I hear a lot about businesses that operate as worker co-ops or have transitioned to operate as co-ops. I'm struggling to find any examples of institutions of higher learning operating this way and I'm curious if anyone knows of any, or knows of any reason this isn't done in higher-ed. Would any of you lovely people be able to clue me in or point me in the direction of what I'm talking about?
Thanks!
In Argentina public universities are more or less ran as a cooperative. Professors, alumni and workers have separate, universal secret ballots every two years in which you elect a union to represent you in the council. the council appoints the executive and decides how to allocate the budget (that comes from the State), wages, policies and curriculum for that faculty, and so on. The students' union usually is also in charge of the food stalls, dormitories, photocopiers, and depending on their political line they might lease it to corporations for funds or run them themselves to help disadvantaged students.
The unions are usually but not necessarily related to a larger political party or labour union, are are considered a trampoline into the wider national politics. This type of organisation has proven very robust and resisted several attempts at privatisation in the last 100 years. During the worst parts of the nineties many universities relied on mutual aid to keep running.
This is a very touchy subject. There has been a struggle between the Peronist and the socialist factions of the Argentine CGT ever since Perón co-opted the unions in 1945. During the last CIA-backed military dictatorship the CGT had an anticommunist line, snitched on leftist unions and their leaders were murdered by the state, so nowadays most unions have inherited leftist praxis and structures like democratic centralism but are more class collaborationist than revolutionary.
The government did the exact same things to unions here in the states too with the Taft-Hartly Act in 1947. Its a law that we still have on the books that says communists can't touch labor unions. So what's left of unions here have largely retreated to corporatism and function more as an independent HR department than anything approaching leftism. America truly is a disease.
The thing is that Perón did not co-opt the unions by brute force like that but by "delivering the goods". He became the president during the peak of urbanization in Argentina. Millions of rural peasants were pouring into the cities and becoming proletarians as Perón through his unions gave them a minimum wage, maximum working week, vacations, an extra wage in July and December, public schools, and so on. Socialist unions were never really outlawed (and they still exist), but they became minoritary.
I don't know much about Argentina, does membership with the CGT still have all those same benefits? Socialism is obviously preferable to any sort of union system but it's hard to argue with results. Ignoring the obvious fact that the CIA had a bunch of communists murdered.
In a way: On paper membership of a labour union is mandatory for both wage and independent workers. Every now and then the CGT splits but you have to belong to "a" CGT so everyone gets the benefits. However there's something like a 50% rate of unregistered labour. Being unregistered gives you no vacations, minimum wage, health coverage outside public hospitals, etc but employers are very heavily fined for it. The fines make it so that the employer has to offer you something in exchange for not snitching on them: snitching entitles you to the wage differential, the overtime, the paid vacations, all unpaid complementary wages, their share of the retirement fund, unjustified severance pay (which is a month of wages for each year worked) plus the fine which also goes to you.
This something in times of crisis can be to have a job at all, and unfortunately there are corrupt law firms that have access to the database of people who have reported their employers to the ministry of labour and sell the information to the black market employers, so once you've snitched you may not get hired in those businesses.
damn that is corrupt as fuck. doesn't even really compare to anything we have over here except how we treat undocumented workers (sort of). from a very "grass is greener" point of view I'd like to think you're lucky to even have those institutions to work with even if they are hobbled by a shit government. But it does sound like a nightmare. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions
I've hitchhiked in South America quite a bit and when it comes to corruption we really don't have it that bad. Petty corruption in particular is almost unseen here and ubiquitous in Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Perú, and so on. When Perón (or Kirchner these days) is in government real wages and retirement payouts grow by a lot (before the neoliberal party came to power Argentina had the highest minimum and average wage among our neighbours), social programmes, even if inadequate, are erected, like a supplementary income per child for poor mothers or free laptops for all public high school students—which helped most of my University friends and wihch would have come so handy during the pandemic if it had not been gutted—. In general like I say they 'deliver the goods' and keep consumption high and the local small industrialists happy.
I don't know much about it but I know Mondragon University is part of Mondragon, the largest cooperative
edit: it is explained here: https://www.mondragon.edu/en/international-mobility/mondragon-university-cooperative-university
