Today, I become a Worker-Owner with Weaver Street Market
Co-operative. Again. Because, sometimes, personal integrity requires
that you put right a mistake that you have made in the past.
The
Mission Statement on the Worker-Owner Application Form, the one to
which we all (including the WSM corporate office management team)
subscribe when we sign that Application Form, states this:
As
worker owners we demonstrate the co-operative principles through our
actions in the workplace and the community. Our mission is to create
opportunities for all workers to take responsibility for the business,
participate in decision making, contribute to the community, and benefit
from their involvement.
It is this same Mission
Statement that inspired me to become a proprietor of WSM back in 2006.
The notion that I should become responsible for an enterprise, not just
of the economy, but of the human spirit, on an equal basis with all
others in the enterprise, equally responsible for safeguarding our
combined destinies and the soul of the enterprise itself. This turned me
on.
Along with the concept that our combined destinies
were to be shaped by the declaration that success of our joint
enterprise would not be determined by stale financial parameters alone,
but by tending to the stated common needs of the equal participants.
What
a simple but joyous idea. We all decide what we want, what we need. We
then decide, together, how best to meet those needs. Including, but not
limited to, financial comfort. And finally, we apportion to the
participants roles that define job alone, not status, since our status
is that we are all equal. That’s what co-operation demands. And what the
Mission Statement confirms. That we are all equal proprietors, equally
responsible for the success of our joint enterprise.
My
experience to that point, in the field of political economy, had been
only with the stale, depressing, soul-crushing macroeconomic model of: Growth is all. Expansion the key. During good times, get bigger. During
bad times, improve productivity (aka screw the worker harder). ‘Return’
meant only financial dividend.
Yet here in co-operation
was a system which bypassed the sterility and the inhumanity, and
treated participants as intelligent human beings, able to determine for
themselves what they needed to do to provide for themselves. And to do
so without trampling all over workers, the community and the
environment.
Excellent. So, I signed up. And went looking
for the conversation about common needs. And I’ve been looking ever
since. It doesn’t exist. So. I began one of my own. This blog. Sometimes serious. Often
impertinent. Occasionally silly. But always about bearing witness, both
in our co-operative and in our community (as our Mission Statement
demands), to actions of a few in our co-operative which adversely affect
and denigrate our co-operative mission.
I guess the WSM
corporate office management team grew tired of the witness. In the Fall
of 2010, they engineered against me a case of Emotional Harassment
involving a member of the corporate office, and brought, dubiously,
under Employee Policy.
The case was a nonsense. As I told
the WSM Human Resources Manager at the time. But, on that day, all
notion of joint enterprise was ignored. Equality forgotten. Common need
set aside. Instead, the conventional capitalist model of arbitrary
authority, abrogated by a few to themselves, interpreted by them alone,
and wielded without accountability, ruled the moment.
I
was disciplined. I was also warned, quite bluntly, that the corporate
office management team had had enough of my ‘witness,’ and that,
if I wrote any more with which they found disfavor, they would find ways
further to discipline me. I didn’t believe the Human Resources Manager.
How could I? It went against all the precepts of cooperation, and was
counter to the same Worker-Owner Mission Statement that we had both
signed.
Yet, half a year later, the axe fell. I found
myself being dragged into disciplinary meetings for the most ridiculous
of infractions. Eventually, I refused to answer the charges, and merely
asked why I alone was being brought up on these fanciful charges. At
which point, I was told (I think in a moment of unguarded exasperation
(oops)) that I was the only employee being monitored by the corporate
office.
Which is when I made my mistake.
Leaving
aside the obvious possibility that such a statement amounted to illegal
practice on the part of the corporate office management team (harassment, retaliation,
bias, et al), the beauty of arbitrary authority is that it is … well …
arbitrary. The very nature of cooperation leaves itself open to folks to
abuse the loose communal structure, and slip away into the dark
corners, and wield influence without check or balance.
Sometimes,
I believed, personal integrity was not just about winning the good
fight. It was about personal survival. And this was a personal fight
that would only lead to blemish of my reputation. A blemish which,
again, I believed, would affect all else that I wished to accomplish,
both within WSM and elsewhere.
I resigned my
Worker-Ownership, so that the corporate office management team would no
longer feel threatened. I continued with my writing. But I sensed that
my ‘witness’ would not cause the insecurity that the possibility of
election to the Board of Directors might engender.
When I
explained this reasoning to a fellow Worker-Owner colleague, who asked
why I had resigned my Worker-Ownership, her answer was blunt and, I’ll
be honest, painful: “That’s not a good enough reason.”
I
felt it was. And, since we are being so honest, I felt more. Where, I
wondered to myself (but not aloud), where have you and the other
Worker-Owners been, when I have been bearing this witness, seemingly on
my own? Who are you to criticize me, when I have never seen you standing
by my side, when confronting the arbitrary authority that our corporate
office management team has become?
Not exactly the most
gracious of thoughts. But then, we tend not to be at our most gracious
when we are being invited to own up to the basic truth we are merrily denying.
Er. Kind of my point with the WSM corporate office management team.
Well.
In any event. That’s where matters lay. For a while. The writing
continued. But, I couldn’t help feeling that it was more out of
compensation, than with any real prospect of attaining any result. Until
this year.
