The authors tell the story of a democratic workers' cooperative that makes hand-rolled cigarettes, known as "beedis," in the unorganized sector of a fiercely competitive capitalist economy in India. For decades, beedi workers have been among the most exploited and impoverished of India's work force. In 1969, in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, several thousand workers banded together to form a worker-owned beedi cooperative. The authors argue that their skill and determination, combined with Kerala's generally leftist political culture, allowed them to beat the odds. The cooperative surprised the private sector beedi barons by creating an enterprise that has lasted and prospered, offering the best wages and benefits in the business, while making a profit and contributing to the local economy.The authors analyze the major features of the cooperative, assessing its overall structure, worker-elected management, shop floor democracy, and progress in providing a better life for its worker-owners. Tensions are also discussed, including the complaints of women workers and the need for diversification from tobacco.
The book critically examines the evolution of industrial co-operatives and their importance in the present context of industrial set up. In this outstanding book, the author has aptly analysed and discussed the role of co-operation as a balancing sector. The book provides a comprehensive information on the subject. The work appropriately demonstrates and among the issues discussed in this book are their working, financial managment, organisation, marketing, State aid and industrial relations. The problems including those of artisans have been viewed. The author offers many workable suggestions. A carefully designed, realistic approach, and enjoyable pack of eight chapters. This is a useful reference book which can be consulted conveniently by those looking up for information. The book covers everything relevant currently in regional planning. The present pioneering and indepth study is the outcome of the author’s wide thinking and painstaking survey.
This book discusses the experiences of cooperative enterprises in India that have been operated by or influenced to a significant extent by trade unions. It describes the origins of these movements in India presenting a political-strategic view of their development and, in some cases, their decline. The book also presents case studies of groundbreaking social experiments conducted in India in which trade unions have formed cooperatives for production and service provision for the working class movement. It also offers lessons learned from previous social experiments and explains how to use them for future strategies in the working class movement by using primary research undertaken on trade union cooperatives in India. With globalization often given as a reason for the decline of trade unions and transformative social movements, this book demonstrates that where movements declined it was due to their own internal weaknesses, while presenting successful case studies of movements which have shown resilience in the face of globalization. The book also gives an extensive criticism of India’s Self Employed Women’s Association as a model of a depoliticized trade union cooperative. The main lesson of this book is that cooperatives represent a viable strategy to build working class power in the 21st century in India, and elsewhere.
The basic concepts and characteristics of entrepreneurship are concerned with developing a vision of what a company should be, and afterward executing that vision by making an interpretation of it into solid advances and finishing. Business people have a tendency to be actually associated with building and modelling their organizations, however business achievement additionally relies upon understanding individual cut off points, and creating techniques and frameworks to rise above these breaking points. Although many business magazines publish long lists of entrepreneurial traits, entrepreneurship is more a way of thinking and behaving than a set of specific, sharply defined character traits.
This monograph narrates the decade-long struggle of workers, unions, and management in transforming one of the largest ailing family-owned jute businesses in India, into a sustainable worker-owned and governed cooperative. It focuses on the variation in the three groups’ involvement in the transformation. It begins with the employees’ struggles in taking over the business, deserted by its owners, to save their jobs. The study analyzes the tensions between the three groups in creating and maintaining democratic governance that would sustain the initial leap in employee participation in the transformation. The analysis reveals contradictions at multiple levels, starting with the unexpected outcome of information sharing with workers: increased information sharing by management resulting in decreased employee involvement. The study explains this paradox by showing that for workers, information has a symbolic nature and information sharing is a signal of their trustworthiness in the assessment of those who are privy to the information. This means involvement is contingent upon the feeling that the information that workers consider crucial is being shared with them. However, what workers consider crucial, and thus a symbol of trust, changes over time as the nature and breadth of their involvement evolves. Thus, worker expectation as well as management and union expectation of information sharing evolves. However, the evolution has the potential to create a mismatch between the two expectations that might lead to contradictions in employee involvement. While for management, information sharing is an instrument in eliciting involvement, and thus management’s expectation of information sharing goes through an instrumental loop, for employees, information sharing is a matter of trust, and thus their expectation of information sharing goes through an institutional trust-based loop. To sustain high employee involvement, the organization should ideally institutionalize the trust-based loop and avoid engaging with the instrumental loop. The author proposes a collaborative approach to organizational transformation that will help deal with the contradictions more effectively, sustaining employee involvement in the transformation. The author also discusses the implications of these propositions for academic scholarship and organizational practices and situates them in the ongoing attempts to reform Industrial Disputes Act in India.
