It didn’t take Ieva Padagaite long after she graduated with a film degree to figure out that her industry had a major problem.
Padagaite grew up in Lithuania as one of the “freedom kids” who emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Republic and was raised with the idea that capitalism would let her be whatever she wanted if she worked hard enough. She crossed Europe to study at London College of Communication, but soon found herself picking up bar work to support herself while she freelanced for production companies and corporate social responsibility departments. She watched her bosses scoop profits from her labour, while she lived off zero-hours contracts and her overdraft. “I felt really isolated and alone,” she says. “I saw a lot of my friends going through mental health issues, just dealing with pressures as a young person.”
In 2014, ready to give up on film, Padagaite sketched out what her ideal company would look like with fellow film graduate Simon Ball. They imagined working with a high degree of autonomy, for fair pay and for clients they believed in. Though they didn’t realise it at the time, they were planning a co-operative.
Together, Padagaite and Ball founded Blake House, a filmmaking co-op that makes films for charities and social enterprises. In 2016, it became one of the first members of CoTech, a growing network of tech co-operatives in the UK. There are currently 30 tech businesses united under the CoTech banner, which range from filmmakers to programmers; they collectively employ more than 250 staff and have revenues of over £10.2 million.
The idea is fast gaining traction, as some tech workers fall out of love with a startup culture focused on growing companies as fast as possible to attract maximum investment. “We want to grow as slow as possible and build a company that’s here for the long term,” says Chris Lowis, a developer with software co-operative Go Free Range. Lowis was attracted to the CoTech model after working for large companies where months of work could be lost if a manager pulled funding or changed direction. “Autonomy is important to us,” he says.
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Co-operatives are loosely based on the Rochdale Principles enshrined in 1844, which emphasise a need for open membership and democratic control. There are currently over 7,000 co-ops in the UK, from care workers to grocers to taxi drivers. Sion Whellens, a member of printing co-operative Calverts, says the tech sector is particularly suited to the co-operative model. “It’s much easier to establish co-ops in an industry that is expanding,” he says. The industry’s approach to managing work could also be a benefit. “Particularly in the way tech people think in terms of agile projects, they [can] apply that agile mentality to governance.”
At digital agency Outlandish, another founding member of the CoTech network, workers are paid a flat day rate of between £150 and £350. Rather than taking bonuses or paying dividends to shareholders, Outlandish members put surplus profit into a central pot and assign funds to pro bono projects using an app called CoBudget, developed by New Zealand-based co-operative network Enspiral. Outlandish has developed another app, CoPitch, to share work among its members. It also uses common organisational tools such as instant messenger Slack, time-tracking app Toggl and project management software YouTrack.
Padagaite says the CoTech network has helped Blake House keep going when for-profit businesses said they’d never survive. “It was a bit lonely at the beginning,” she says. “If you’re going to try and create an alternative, you’re going to have a lot of people telling you it’s a bad idea, because the whole mainstream narrative is telling you you have to compete to succeed.”
Harry Robbins, a worker-member at Outlandish, says he has had good results pitching to commercial businesses. He was recently asked by a financial organisation why they should trust a co-op. ”I told them that if I was a director of a bank, I'd be reluctant to put my faith in a bunch of anarcho-communists – but they're better off hiring a group of people that do what they do because they love it than a bunch of people who hire a bunch of other people to do the work so that they can extract money from the process,” he says. “They thought this was hilarious and hired us immediately.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
