At the beginning of July we learned that the pastries and sweets factory De Paula will be closed in our town, which is essential for many workers’ houses. They say that pastry shops and, of course, retired workers have every right to rest, but we are going to lose an important element of community enjoyment in the people, and I believe that in those cases we need collective instruments that promote and ensure continuity.
In the context of the industrial crisis that took place in the 1980s, there were many company recoveries in the Basque Country. I don't have direct memory, but I saw it years later, and the film Numax presents by Joaquim Jordá, which shows the experience of recovering a company in Catalonia, I thought. In fact, the processes of recovery or transmission of viable or socially necessary businesses are not easy, many have ended up badly, but the self-management practices developed along the way change the lives of people in the community forever.
We will lose an important element for community enjoyment in the municipality, which needs collective instruments that promote and guarantee its continuity
These processes depend in most cases on the initiative of the project personnel and in these cases do not have the necessary support and tools at the most necessary time. But besides making collectivization processes, it is an important question who should do them. In order for these enterprises to meet community needs, the subjects of the processes must be broad, composed of workers, citizens, public institutions, trade unions and cooperatives of the territory. And of course, networks of knowledge and relationship are not created overnight.
As a result of the continuing crisis we are experiencing, companies have increased their needs for the transfer of labour, knowledge and property, especially in first sector projects and services in rural areas, and in the small trade that stimulates our peoples and neighbourhoods. In the same vein, the new recovery needs of the larger companies will soon arrive, and since the development of cooperativism is counter-cyclical, we must prepare to respond to the situation with collective tools, through projects promoted by the community, with new alliances of cooperativism and unionism.
To this end, we will need sound training, funding, accompanying and public-Community support tools. We are working on the line from transformative cooperativism, but we need more compact networks to respond to the challenge from our territories.