Currently, we are trying to systematize information gathering across the Cataunidos organizations as part of our goal of standardizing and improving financial management of the cooperatives. At Coopert, we are working with the treasurer to develop systems to measure employee wages and benefits, fixed and variable expenses, and quantity/price of commercialized materials. I helped put together some spreadsheets for the treasurer to use in order to track this data, based off of information the cooperative already collects. However, as we were going over the forms, it became pretty apparent that we were going to have some issues.
Right now, hours of the Coopert associates are added up manually. But instead of using a regular decimal system, the treasurer adds the numbers up so that decimals represent minutes. That is, 18.2 means "18 hours and 20 minutes" even though that is not an equivalent value. So when adding all the hours together and then multiplying it by the hourly wage (dependent on total income earned in the cooperative divided by total numbers of hours worked by all associates), the end result is an inaccurate number. When I tried to explain to the treasurer that she had to convert the hours/minutes numbers into decimal numbers, she quickly became confused. Although I tried for a while to explain the idea (with help from Guilherme, one of the INSEA technicians), it became apparent that she was becoming discouraged and preferred to just keep using the system that they already had in place. Then, an ex-treasurer of Coopert came in to the office and told us that he thought messing around on computers was too complicated and was bound to mess up their administrative process.
The whole experience was quite revealing to me in terms of the practical limits we are dealing with in this movement. The catadores in general lack very basic education, meaning that something as simple as the difference between decimal numbers and hour/minute numbers can be a huge problem for them. This anecdote reveals just how far off we are from having the cooperatives really take control of their financial management, create strategic business plans, and commercialize effectively through the Cataunidos network in order to become commercially viable businesses. The idea of using computers, even for something as simple as spreadsheets, clearly is not going to work, at least in the short term. As soon as something goes wrong (having to add another column, or an Excel formula error), the entire process would become messed up as they would not have the detailed knowledge to fix the issue. The problem is that you cannot build a strong cooperative administrative structure without an educational base to begin with.
And yet building that educational base is a challenge. If we were to show up one day at the cooperative and try to convince everyone to take a math class, they would no doubt yell at us and say the activity was worthless - when a catador needs to collect, sort, and process his materials, what good is learning some abstract theoretical concept like math that has nothing to do with his daily life? Incentivizing the community to build the educational base is extremely difficult.
Yet if we take the other approach and focus simply on skills training for the select few in the directorship, other problems arise. First off, leadership positions are supposed to rotate, and the most successful cooperative leaders sometimes end up leaving the group to pursue new opportunities anyway (the traditional head of the Nova Lima association, for example, is now running for city council). So the strategy can backfire due to the simple issue of turnover. But also, it is hard for the leadership of the cooperatives to stake out unpopular positions among the group, due both to simple peer pressure and presumed respect for democratic decision-making. So if we focuses our training on a few individuals without building consensus, this often fails anyway as the leaders are unable to win support for new administrative procedures. It really creates a tough situation from either direction.
One thing that caught my eye was the history of Rede-sol, a separate network of catadores in the BH metro area that is not affiliated with Cataunidos. The Rede-sol cooperatives are in fact much more effective at financial management than the Cataunidos groups, which at first gave me hope that we had discovered a successful model that could be replicated. However, when I dug deeper I found that this was not the case. Rede-sol is successful in its financial management precisely because it has the sort of traditional hierarchy that the Cataunidos groups try to avoid - the leaders in the diretoria tend to have a very different profile from the rest of the workers, coming from more skilled labor and educated backgrounds. They end up taking control of the cooperatives and centralizing decision-making. While this brings clear benefits in terms of management efficiency, the fear of creating a two-tiered system within the groups certainly gives me pause.
At times, I get frustrated dealing with these issues because there really seem to be no good answers. Is there a way to build and strengthen these cooperatives and associations without sacrificing the social cohesion, inclusion and equality that they have worked so diligently over time to cultivate? At this point, I really just don't know.
Some pictures of Coopert:
Coopert truck - materials are unloaded at the entrance to the cooperative
Entrance to the silo - materials are pushed down the chute to be sorted
Side view of the silo - materials fall down chute and then onto a conveyor belt for sorting. Once sorted, the materials fall down various chutes into bags below the conveyor belt.
At the end of the conveyor belt, rejected material is discarded into an open area, where it is eventually removed to the landfill next to the cooperative.
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