Mihajlo Jakovljev speaks with Godfrey Moase, chair and co-founder of CoPower, a non-profit energy cooperative, an executive director at United Workers Union, writer, and activist based in Melbourne, Australia.
MJ: Godfrey, you are the Chairperson and co-founder of CoPower, a non-profit energy cooperative, executive director at United Workers Union, writer, and activist based in Melbourne, Australia. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself and your work?
GM: I'm a passionate trade unionist and cooperator who believes that we should run the world on a democratic basis whether through direct input of decisions or one-worker one-vote, one-person-one-vote, but that we should have an equality of decision making and things should be in the hands of the people broadly defined. That's been a throughline in terms of my life and I think that's critical in order to build a world that is just, secure, and very importantly in today's context, sustainable.
MJ: Since 2020, CoPower has been asking its customer members to collectively decide how to spend money that the cooperative makes. Where did this concept originate and what were the challenges you faced in the beginning?
GM: Well, I think I have always been a passionate believer in the principles of participatory budgeting. As one of the co-founders of CoPower, we didn't initially connect participatory budgeting with CoPower. Where that came out of in 2020 was around dealing with COVID-19 and the pandemic. We initially had a solidarity program during the pandemic within the electricity cooperative, because that's what CoPower is: an energy provider. It’s not a licensed electricity retailer. I guess eventually it will be, but at the current stage, it is a cooperative that acts as a collective bargaining unit for thousands of electricity consumers in dealing with a privatised, corporatized electricity sector.
During the early stages of COVID-19 in 2020, as everyone was going into lockdowns we formulated a solidarity program where because the cooperative was very new and quite young there were only maybe a hundred people who were in it. There were very low costs in terms of running the overheads of the cooperative. So we thought that we could, for the balance of that financial year, put all of our income towards dealing with the social impacts of COVID-19 and the disruptions that were occurring in terms of dealing with a public health emergency. So we asked our customer members whether or not they needed a hand. And if they needed a hand, we would put them in. We would, essentially donate money to their electricity bills. And those customer members that either said that they were fine or didn't get back to us, we had a pot of money that we could use. That mainly went to people who were not covered really well by the income support program that we had with the federal government at the time, so a lot of people who were freelancers, artists and creatives or otherwise unemployed and not necessarily covered by the more beneficial arrangements. Or people who were in certain forms of enterprise whether in some state-owned agencies or here on a visa.
So we put all of our income towards dealing with the social impacts of COVID-19 and the disruptions that were occurring in terms of dealing with a public health emergency. We asked our customer members whether or not they needed a hand. And if they needed a hand, we would put them in.
So it was a patchy income support program and that was some way of helping people through that, minimizing their costs in terms of mainly their electricity bills. And out of that experience of solidarity, we had a meeting of our members at the time and we put forward the idea that, because that experience of solidarity was not formally but substantively quite a radically democratic process, maybe we raise the idea that maybe going forward 100% of our electricity income should be subject to direct democratic processes.
We had an elected board and the elected board would do the budget. We're a nonprofit. But it wasn't a direct democratic budgeting process before then so after that, we said ‘okay we're going to do that and that's how we're going to deal with trying to build a proper, just transition in a world where electricity is under social ownership and not a thing that's commodified’.
So we started that off in 2020. We had maybe 100-150 customers at that time. Today, in 2024, we have over 4,000 customers. We grew quite significantly in 2021, largely because a fossil fuel corporation, Shell, purchased an ethical, or what was deemed to be an ethical, electricity provider called Powershop. In light of that development, I think the Democratic Budget really made it clear to people who we are and what were our values and that we were a good option to go with that wasn't just a new ‘ethical corporation’ that then might get bought out by fossil fuel capital later.
The Democratic Budget really made it clear to people who we are and what were our values and that we were a good option to go with that wasn't just a new ‘ethical corporation’ that then might get bought out by fossil fuel capital later.
We didn’t consciously think that it would play out like that. You can't foresee the future, but direct democracy and participatory budgeting ended up becoming not just a meaningful value in our identity as a cooperative, but a core part of our strategy to build, our strategy to win. Democracy is really a strategy to build power.
MJ: I'm glad you mentioned the Democratic Budget. Maybe most notably, and recently, the Democratic Budget for the 2024-2025. It became a very interesting initiative for me personally who was getting introduced to your company and how everything works. How does this look like on the ground level - How can people participate and how do you ensure participation?
GM: Australia is a very big, geographically disparate country and we have members in many different parts of Australia, although probably 60% plus of our cooperative membership is located in the state of Victoria. Our participation, in order to be inclusive, is online and that was built out of our experience of having democratic meetings during the COVID-19 early lockdowns.
