As with any business, one of the most important strategic decisions facing the cooperatives is the question of size. This issue has fascinated me since the beginning of my research. Upon first glance, we naturally assume that one of the goals of the cooperatives is steady growth. In order to achieve a greater scale (and thus negotiate better prices for materials), integrate more unorganized catadores, gain political influence, and improve the reach of services, long-term expansion would seem to be a reasonable goal. Size has been a crucial component behind ASMARE’s success: as a roughly 200-member association it maintains a large profile in the city and produces 42% of the total material in the Cataunidos network.
Yet expansion can often be as much a curse as it is a blessing, due to the fluid nature of decision-making within the cooperatives. Several INSEA technicians have explained to me that ASMARE’s size has made it unwieldy, undermining carefully constructed group dynamics of solidarity and teamwork. With more associates, more conflicts emerge between individuals, creating new headaches for the leadership team. The assemblies become more tense and harder to control, which makes it harder for the enterprise to maintain direction and make strategic decisions. Simply put, it is easier to manage a smaller group of people. Several people I have talked to have expressed the opinion that maintaining roughly 25-35 associates is more ideal. Expansion exposes the weaknesses in the organizational structures of the cooperatives.
The difficulties of expansion carry large implications for the future of this movement. If associations and cooperatives do not continue to grow, how will they ever expand beyond their currently limited role in solid waste management? Has ASMARE’s success reached a plateau? Can new models of organizational management within the associations overcome these difficulties? And if so, would this require centralization of decision-making within a smaller group and thus limiting democracy within the cooperatives? And without expansion, how will the catadores achieve the necessary scale to circumvent middlemen and market their products directly to industry?
One interesting possibility to avoid the problem of large, unwieldy cooperatives is the creation of several smaller local cooperatives that work in partnership to achieve full coverage within a municipality and jointly market their goods. But it is hard to imagine this really being any more effective than a large, single organization. As the Cataunidos project has shown, coordinating among several cooperatives creates a whole other set of organizational challenges. With either model, the root question remains the same: how to create management structures that will allow for long term dynamic development, and not stagnation?
An interesting case study I will be considering is ASMAC-Contagem. The municipal government just built a new sorting warehouse next to the sanitary landfill and will turn use of the new facility over to the association. However, the new warehouse is quite large and has space for up to 110 workers working in two separate shifts, whereas only 14 catadores from ASMAC will be moving to the facility. Therefore, the municipal government has decided to install a second group of workers from the neighborhood next to the landfill, a low-income community that has to deal with all of the negative effects of a trash repository as a neighbor. (As you can imagine, the smell does wonders for one's appetite.) INSEA has trained roughly 80 of these residents in the CATAFORTE program, and they will be integrating themselves into the new ASMAC team in three waves (30 workers initially, growing to 80 in December, and then 110 in July 2012). I will be accompanying this process along with two UFMG students in order to better understand some of the challenges and opportunities involved with integrating new members into the collective.
The situation with ASMAC is especially complex because the association currently has three different warehouses, with each one operating somewhat independently. One of these will be closed and the members transferred to the new warehouse, but the other two will remain functioning. So in addition to researching the process of assimilating new workers, we will research the relationship between members of the three separate warehouses and the implications for management structures of organizations of catadores. I plan to report back on this project on a regular basis.
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