co-operatives in venezuela:
To end poverty, put poor people in charge of their livelihood. A co-op boom turns the jobless into worker/owners.
(...) At Manos Amigas, members voted to work eight hours a day, five days a week, and to pay themselves minimum wage, or around $200 a month. They also receive a bonus at the end of the year, depending on the cooperative’s yearly profits. As is the norm under the 2001 Venezuelan Cooperative Law, a president, secretary, and treasurer are elected yearly. The co-op holds a general assembly once a month, and decisions are made by consensus or by majority. “No one is boss, everyone is part of the team,” said one member.
(...) Manos Amigas is just one of the 8,000 cooperatives, or worker-collectives, formed by the nearly 300,000 graduates of the Vuelvan Caras cooperative job-training program since it began in 2004. It is also just one of the 181,000 cooperatives officially registered in Venezuela as of the end of last year—an astonishing figure that puts the South American nation at the top of the list of countries in the world with the most cooperatives.
(...) Over 99 percent of Venezuela’s cooperatives have registered since President Hugo Chávez Frias took office in 1999. The cooperative boom is key to the shift by the Venezuelan government towards an economy based on the inclusion of traditionally excluded sectors of society and the promotion of alternative business models as part of its drive towards what Chávez calls “socialism of the 21st century.”
(...) At the time that President Chávez was elected in 1998, poverty had been on a slow but constant rise since the middle half of the century. The consolidation of lands into a few hands had displaced farmers who migrated in large numbers to the cities in search of work. As a result, Venezuela became the most urbanized country in Latin America; its capital, Caracas, is surrounded by poor barrios that house almost half of its population of nearly 5 million in substandard conditions. The implantation of neoliberal policies during the 1990s only aggravated the situation by privatizing state-owned businesses, and cutting subsidies and social spending. Inflation skyrocketed and zeros piled on to the end of the national currency, the Bolivar.
(...) Chávez decreed the Special Law of Cooperative Associations in 2001, which made it easier to form cooperatives, and, in the words of former Cooperative Superintendent (SUNACOOP) Carlos Molina, “transformed cooperatives into a fundamental tool of social inclusion.”
(...) The Venezuelan government began promoting the creation of co-ops by prioritizing them for government contracts, offering grants and loans with little or no interest, and eliminating income tax requirements for co-ops. Cooperative numbers immediately began to grow.
(...) Unfortunately, the reality of the cooperative boom is not without its problems. According to last fall’s first Venezuelan Cooperative Census, less than 40 percent of the cooperatives registered at the time were actually functioning. Many of the discrepancies come from businesses that registered and either never got off the ground or failed to comply with the cooperative law. In rare cases, so-called “ghost cooperatives” registered and received loans from the government before disappearing with the cash. Venezuelan cooperative totals are growing at hundreds per week, and former SUNACOOP director Molina verified last year that they have no hope of being able to audit them all.
(...) Unlike the Chávez government cooperatives, CECOSESOLA has no elected officers or management team. Decisions are made by consensus in meetings that take up a major portion of the work week. Associates rotate through different jobs, and each is expected to take full responsibility—in front of their work mates when necessary—for the choices they make.
(...) Establishing CECOSESOLA was not easy. During the 1970s, co-op members were labeled subversives, the cooperative was infiltrated by agents from the Venezuelan secret service, and their transportation bus co-op was shut down and looted by the local government for offering services so reasonable that private bus companies couldn’t compete. The struggle drove the co-op into a decade and a half of bankruptcy, from which many members thought they could not escape.
(...) “It’s a huge success,” says Angel Ortiz, the only male member of Manos Amigas. “We were workers for others, we were employees, but today we are business people, and we are not only producing for the state, but for our community.”
(...) Nevertheless, Venezuela is banking heavily on these democratic businesses, which already account for 6 percent of Venezuela’s workforce. There is no doubt that the cooperatives are changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, who, only a few years ago, didn’t believe they could find a job—not to mention run their own business.