Augestão: o cotidiano de uma cooperativa de reciclagem em um estudo etnográfico

Abstract

The self-management practiced in the current cooperatives lost the grandeur of their origin, when it was treated as government system where the people would be sovereign and the decisions would flow from the bottom up. The cooperative self-management is far from seeking a transformation of society despite preserving the ideal of democracy. Because their fight is limited to enable the workers’ cooperative to manage their own business, although this struggle is of great importance. Considering self-management as an unfinished project, it is necessary to know your daily practice through the organization of work to understand what factors interfere in their development and consolidation. Ethnographic research was chosen as a research method to accomplish this task because it allows this diving in the daily life of the organization. The research was carried out in a waste picker cooperative using ethnographic research and adopting participant observation as the main method of data collection, where the researcher worked as a workers’ cooperative in several activities of the productive sector of the organization. Through the immersion of the researcher in the daily life of the cooperative it was possible to establish a debate on the influence of the practices adopted by the organization of work in the implementation of self-management. The data collected in the participant research were transcribed in a field diary shortly after each working day, were also performed informal interviews and interview by guidelines with key informants of the organization, well beyond the analysis of documents and making photographs. The analysis of the data produced an ethnographic account written in first person, where the influence of work organization on selfmanagement is discussed. It was found that the delegation of the management of the cooperative to an external manager during its creation made it difficult for the administration to be transferred to the own wokers’ cooperative and inhibited politecny by separating the administration of the production. It was also possible to verify that the lack of a rotation policy creates a specialization of functions in the cooperative and weakens the collective of workers. Already the collective ownership of the means of production and the equal division of profits establishes a collective control as a form of work control and educates the cooperative under new values turning it into a more supportive, political and autonomous worker.