This year we had a couple of different waves of voting. What we have is that the Board of Directors, which is elected by the membership, doesn't give up its responsibility to try and think through the strategy and direction of the cooperative. What happened early in the year, in the first couple of months, was that the Board put together a proposal about ‘this is what we think we need to do to reinvest back in the cooperative to grow; we need to build out more employees as we get bigger and reinvest in some of our internal processes.’ Then there is an element of working through improving the benefits that our members get through switching to us because we're not large enough yet to materially impact the price of electricity as a commodity. I think once we get larger and larger we'll be able to do that. But we are large enough to fund more services, whether it's energy efficiency services, advice, discounts on certain forms of products like heat pumps or whatnot, that help people. We can do some interesting things. We put together a strategy that was (1) reinvesting back into the cooperative, (2) a balance of building member services and then (3) what would be roughly described as doing good out in the world, we call them Impact Campaigns. They're really exercises in solidarity because they might not directly benefit our customer members.
We put together a strategy that was (1) reinvesting back into the cooperative, (2) a balance of building member services and then (3) what would be roughly described as doing good out in the world, we call them Impact Campaigns. They're really exercises in solidarity because they might not directly benefit our customer members.
One of the Impact Campaigns we’re voting on at the moment is whether or not to put $10,000 towards installing a solar panel for a women's farming cooperative in the West Bank and allow them to disconnect from the Israeli power company. That is not going to change what one of our members pays in electricity in the next two or three months, but it's an act of solidarity in the sense that it's helping to build a world that is safer and secure for all. We know that an unstable world drives up electricity prices in a very corporate-controlled environment, we all experienced that with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what happened with gas pricing. That reverberated all around the world. The Impact Campaigns are about doing good in the world, but eventually so that we all live in a better world.
The first meeting that we had with our members was about strategy. ‘Here is a strategy, what do you think of the strategy? We have X, Y, and Z objectives that we're trying to achieve, and here is the relative prioritisation of reinvesting back in the cooperative so it can grow and get better and more sophisticated as an entity.’
We employed our first part-time staff member last year. It's still fairly early days. ‘Here is what we can do to help improve services for members and here's an amount of money we think we can do to exercise meaningful solidarity in building a more cooperative world.’ That has feedback, it has discussion. Generally, there's working out the terms of reference and everything else and then that goes to a vote of customer members. That vote has to basically get a super-majority for it to succeed. Maybe one day in the future there'll be a controversial vote on that. You never know what'll happen and that is probably not a bad thing. That's democracy and contest. I think it’s ultimately productive, that it leads to a better world. But, we essentially committed that the strategy has to have more than 50% plus one endorsement of our customer members. It's not going to work unless a super-majority of people go ‘Yeah, we are on board with that’. So it's actually not really a hard task, I think, if anyone had a problem with our strategy, to organise a minority in order to block it or restart the conversation. So that's the first vote: ‘Are we comfortable with this as the direction we're moving in terms of the broad prioritisation?’
That's the first vote: ‘Are we comfortable with this as the direction we're moving in terms of the broad prioritisation?’
And then that locks in the business plan for the next 12 months for want of a better term. Once that vote is done, we open up to the community at large. We’re an enterprise cooperative. While we practice direct democracy our structure is an example of associational democracy. It's an interesting thing where we have direct democratic processes internally, but our broader theory of winning is about building associational democracy out in the world. That's not unusual in the sense that participatory budgeting also helps build associational democracy. To be clear, we're owned by cooperatives, unions, a democratic church, and any other organization that can demonstrate in its rules of incorporation that it has a democratic function. It's essentially a no-corporation rule.
When we open the second wave of voting in the democratic budget, the applications for various programming spans to the world at large, but we also deliberately try and activate our enterprise, our organizational owners, to build relations of solidarity between our customers who we still talk about as members because they have this ability to vote, elect, and we have independent directors on our Board as well. We have this structure that we're building as we go with a deep commitment to democracy.
So, as I said, the second round we open up program applications. This year we had program applications for various forms of member benefits with a total quantum of spend that was determined by that democratic vote and various forms of impact applications. The Member Benefits programs are essentially partially owned by another cooperative called Earthworker Cooperative. They're a federation of worker cooperatives. One of their worker cooperatives makes solar hot water heaters in brown coal and coal-generating communities in Victoria. They also have another cooperative in their network that does energy advice. And so, they've put together a range of things that our customer members are voting on, such as discounts for cooperatively and union-made solar, hot water and heat pump units, discounts for draft proofing and thermal assessments and potentially an energy advice line as well. So, members are voting on that currently with relative weightings. We have an interesting system where people have 20 points per bucket and they can allocate them. You don't just put a tick next to something. You can say I want to put 20 points on this one project because I'm really passionate about it or if you're so minded you could just allocate an even amount to everyone, or anything in between.
