have little if any collective power (ESOPs are essentially schemes to prevent unionization and collective action from workers). As such, rank & file members are allowed to join the IWW.
(5) Volunteer Collective - An organization that sometimes is a marginal business but needn't be anything more than a political organization where there are no paid workers. While individual members of these organizations may be allowed to join the IWW, unless the organization plans to become a collective business where members are paid a wage, it wouldn't be eligible for IWW Shop Status, because it is not actually functioning as an economic industrial unit.
. . .however, in each case these are not attempts at egalitarian, business incorporations, and so the rest of this page does not concern them.
Why do we need a union, when we're already a collective? Why Indeed. This question gets asked quite a lot. Here's why:
Collectives are not inherently revolutionary. Most contemporary advocates of collectives confuse the slogan "Abolish Wage Slavery" with the more contemporary slogan "Fire Your Boss". On top of that, contemporary anarchist organizational theory favors completely autonomous collectives with no central coordination (other than barely functional and rudimentary ad hoc process). Central coordination is rejected as being authoritarian (because democratically elected central coordination is often confused with centralized power). However this is incredibly short sighted thinking. Consider these external factors:
(1) It is not just the boss that we seek to overthrow, but the entire capitalist class. One can't just do this on a shop-by-shop basis, because the employing class controls most of the market share and therefore sets the economic conditions in which collectives have to compete. They also pass laws favoring big corporations and discouraging small businesses.
(2) Workers gain collective power not from isolating themselves from other workers in small autonomous units, but rather by organizing large industrial based organizations (with local autonomy over purely internal issues, but democratic federalism over issues that extend beyond the internal matters).
(3) Members of Collectives often do not consider how their actions affect other workers in the same industry. For example, a collective, with no boss, might pay each of its workers $12 an hour, seek to expand by moving to a bigger building in the same neighborhood where a private business in the same industry employs unionized workers making $15 an hour plus benefits. If the collective drives the other store out of business, it has actually negatively affected the working class and advanced the causes of the employing class! This has actually happened on occasion. The members of collective probably had no intention of doing this, but--isolated from the rest of the working class--their focus is entirely self important.
(4) Collectives often try to be political, engaging in political actions such as boycotts of a particular product, but often market forces make this impossible and this leads to cynicism within the collective and the breakdown of the collective ideal. The reason this happens is because small isolated boycotts have no power. Collectives would have more power in engaging in such boycotts if the workers were aligned with other workers in the same industry whether they were in collectives or not.
(5) Collectives sometimes join networks of workers' collectives, but these have limited power themselves, because workers' collectives are rare and though the collectives can provide each other with mutual aid, the focus is still limited, usually to a geographic area (not anywhere as big as the market share of the corporations seeking to drive them out of business), and of course there is no strong concentration in any given industry.
(6) Historically Workers Collectives alone are not enough to bring about revolution. For example, the closest example of a workers' revolution involving collectives is the Spanish Revolution of 1936. But there it was not collectives that brought about the revolution but rather the revolution that brought about the collectives. Workers in private businesses joined the revolutionary CNT which had a few collectives and some self employed workers. Together they pushed and rode the revolutionary wave that resulted in the overthrow of the liberal capitalist government. After that, many of the shops collectivized. In other words, it was the class struggle of the militant, radical CNT union that sparked the revolution. No economic revolution has EVER been organized by workers' collectives alone.
(7) The idea of all shops being workers' collectives has its roots in the Anarchist, Pierre Proudhon. But his ideas are only appropriate for the mid to late 18th century--long before the advent of multinational corporations and large industrial structures. Most anarchists that followed Proudhon realized that his vision was limited. It's only in post 1960s America that these ideas and this history has been lost.
In every case if the collective or workers' cooperative were organized by a radical union, such as the IWW, it could answer the challenges posed to it they simply cannot face alone.
The ideas that collectives and workers cooperatives are more revolutionary than revolutionary unions is pure nonsense!
The opposite is actually the truth. Radical unions like the IWW are in fact the best defense against the degradation of the progressive ideals that challenges most workers' cooperatives and collectives.
There are internal factors that degrade the revolutionary potential of collectives:
(1) Collectives are often founded by people with noble, even revolutionary ideals, but they often assume that everyone they hire will share that vision or that the collective structure is enough to ensure that all future hires will "get it". This almost never happens of course, mainly due to the external factors, but also some unavoidable internal problems.
(2) There are really four to six types of workers in a typical collective:
(A) Founders and those that share the revolutionary vision of the founders;
(B) People who get a job working there because it is available;
(C) People who get a job there because they know it will be easy and they can therefore slack off;
(D) People who get a job there who are class conscious workers who know that collectives are not inherently revolutionary (though these are rare, because collectives tend to have a cult like mentality and they have a way of preventing these types from being hired);
(E) People who get a job there because they are ambitious entrepreneurs who know that collectives degrade and taking over a degraded collective is one way to make a killing in a business career;
(F) Cynical and Jaded members who started out as Type "A", got burned by Types "B" and "C", rejected the wisdom of type "D", and have come to essentially aligned themselves with type "E".
Because of these dynamics a union structure would prevent degradation (and certainly preclude types "B" and "C" from causing damage or types "E" and "F" from ever taking over).
(3) Most collectives do not have very coherent internal structure. A union contract with a grievance procedure and checks and balances would provide this.
(4) The pressures of the market and low wages typically associated with isolated collectives also sever to push degradation.
(5) Collectives either have a cult mentality (no criticism of the collective is allowed, and therefore no process for improving deficiencies, because in order to solve a problem one must first admit that it exists!) or they degrade into warring cliques (often because members try to get their friends jobs there when a better solution is through a union hiring hall and a fair and impartial trial / probationary system that ensures an adequate trial period for potential new members).
(6) At some point, some industries are simply to big for collectives. That doesn't mean that they must degrade into hierarchical corporations, but rather a system of collectives within collectives and elected governing boards is desirable.
Therefore, it is evident that a radical union, such as the IWW, is in fact the best defense against such degradation, because the IWW's internal structure and process is designed to preserve and expand internal democracy even in large industrial organizations. Collectives and Workers' Cooperatives have no such structural process.
In any case, those who most vehemently oppose unionization are those most likely to be "Type E" and/or "Type F" members.
For a further discussion on why collectives and workers' cooperatives are ripe for unionization, please read Beyond Cooperation - An Introduction to the Industrial Workers of the World for Workers' Collectives (PDF Document).
