Workwomen Artel (China, Hong Kong SAR)


Workwomen Artel is founded by Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association. It aims to provide an ideal business environment for women workers and let the shop, teachers and students to support each other, putting social care and support to marginalized groups.

 

The Artel runs though workers’ equal cooperation. They will also cooperate with each other to discuss the size of the transaction or cooperative problem encountered during their regular meetings. Also, everyone has an equal voice to express their views and to discuss the implementation of all decisions. The boss is equivalent to employees, which is a practice of economic democracy. This democratic decision-making may be exempted from the boss exploitation of workers and to fulfill democracy and equal spirit.

 

For the women from the cooperatives, they were originally a group of women who went to the photocopy room and then changed their job to business cooperatives. It is totally different when it comes to their job duty and business practice. They have no experience in operating cooperatives, which means they are all starting from zero. This transition will take time and helping them to adapt to the force. In operation, the procurement of materials and funding opportunities have become difficult before they opened. On raising funds, cooperatives receive about $ 50,000 funding from schools and also donations from others. People are willing to provide them with interest-free loan so that they can earn some income slowly when the shop is opened. Those women say they only used two years will repay all loans fortunately.

 

In cooperatives, emphasizing democratic participation, shop workers discuss business and development decisions through consultation. Every employee has the right to speak their own, they also have space to play. However, the decision will be compared difficult to reach a consensus in this mode of operation because everyone has their own opinion. For women workers cooperatives, everyone’s opinion is very valuable, so it takes a long time to iron out between workers when they make next decision. They need to explore how to establish good space for discussion and which is suitable to their mode of communication. Therefore, different worker cooperatives have different way for communication.

 

Written by: Chan Tsz Ki/Chow Wai Yin/Leung Wing Yu