So with the second vote that's open currently, people are simultaneously voting on Member Benefit programs and Impact Campaign programs they want to support. The second vote comes from applications that are either internal to CoPower where we've determined funds that we can help spend throughout the year or through organizations that have programs that they want to do. We've got 15 or 16 of those applications open currently where people will vote on what will end up being roughly $41,000 that will be distributed out in grants.
With the second vote, people are simultaneously voting on Member Benefit programs and Impact Campaign programs they want to support.
We probably don't have enough time to go through them all, but there's a very interesting list of things on our website that involves First Nation solidarity, solidarity with Palestinian peoples, building cooperatives in East Timor and cooperative supply chain in coffee growing between East Timor and Australia, through supporting striking workers, supporting climate organizing and resistance, a campaign around building a better bus network in one of our population centres in Australia. So, it's a just transition very broadly defined, but all united by those principles of sustainability, social justice, equality and democracy. I should also say that the second round of voting was preceded by a second meeting that was open to our customer members that was recorded and people can go and access and listen and get further information about.
MJ: Let's try to summarize these rounds of participation starting with the first round.
GM: Well, the first round sets the overall spending strategy for the cooperative. How much to reinvest back into the cooperative, how much to invest in member benefits, and how much to invest in doing good work out in the community. So the first round sets ‘Do we have general agreement on the strategy for the next year?’ with a super-majority, because if there's not strong agreement on a strategy, that probably indicates a defect in that strategy in some way, shape or form.
MJ: Moving on to the second phase in which you use a prioritisation tool. You mentioned that there are points allocated to each member that they can distribute across programs rather than just ticks that they would just click on.
GM: We're currently using a tool for this called Election Buddy. It's a program that anyone can access. The second round is ‘you've set the priorities; We've now said there's X amount of money to spend on Member Benefits and Y amount of money to spend on Impact Campaigns; How do you want to distribute that money in each bucket?’ So, everyone gets 20 points for each and then they just allocate the 20 points how they see fit. They could even abstain some amount of points for whatever reason. You just got 20 points, you use them how you want to use them in each. 20 points here, 20 points in the second. 40 points in total, to be clear.
MJ: Okay, can you identify maybe a couple of advantages and disadvantages of this process?
GM: Well, I mean, one disadvantage is that it’s time-consuming. Democracy can be hard, right? It's not a magic thing that you wave over a thing to make it good. Democracy is not the same as necessarily a thing that is good or generates good outcomes, even though I would argue that a democratic process generally leads to better outcomes over time and is a better decision-making process. You never know what's going to happen in the short term. So the first negative is that it takes time and commitment.
The flip side of that is that time and commitment build better relationships in the cooperative. It is an educational tool in and of itself, either directly for those programs that people review, even if they don't vote it up. Most of the programs that people are going to consider are going to go ahead anyway, so it is a useful educational piece. I think it helps explain the actual activity itself and also makes real the values of the cooperative and clearly contrasts with how it's different from corporate energy providers who would be using that money to spend on TV ads or whatever else.
MJ: Moving on from CoPower a bit, how does that decision-making model that you’ve developed at CoPower compare to the United Workers Union?
GM: I think that the first thing in general about being a union is that democracy is not just nice to have, but it's a strategy for power. As a trade unionist, I firmly believe in Hannah Arendt's conception of power that it’s generative from people working together. It's based on relationships of cooperation. Therefore, it should be contrasted against control, authority, force, and other forms of people seeking to shape the world. That is a really important point. Understanding the philosophical basis of power, because when you understand the philosophical basis of power, that has strategic implications. The strategic implication is that forms of cooperation don't necessarily need to be democratic. They can be deep forms of cultural and familial ties that aren't necessarily democratic that people cooperate around.
But on a mass basis, ultimately, you probably need some form of democratic decision-making in order to achieve that level of cooperation that then builds power. So my conception is that trade unions are engines of practical democracy. That plays out in really important direct ways. In the way that unions operate in workplaces. Collective bargaining for instance is intrinsically a very democratic process both in a representative and in a direct form. By that I mean workers elect who their representatives are when they go and bargain with sectors or with employers. They also make decisions, workers as a group make decisions about how they feel about various forms of offers or what claims they want to pursue and that's a very democratic process.
