Cooperativism to be new-age avatar of Capitalism

Niki Okuk, a TED speaker surely believes in saving the best for last. In her speech, concerning how worker owned companies contribute to a more resilient economy, she refers to a brilliant essay penned by Arundhati Roy on the nature of Capitalism, and quotes her as, “The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they’re selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their sense of inevitability. Our strategy should not be only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To mock it. To shame it. With our art, our literature, our music, our brilliance, our joy, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Not the stories that we’re being brainwashed to believe.”

Okuk owns a small business – RCO Tyres in Compton, something which was inspired by a need to create green collar jobs in the hood. She co-founded, owns and operates a tyre recycling company, which has so far recycled a 100 mn pounds of rubber. That’s 21 mn gallons of oil diverted from landfills into new products. Okuk also tells us that her enterprise is a privately held company with community-minded ownership aims to be a cooperative. But what she really wants is to empower her co-workers to be able to fire her – the boss.

While Okuk is essentially banking on the notion of cooperativism, she invokes significant movements of America’s Black History to make her case. She talks about South Bronx, which is home to the US’s largest worker-owned company, Cooperative Home Care Associates. Founded by black and Latina home care workers, they are who are now able to pay themselves living wages, have full-time hours, benefits and a pension, through their membership as a unit of Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Similarly, in Mondragon, Spain, there’s a community built entirely around worker cooperatives. “There’s 260-plus businesses here, manufacturing everything from bicycles to washing machines to transformers. And this group of businesses now employs 80,000 people and earns more than 12 bn euros in revenue every year. All of the companies there are owned by the people that work in them,” she informs us. Maybe it’s time India Inc takes a cue from such revolutionary ‘capitalists’.