Unions and Cooperatives: The Alliance That Changed Work

In 1864, in London, something fractured that we still haven't finished repairing. The First International brought together workers from across Europe with the ambition of building a collective response to industrial capitalism. Within the movement, two incompatible visions coexisted. For some, labor organization was a tool of struggle: a means to negotiate and transform power relations. For others, the solution lay in building alternative structures outside the system, cooperatives where workers would also be owners. The International did not survive that rift.

The twentieth century consolidated unionism as the dominant model. Cooperativism was left as a marginal experiment. That choice, made more than a hundred and fifty years ago, now seems on the verge of reversing.

What's happening now is no coincidence. In Kenya, regulatory frameworks are being discussed for platform cooperatives that would allow drivers and delivery workers to own the digital tools they use. In Canada, budget allocations favoring cooperativism are appearing under pressure from automation's impact on employment. And within international union structures, even those tied to the ITUC, serious conversations are emerging about how to extend representation to platform workers and self-employed people who currently fall outside traditional collective bargaining. None of these steps amounts to firm legislation yet. But the trend they draw together deserves attention.

It's worth being honest about what exists and what remains exploratory. The Kenyan frameworks are recommendations, not enacted law. Formal convergence between unions and cooperatives remains more pilot test than consolidated model. Even so, a historical precedent illuminates why these attempts are emerging precisely now, driven by structural necessity more than ideology.

Mondragón demonstrates this better than any theoretical argument. The Basque cooperative was born in 1956, in the midst of a dictatorship, precisely because unionism was banned. When the only possible avenue for collective organization was the cooperative, workers built it. Later, when unionism was legalized, they didn't abandon their form. They added internal labor representation and created a hybrid that neither pure model had achieved on its own. What's fascinating is the dynamic: external pressure on the dominant model didn't destroy collective capacity, it redirected it toward a more resilient form. Automation exerts exactly that pressure today.

This matters because the debate over artificial intelligence and employment tends to get stuck between two responses that, on their own, prove insufficient. One is regulatory: limits on AI use, algorithmic transparency, retraining funds. The other is compensatory: basic income, direct transfers, subsidies. Both treat the problem as if the central question were how much money the displaced worker receives. They avoid, however, a prior question: who owns the tools replacing human labor. That question takes us straight back to the 1864 fracture.

Platform companies thrive while labor debate stays focused on minimum wage, contract conditions, and worker classification. These are relevant debates, but they leave the ownership structure untouched. An on-demand transportation cooperative in Nairobi that competes without ceding margins to distant shareholders doesn't just distribute income better. It also changes who decides on fares, assignment algorithms, and working conditions. The same holds for delivery, care, or creative-work cooperatives. The technology that today allows millions of transactions to be coordinated also allows a cooperative to do the same, with no technical reason for the extractive model to remain the only possible one.

Organizations that combine ownership and representation show greater resilience against economic shocks. This isn't a romantic observation about solidarity. It's a structural regularity: when the same actors who bear the risk control strategic decisions, incentives align in a way that mere-negotiation models fail to achieve. Traditional unionism brilliantly solved the problem of collective bargaining. What it left unresolved was productive governance.

A recent strike in rail transport repeats a familiar pattern: concrete wage gains without real participation in the decisions that will determine whether those jobs still exist a decade from now. Small variations in who controls decision cycles end up producing very different long-term outcomes. Technology doesn't just displace jobs. It also enables forms of productive organization that integrate collective bargaining with shared ownership. That dual movement is what interests me most to explore.

The convergence between union and cooperative movements isn't mere ideological synthesis. It has a very concrete coalition logic. Unions bring negotiating experience, established legal structures, and mobilization capacity. Cooperatives bring governance models that integrate independent and platform workers who currently fall outside traditional representation. Together they can build a much broader base than either could alone, which is exactly what the labor movement needs as conventional wage employment contracts.

I'll admit this is more complicated than it sounds in summary. Cooperative models have historically shown slower growth rates than conventional companies. Mondragón faced serious internal tensions as it expanded. Cooperative experiments in various sectors proved resilient during crises but didn't always manage to scale at the pace markets demand. Combining them with union structures could resolve some of those limits. It could also generate new frictions we don't yet know how to handle. I'm still exploring how far that complementarity extends and where its own contradictions begin.

The question posed in 1864 was never answered, only postponed. The twentieth century chose one model for specific historical reasons, many of them contingent. Those conditions are now changing at an accelerating pace. Automation isn't only a threat to employment. It's also an opportunity to rethink who owns productive capacity. The digital cooperatives emerging across various regions aren't nineteenth-century nostalgia. They're experiments addressing a question the First International raised and couldn't resolve.

The tension between negotiating within the system and building alternative structures outside it doesn't have to be a permanent contradiction. Mondragón proved this under far more adverse conditions.

What institutional imagination will twenty-first-century labor movements bring to combining both tools before the window closes?

Stones don't lie, but historians sometimes do.

1. Kasmir, Sharryn. The Myth of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town. State University of New York Press, 1996.

2. International Co-operative Alliance. World Cooperative Monitor 2023. ICA, 2023.

3. Scholz, Trebor. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016.

4. Bakunin, Mikhail / Marx, Karl. Minutes of the First International (1864-1872). Marx-Engels Archive, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

5. ITUC. World Congress Resolutions on Platform Work and Cooperative Models. International Trade Union Confederation, 2022.