Trade unions are engines of practical democracy.
If you really want to shift corporations over time and those that exercise very entrenched forms of authority, you can't escape the need for some form of direct democracy. In the sense that what will happen eventually if you really want to build a living wage, carve out time for people to spend, time away from work or change lives, you have to take some form of action as part of collective bargaining. Not every collective bargain. In fact, most collective bargains don't result in industrial action, but it's a thing that needs to happen if you want to drive those real outcomes and I would argue, it's a really important part of a healthy, functioning and free society - that workers can peacefully withdraw their labour. It's a very directly democratic process because you have to engage in some form of vote. ‘Are we happy with an offer or not? Or do we want to keep pushing these clients or not?’ And in that vote, you will have negotiations with representatives of an employer. You'll get to their final position and then workers have to say ‘Okay, if we want to keep doing this, we have to do something’. So they'll vote on authorizing action. Then that vote is about what they're prepared to do. And then there's a second layer of very robust democracy where if that occurs, then the workers themselves are the ones who are taking the action. If you're going to walk out, you don't only vote on walking out, you engage in the democratic action of walking out. And so, principles of not only representative democracy but direct democracy are vital to a well-functioning trade union and the promise of unionism in general that every worker should count on, and that every worker deserves respect and dignity in the workplace. That general principle is a very democratic proposition. The idea ‘that we shouldn't just rely on managers to tell us what to do’ is I think not only a trade union principle, but a cooperative principle and it's why I'd said at the top I'm a trade unionist and a cooperator. I think that they're both highly democratic institutional forms in and of themselves.
What they share is that they’re the forms in which workers can exercise democracy in their daily working lives. Not only democracy but solidarity. If you're in a trade union, your collective bargaining is not only a very democratic process, there are also other issues that occur in workplaces, between bargains: you elect your delegates, you elect health and safety reps, it is a very robustly democratic culture. That is also important in our work, that in a worker cooperative, you elect your management and strategic operational decisions together. You make decisions on a one-worker or one-vote basis. You elect your managers, you have those General Assemblies.
What they share, the trade union and the cooperative, is the characteristics of both being institutional forms where workers can exercise democracy on a daily basis while they are at work. Therefore, they're both really important to a functional democratic society because what that means is people experience better material outcomes through exercising democratic norms. People have a significant stake in the system, in protecting and defending their democracy if they are in a trade union. If they're in a cooperative, or worker cooperative in particular, they have a stake. They have a lot to lose if those processes get taken away or undermined and I don't think it's any accident that societies that have higher functioning and healthier political democracies generally have a higher trade union density.
While there are a lot of people who are members of cooperatives – and a lot of people who don't know that they're members of cooperatives when you include consumer cooperatives and mutuals and insurance mutuals and other things like that – you probably don't have any jurisdictions in the world where worker cooperatives exercise density on a scale similar to trade unions. However, I'm going to posit a theory, a hypothesis that requires testing, that if you looked at those regional jurisdictions that have a high level of worker cooperatives relative to the rest of the economy then they probably have a healthier regional democratic culture compared to their broader national counterparts. By that, I specifically mean the regional politics of the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy compared to what's happening in the rest of Italy.
If you looked at those regional jurisdictions that have a high level of worker cooperatives relative to the rest of the economy then they probably have a healthier regional democratic culture compared to their broader national counterparts.
Sorry, this is a very long-winded answer, but democracy is core to the work of what a union does and is very core to my work as a trade union leader in working with workers, to formulate good strategies for them to improve their lives. It's not me coming down from the mountain telling them, A, B, C, you need to do this. It's me working with them, thinking through how we build a healthy functional democratic culture in your industry or your workplace. That's the real work.
MJ: Thinking exactly about this and listening to your thoughts on this topic and the difficulties that you mentioned, I'm curious to ask if you could change something in these decision-making models within CoPower or within the United Workers Union with 100% success, what would you change?
GM: On the trade union side of things, and this is very particular to the Australian context, but it could play out, I think that the way that we would need to do collective bargaining should change.
The way we need to do collective bargaining should change.
We have a very decentralized enterprise bargaining system in Australia and I think that it's an additional barrier to workers taking on big social questions. Australia regularly reduced working hours whether through a reduction in the working week or increased annual leave or other forms of leave up until the 1990s when enterprise bargaining was introduced. While there's been a total decrease in working hours in Australia since that time, that has not been achieved on a fair or equitable basis. That's largely been achieved by more and more people being outsourced and casualized and made into gig workers and freelancers against their will and a smaller and smaller cohort of permanent workers basically doing more work on unpaid overtime.
