This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work, responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question
from our Patreon community, and this one comes from Dade. Dade wants to know, basically,
would there be strikes in an economy based on worker cooperatives?
I think this is a wonderful question because it raises such a host of really important issues.
So, let's begin with remembering what strikes are, how they developed, and the purpose they serve.
Capitalism is the system in which the strike became a well understood, well grasped, and
often used tactic (or strategy, if you like) in a struggle. So—let's be clear—what was the struggle?
The struggle was between two groups of people involved in every factory, every office, and every
store. A very small group, on the one hand: the employer. And a much larger group, on the other
hand (except for the tiniest of businesses) the employees. And the interests of these two
were in some ways aligned. They both were happier if there was a lot of business going on
rather than a little. They both understood they needed each other, sort of.
But more important for the issue of a strike was when their interests were not aligned.
When their interests were full of conflict and struggle. I can give you simple examples. The
less the employer has to pay the worker, the more out of the revenue of whatever is being produced
that the employer gets to keep. When you sell the hamburgers and you get five dollars for one, how
much of it do you give to your worker, how much do you have to pay for the meat and the bread,
and how much is left for you in the profits? If you can lower the cost of the meat or the bread,
more is left for you. If you can lower the cost of the worker, more is left for you. That's a big fat
clue as to why it is that employers have always tried to reduce their labor costs. By either
paying the workers less, or bringing in a cheaper worker to replace one that was more expensive,
or maybe moving production to another part of the country or world to get away with paying people
more, or to bring in machines to take the jobs away from the workers if the machines are a little
cheaper than the worker—you get the picture. Workers are therefore vulnerable. Workers can be
ripped off in the production process, and they know it. And they know it's a constant issue.
And if the employer pushes too far, too hard, then the workers (ah, here we go!) strike! They
say, “No, no, no, no, no. We will allow this, and this, and this, but you push too far. We're
pushing back.” And it turns out that the employees don't have that many weapons at their disposal.
The employer always has a really big one. He can move the factory or the office. He
can substitute cheaper workers. He can bring in machines. He can fire the workers. He can
threaten to fire the workers. A lot of tools! Workers don't have many. And one of the big ones
is a strike, taking away from the employer the one thing they really have that he cannot do without:
the labor. Not just of one or two of them, but of all of them.
So they form a union of one kind or another and they confront the employer with a strike
in which large numbers (maybe all) of the workers withhold their labor.
The history of capitalism has been the history of strikes,
but worker co-ops raise a very interesting question. There isn't the division between
employer and employee. That's the whole point of changing an economy from capitalist
to worker co-op based: to get rid of the endless conflict, the endless struggles that are always
besetting capitalism. Whether you see them, whether they're on the surface, or just below.
So a worker co-op wouldn't have the conflict, the relationships out of which the strike emerges, as
a logical extension. So I don't think there'd be strikes in a worker co-op based economy, because
it doesn't make sense. And that's the whole point of getting to that kind of an economy: not to have
capitalism and the problems it has always brought, such as conditions leading to strikes.
But, of course, a worker co-op economy will have its conflicts, its disagreements.
They won't be the same as those in capitalism. Every system has its issues that it has to work
through, so I would expect that in a worker-based economy, new forms will have to be developed
to work out disagreements, conflicts, tensions, and so on. You had those in feudalism that had
to be changed when capitalism came along, and you will have them in the socialist system (or
whatever word you want for a worker co-op based economy when it replaces capitalism). It won't be
the strike because it's not appropriate to those conditions. Feudalism didn't have strikes either,
so that's the issue here. So don't worry, there will be institutions that have to be
developed to handle the disagreements that will be inevitable, but they will
be of a different kind and they would work in a different way under a worker-based economy.
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