Rest and Prefiguration Through Disabled People’s Co-operatives – Steve Graby

Author: Steve Graby

Abstract: Workers’ co-operatives are businesses owned and collectively controlled by their workers, typically according to egalitarian and anti-hierarchical principles. While the broader politics of individual workers’ co-operatives varies, they have been constructed both as prefigurative means for working towards a post-capitalist future society and as pragmatic means of survival for precaritised workers within capitalism.

My recent research about disabled people’s involvement in co-operatives in the UK (see http://www.disabledcoops.uk), involving semi-structured interviews with disabled people who were or had formerly been members of co-operatives (including but not limited to workers’ co-ops), found many points of similarity and potential for connection between co-ops and the Disabled People’s Movement, in particular shared values of collective self-determination, subsidiarity (control by those with most stake in an issue, or ‘nothing about us without us’) and seeking to change environments to fit people rather than vice versa.

Interviewees who were members of workers’ co-ops frequently reported that co-operative workplaces were significantly more accessible for them than other workplaces in the same fields, often to the extent that it made the difference between paid employment being possible or impossible. Several interviewees had co-founded – as, previous to this research, I did myself – workers’ co-ops precisely as a means to create accessible working environments for themselves and/or because of their experiences of exclusion from other workplaces due to disabling norms and practices.

In particular, workers’ control over work patterns and conditions was frequently what made the difference between work being accessible and inaccessible for disabled workers, with co-op members citing examples such as flexible working hours, freedom to work from home, recognition of the need for rest, and unconventional divisions of labour according to individual workers’ capacities, as well as the intentional creation by co-ops of forgiving and comradely workplace cultures which avoid many of the unnecessary, punitive and wasteful practices which are typical of hierarchical work environments, and which disproportionately oppress disabled workers.

Co-operatives are not a panacea, nor can they in themselves end capitalism; but I argue that disabled co-op members’ experiences show that they can prefigure, and help us make concrete moves towards, ways of living that deconstruct ‘work’ as commonly understood, distinguishing the genuinely necessary from that which is only considered to be so because of capitalist disciplinary ideologies. Additionally I argue for active alliance between co-operatives and disabled people’s organisations to find concrete ways to resist capitalist disablement.

Author bio – please visit Steve’s ‘About me’ page on their Disabled Coops’ website.