In the US you had enterprise bargaining through their bargaining system from the 1930s when Australia and the US had roughly the same amount of time off for workers and a similar working week. The US still doesn’t have a generalized form of annual leave or holiday leave for people. It hasn't really reduced its overall working hours. That's significant even on a real basis as opposed to a legal basis since that time.
So I think that there is something in the separation of bargaining at a micro-level that prevents greater worker participation in overall social decisions for a society on a direct basis and that's a problem because then it reduces overall democratic outlets. Although it is not the only factor, I think it impairs the health of democracy over time, as we are seeing play out quite concerningly right now, particularly in the US, but also increasingly in Australia. That matters because we are facing probably the greatest social crisis of the last 1,000 years or more in terms of the climate crisis. Never before has there been a greater urgency for workers to have a democratic voice on a mass scale when it comes to a big social problem, that our elites have failed to grapple with and deal with over the last 30 years, as the climate crisis. So it's not just a theory about how we get better equality or whatever else; there is there is an existential element to this. From what I've researched and what I've seen, if you have a higher trade union density in your national community you actually have better climate policies, because there are greater day-to-day democratic outlets and pressures on that political economy. Naturally, that is going to lead to better climate policies because this is a massive freaking existential issue for people. When you have less of that you have fewer good outcomes. There is a solid relationship between those two things that is important to bear in mind, definitely.
So the way around that I think is that we in the Australian trade union movement need to better embrace democracy as a strategy when it comes to the way that we do collective bargaining. I think that we need to have a strategy that I would call solidarity bargaining that can't be imposed from the top down. It has to invest in delegates and workplace leaders, who are democratically elected, networking with each other and better cooperating across all of these individual enterprise bargaining agreements where they've got a common commitment to fight for a better outcome, not only for everyone but for each other because we'll either fall apart or get through the next few decades with robust forms of democracy and solidarity.
So not just doing enterprise bargaining but doing collective bargaining and what I would call solidarity bargaining where we have democracy on a mass basis and cooperation across enterprises and sectors. That's what I would say we'd need to change in terms of democracy on the Australian trade union movement side of things.
Not just doing enterprise bargaining but doing collective bargaining and what I would call solidarity bargaining where we have democracy on a mass basis and cooperation across enterprises and sectors.
On the CoPower side of things, I think the challenge that we have is just how do we find meaningful ways to increase and deepen that participation for people, building that architecture and reinvesting back into those spaces so that people can better connect with each other whether that's through an investment into our internal IT infrastructure so customer members have a safe way to reach out to each other and form networks and connections outside of the democratic process so they can form networks of cooperators within their various unions or other forms of organization.
That's going to take some time. Essentially the economic strategy for CoPower is what I would call ‘the feeding of the 5,000’. We started with nothing and then we shared that nothing and then that's created more prosperity over time, but not nearly enough. We're talking about dealing with an energy transition that requires trillions of dollars worth of spending and we've gone from having nothing to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of spending. But that's nothing compared to the scale at hand. So we need to find ways to reinvest in those spaces.
MJ: Finally, considering that time permits, I would like to briefly ask about you. What is next for Godfrey Moase?
GM: Well, I'm deeply committed to my position as a trade union leader and I think that in this moment of the climate crisis, democratic crisis, and crisis of living standards I have not only an obligation but a passion and a vocation to think through good strategy to navigate those crises. That is really what drives me, and gets me up in the morning. How can workers that I work with who have to deal with the overwhelming power of a very narrow class of mainly mining and fossil fuel oligarchs, how can they exercise their power? That drives me and that's pretty all-consuming and that's what's next day in and day out for me. And on the cooperative side of things, it's helping the cooperative take the next level in its scale going from 4,000 to 20,000 and going from our first employee to a group of 5 or 6 and being able to make so much more of a difference.
I think what unites those things is that I've probably got a responsibility to try and better articulate that overall strategy and vision because any one of us is limited, you know, we're here for a limited time. We have limited capacity. One of the great promises of democracy is that we can achieve so much more with the ways in which we work together and cooperate together based on relationships of mutual respect and equality rather than someone trying to bully or stand over you, or exercise economic leverage or be able to sack you if you don't do what they say.
Being able to help more and more people step up and claim their democratic voice. That's what drives me and what unites those two facets of my working life.
MJ: Thank you very much for, speaking with me today. I wish you good luck in all your future endeavours and I hope that what drives you now keeps on driving you in the future. I also think our conversation will be incredibly educational and informative for our readers.
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