This is a CTP of initiative: RIPESS/ Groupe Terre (Belgium)
“Project Wallonia”, designates all economic activities led by the group in Belgium. It bears this name in order to make clearer the distinction between activities led in the North and in the South. Today, the support for development in southern countries is taken in charge by a single association, Autre Terre asbl, while the other entities are part of project Wallonia. However, the final objective is similar for north and south projects: they aim at creating sustainable jobs for disadvantaged people in a participative management system. Indeed, participative management has been central to Project Wallonia since its launch on 1st may 1980, through the organization of weekly meetings with all workers.
If the project has always sought socio-economical development, its activities and missions have evolved and diversified over time. In the early 1980s, textile and paper collections were central. Regarding textiles, early investments were made in order to develop collecting activities, as Salvatore Vetro explains: “In a very democratic way, the General Assembly decided to make a first investment of around 6 million Belgian francs. We decided to invest in a new building. We also started to hire people, like drivers. However, we quickly realized that we needed work on a daily basis because we needed to pay the workers at the end of the month”. To do so, the only solution was to expand activities, and consequently, to increase activities and to invest more: “We needed to collect much more, which called for larger investments. We bought trucks and vans because, at that time, we did not have containers yet. We left bags in mailboxes and we came back few weeks later”. At the time, the collected textiles were not sorted and directly sold to a private enterprise in Flanders. In 1982, the prices of textiles dropped dramatically and this enterprise was forced to reduce its purchase price from 15 francs a kilo to 4 francs a kilo. As a response, Terre decided to open up its own shops. To do so, they created Co-Terre, a commercial company, in 1983. They had thought about the cooperative status option, but they set it aside because it would have required financial investment from workers, who could not necessarily afford it. A dozen shops were opened during the 1980s and at the end of the 1990s, 15 people were working for Co-Terre.
Regarding paper collections, they decided during the mid-1980s to try to develop a finished product in order to protect themselves against fluctuating prices. This led to the birth of “panneau pan-terre”, a noise insulating board made from waste paper and to the Pan-Terre company in 1985 in order to sell them. As they did not have the fund to conduct advertising campaigns, they decided to target in the first place only prestigious construction sites, managed by companies like Kodak, Caterpillar, or Renault. As Salvatore Vetro explains, “this allowed us to go to building material merchants and told them that we had supplied these prestigious companies with our noise insulating boards. This was a commercial process very different from what was done usually”. At the same time, in 1985, they launched “Terre Engineering”, a commercial company aimed at selling the technology behind the insulating board, but it did not work out and was finally transformed into Tri-Terre in 2001, the society which would deal with the sorting of textiles. The commercialization of the insolating boards would be assigned to Acoustix as from the early 2000s. In-between, in 1996, Recol’Terre would be created in order to allow the participation to call for proposals for the collections of paper and paperboards, on top of manufacturing activities.
As we have seen in the previous CTP (“Creation and Projects in the South”), during the 1950s (in a post WWII period), Terre’s activities were directed towards supporting people in difficulty in Belgium while during the “golden 1960s”, priority was given to support for the development countries. However, the successive oil price shocks and the related times of austerity came to influence in turn the mission and activities of the group. The impact of the OPEP embargo of 1973-1974 was tremendous for European countries (more than for the United-States for example), involving a quick economic slowdown and an important increase in unemployment. After a short respite, the second oil shock of 1979, characterized by a sudden tripling of oil price, had even greater repercussions on the global economy, leading to a sudden decrease in global economic growth and global trade, accompanied by increasing inflation. Once again, unemployment raised, industrialised countries counting 23 million unemployed people at the end of 1980. For some people, these two crises initiated a period of limited growth and mass unemployment in some European countries which never stopped since.
