Cooperation
An autonomous structure where people come together voluntarily to meet their economic, social and cultural needs through collectively defined rules. The word itself means collaboration.
Manifesto
If we are the ones who produce, we should be the ones who decide and gain
Knowledge, labour, time. When we knead them together with organization and solidarity, the seeds of a new order begin to sprout. Albatros is our attempt to build an alternative to the working life everyone assumes is inevitable.
Our principles
Solidarity
So that every member can live with dignity, financially and emotionally, we build shared funds: pensions, health, reserves, childcare. And our solidarity does not stop at our own door; we share what we know and build alongside others, too.
Collective Functioning
We decide together on every process the cooperative needs to run, and we share tasks and responsibilities equally and in rotation among all working owners.
Horizontal Hierarchy
There is no top or bottom among us. Everyone carries equal responsibility and holds an equal right to speak.
Decentralization
Daily operations and decision-making power belong not to a single center but to the members and the working groups themselves.
Fair Revenue Sharing
The income the cooperative generates is shared fairly among members, in proportion to the labour and time each one has put in.
Consensus
Instead of voting on an item and letting the majority have its way, we look for solutions everyone actively supports, or can at least live with. We listen to each other closely. Consensus is neither compromise nor unanimity; it is a process that often ends in surprising, creative solutions no one saw coming.
Equality
Everyone has an equal say; income and risk alike are shared fairly and equally. Everyone, inside this structure and out, is treated as equal, free of prejudice.
What work means for most of us
For most of us, working life means burning through our years on a road with no clear destination. We count ourselves lucky to land a decent place under acceptable conditions. Inside a forty-five-hour week, the two or three weeks of paid leave we get each year become the widest patch of freedom we will ever see.
Unemployment, interviews, wages that never catch up, performance reviews, precarity, the pressure that keeps you feeling not-quite-enough, the fear of being let go, retirement that arrives at the grave: we talk about all of it whenever we get the chance. We criticize it. But we rarely manage to draw a framework for changing it. We want out of a corporate world that deepens our alienation behind words like “us” and “family,” and leaves us unhappy.
The alternative we want
We do not believe these conditions are inevitable. Our aim is to build cooperation, solidarity, and the working environment of the future. To produce not only for profit but in line with our talents, according to our needs, collectively, and in solidarity.
Each of us carries different skills and different specialties. On our own we can go only so far; but gathered into collectives around shared goals, we can be far more dynamic and productive. And we believe that, over time, these collectives can knit together into union-like structures, building organization from the ground up.
Centralized structures have almost always needed unfair conditions to stay healthy and last. “Decentralization,” the idea that has come to the fore in recent years, especially in tech, grew out of the very same needs. We agreed on eight principles to lay the foundation of the alternative we can build together.
The change has already begun
Building a whole industry’s way of working around values like these may sound unrealistic to some. Yet the kind of examples that make you think “if only” are running all over the world, and they are not few. The change has already begun; international networks are taking shape.
Breaking out of the order that runs our lives and building something new also opens the doors to how we will work in the future. Trusting that we have the courage and the resolve to take the first steps, we founded a tech cooperative around the principles and values we share.
As Albatros Tech Cooperative, we’re taking off