First, I came across disturbing information
about who might actually
own the assets of WSM; assets which, in
accordance with normal practice, and our catchy little come-on,
“Community-owned Grocery,” ought to be owned by the wider membership of
WSM.
Then, I became aware
that the same self-appointed few in the corporate office management
team, who were so happily abrogating arbitrary authority to themselves
left, right and center, were now claiming to themselves the sole right
to
draft a vision for the co-op for the next ten years.
I bore witness to both. And
all hell broke loose. And so it was, this past Thursday, the corporate
office management team posted proposed changes to
Employee Policy,
effectively to put an end to any and all further co-operative witness - by anyone - upon threat of dismissal.
I
do not know when exactly the corporate office management team sold out. I
do not know precisely why they abandoned all pretense of supporting
co-operation. But I can guess.
At heart, the wider mission
of WSM, to provide a self-sustaining, farm-to-fork local food system,
is an admirable one. But it is one which depends for its success upon
the open and democratic support of the membership of WSM. Simply put,
this is because the producers are the ones being supported. But they
have no money. That has to come from the consumers and workers. And that
support has to be willing. That requires transparent, democratic,
accountable and voluntary co-operation.
Somewhere along
the line, the corporate office management team lost faith in the human
spirit. Believed that they and they alone could be trusted to be the
guardians of this vision. That alternative ideas were not to be trucked.
That criticism would be an unwarranted interference. And that democracy
and accountability needed to be curbed, if not completely eliminated.
And
as their primary weapon, they began to employ fear. In place of
democracy. Fear that a recession would kill WSM, unless we followed the
dictates of the corporate office management team. Fear that dividends
would dry up. Fear that we would lose homes and livelihoods, our
retirement plans, our children’s college educations, if we strayed from
the path of their financial rectitude, and listened to those ridiculous
siren voices demanding that co-operation be what it is supposed to be: a
living social statement – an alternative, sustainable way of engaging
in morally, socially and environmentally acceptable business.
And
then the corporate office management team began to employ more pointed
fear, against workers directly – and individually. Fear that jobs would
be lost, discipline enacted, promotions sidelined, pay raises suspended,
if any spoke out against the central diktat.
Annual Store
Meetings, the only venues left for the democratic conversation which
co-operation requires, became sterile dog-and-pony presentations by the
corporate office management team, where arbitrary demands by that same
team, for workers to work ever harder for less, were to be accepted,
without comment, in order to finance a vision that the corporate office
management team now designed, on their own, behind a combination lock in
Hillsborough, all the while dishonestly dressing up those demands as
‘Standard Financial Goals,’ and pretending that the Annual Store
Meetings were democratic imprint by workers on consensually-determined
future plans.
And I fell victim to that fear. Ignoring the
lesson of history: when you back down, in what you think is a gesture
of compromise, arbitrary authority does not respond in kind; it merely
continues its advance forward. And so, the corporate office management
team now seeks to eliminate any future possibility that the workers of
WSM will engage in open discussion of the aims, ambitions and plans of
WSM, by introducing the muzzle.
Effectively, the proposed
changes to Employee Policy come down to this: workers may not
disseminate information the corporate office management team deem
proprietary to them; and if workers discuss publicly (especially online)
any matters pertaining to WSM with which the corporate office
management team finds disfavor, it will count as adverse work
performance.
Which is the primary reason I determined to
undo my mistake, and become, for the second time, a Worker-Owner with
WSM. As an owner, and therefore a proprietor, of WSM, it is not for
another equal proprietor of WSM to tell me what I can or cannot do with
information that is proprietary to me, too.
As a
proprietor of WSM (indeed, even as an ordinary stakeholder, but being an
owner underscores the point magnificently), I have used my blog
primarily to bear witness to those moments when the few in WSM have
acted in a way that is adverse either to allowing our co-operative to
act as a co-operative, or to achieving the ends to which those same few
have said they are committed.
I use that language
carefully. Since the proposed changes dwell long and hard on potential
behavior by employees which is adverse in its effect to our cooperative.
I maintain that the ones acting in a fashion, which has adverse effect
upon our co-op, are the corporate office management team. Not always.
But on those occasions when I have used my blog to point out the same.
And now, when they seek to introduce draconian censorship to prevent any
future discussion of the adverse effect that they have.
As
to discussing that adverse effect in public, it is the God-given right
of every American worker, outside of work, off the clock and away from
management, to bitch quite heartily about their work and their boss.
Whether that bitching takes place in a bar or on Facebook makes no
difference. No employer, and certainly not a socially-conscious
co-operative, has the right to legislate how we feel outside of work,
nor to regulate how we then express that feeling.
Down that path lies totalitarianism.
And
that is the second reason for my becoming a Worker-Owner again.
Whatever the reason for the corporate office management team losing
their belief in democratic co-operation, mine remains as strong as ever.
One
does not guard against the arbitrary wield of unsustainable power by
accommodation. One protects by speaking out, standing up, and being
counted. I intend to be counted in two month’s time, when I vote for a
candidate in the Worker-Owner Board Election, and we Worker-Owners
elect, perhaps for the first time, a representative who truly speaks for
all of we ordinary workers (again, as our Mission Statement demands),
who work our hardest every day, because we still believe in an ideal
which can once again become Weaver Street Market Co-operative – the one
defined in our Worker-Owner Mission Statement.
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