When Miguel Navarro, a technical architect trained at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, needs to be absent from work because he has to attend to personal matters, or requires extra income, he does not have to beg any boss: he just adjusts the bank himself. company hours, the original system that they have implemented to organize the distribution of work between partners according to the needs of each one.
Mutual aid is not only a concept for textbooks, but it can also be found in business reality: Navarro is a partner and worker at ReBive, an architecture and rehabilitation office that he created together with several colleagues in 2018 with a formula of associated worker cooperative, in which the workers are also the owners of the company and, therefore, participate on an equal footing in all organizational, strategic and management decisions.
“We opted for the cooperative formula because it was the one that best aligns with our values by prioritizing social activity over economic profit and allows us to organize ourselves in dignified and pleasant conditions,” Navarro explained in the round table. Work cooperatives: the business model of the entrepreneurs of the futureorganized by elDiario.es in collaboration with the Spanish Confederation of Associated Work Cooperatives (Coceta) and the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy.
The president of Coceta, which brings together organizations in the sector, Luis Miguel Jurado, and the professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, Paloma Bel, an expert in social economy, agreed to point out the rise of the model, which in recent years has spreading new business proposals in all sectors of the economy. Included in strategic sectors such as energy and finance, as well as those that address today’s major challenges, such as housing, care and the energy transition: Which has shattered the cliché that cooperativism is limited only to care sectors: “We are not aware that our daily life is already much more cooperative than it seems, even in very cutting-edge sectors,” stressed Jurado, who recalled that almost all daily activities on a common day can already be carried out in a cooperative framework.
From the first coffee with milk of the day that we drink to reading before going to bed, through all the activities of the day, they could have a cooperative footprint in the companies that make them possible: turning on the light, getting around – whether by taxi, by bicycle or by shared car -, going to school or university, stopping by the pharmacy or bank, visiting the elderly in a residence and a very long etcetera with almost all imaginable possibilities.
Interest among young people
For his part, Bel, who stressed that the impact of the social economy as a whole in Spain is equivalent to 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), emphasized that young people are the ones who are most looking for models that allow them to undertake business. with values compatible with their own life choices: “In the classrooms we observe that there is increasingly greater social sensitivity and that projects are sought that make social and economic value compatible, that are capable of combining both riches. Cooperativism is not the only model with this vocation, but it has it in its DNA,” he stressed.
For this to be possible, the company must also be viable and sustainable in accounting terms because otherwise it would not be able to continue operating and many tools have been put in place at the disposal of entrepreneurs so that they can set out to create cooperative or joint ventures. social economy.
The social impact of having cooperative companies with healthy accounts is usually very different than in the conventional economy, where profits are usually used basically to return capital in the form of dividends. In cooperatives, Jurado explained, part of the profit must necessarily be directed to nourishing a reserve fund, which will help the company face times of crisis, and also to promoting the model itself. And if the members’ assembly decides to distribute part of the surplus, it will be directed to the workers themselves, who are also the owners, based on the work and not the capital contributed: “It is a powerful mechanism to reduce inequality and the benefits remain always in the territory and in the people who work,” Jurado stressed.
All the speakers agreed that if the model is not more widespread it is largely due to lack of knowledge, since the official circuits tend to disseminate the commercial and capitalist company as if it were the only possible option and it is rarely reported that there is another way. to do business with these values. But as Jurado recalled, Coceta offers free advice for all collective projects that also want to explore the cooperative option.
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