Project Wallonia was launched on 1st may 1980 in order to respond to the unemployment crisis which stroke Belgium. The main idea was to replace volunteerism by remunerated activities, as explained by Salvatore Vetro: “At that time, we had more than 500 000 unemployed people in Belgium. And, like always, it was the weakest who were suffering from these crises. We realized that there was a lot of people, and especially the youngest, who could not find a job. We began to think that it was indecent that hundreds of people were asked to volunteer for activities which generated profits and financed projects in the South, whereas this job could have been done by salaried employees”. Besides this, the economic crises also led to a volunteerism crisis: people, faced with unemployment, were more reluctant to work for free. It became harder and harder for Terre to recruit hundreds of volunteers to do the collections once Saturday a month.
Project Wallonia, which was launched in this morose economic context, reflects a fundamental reorientation of the purpose of the activities of Terre, aimed from there on at supporting disadvantaged people both in the North and in the South. Reorientations of this magnitude would not happen again in the history of the group, even though activities would evolve in parallel with technological changes and increasing competition (on that point, see CTP “Difficulties and Revitalization”).
As we have seen in the “co-production” category, sustained efforts were provided during the 1980s to offer employment to people suffering from economic crises in Belgium. As an example, the closing in 1982 of “the Laminoir de Jemappes” a metalworking enterprise specialized in rolling processes convinced the group of the necessity to develop insertion. Situated in a former mining area of Wallonia (near Mons), the closure of the enterprise had tremendous impact on the region, leaving over 1200 persons without employment, after more than a year of massive protestations and blockades. As Salvatore Vetro remembers, “When the Laminoirs de Jemappes closed down, thousands of people fell by the wayside. Some of them were part of a retraining program and we were asked to come and help them to create their own job. When we asked some of them what they could do, they answered they knew how to weld. So we bought some welding machines and asked them to work for us. We could do that because we were working on several constructing sites at that moment. But we warned them that it would probably not always be the case and that they would have to become autonomous and find their own customers at one point”. The idea was to foster empowerement in order to facilitate the vocational retraining of workers who, sometimes, had been doing the same activity for years, or even decades.
And even though priority was given during the 1980s to the provision of employment and trainings to people suffering from the economic crises in Belgium, it does not mean that projects in the South were given-up. Until the end of the 1990s, supported projects in the South were only industrial in essence. For example, they supported a bike manufacturer project in Nicaragua. They even tried in 1985 to extract lithium in the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, because some volunteers had run tests and knew where to operate the extractions in order to get higher yields. The project was self-financed, since the Belgian development cooperation agencies had refused to provide their support. However, when they asked for an operating license, the Bolivian authorities instantly refused. For Salvatore Vetro, this project was too bold: “I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but when you see some things on the ground, you realize that there are some economic areas that are untouchable”. As a consequence, they kept on supporting more classic industrial projects in the South until the end of the 1990s
During the first General Assembly during which Project Wallonia was evoked, contestation rose within the group of volunteers already involved in Terre. Salvatore Vetro summarizes the main underlying idea of the project as such: “when voluntary work generated enough income to pay people for that work, we would not resort to volunteers anymore”. However, this principle had to be accepted by everyone in order to become effective, which was not as easy as expected.
Indeed, this principle was not welcome by everyone in the General Assembly, essentially composed by members of the working class. As Salvatore Vetro explained, “Half of the people who took part to the General Assembly thought it was not normal to give a salary to lazy people (ie. the unemployed), especially the workers. They did not want to volunteer one Saturday a month to finance a salary for lazy people”. However, this contestation relied on a misconception of what Project Wallonia was about: they thought volunteering would help financing several wages whereas the project was larger, and rather called for a radical change in the objectives and the structure of Terre. It took hours to convince reluctant volunteers, and the project came close to rejection: “We had late night calls to make them understand that the collections and the commercialization would be operated by salaried people whereas the volunteers would be involved in other activities. There was a vote and, with a very weak majority, we finally voted in favour of Project Wallonia”. Even though the project was finally voted, it led a certain number of volunteers to leave the ship.
This phenomenon was amplified by what Salvatore Vetro called “a strategic error” made by the proponents of Project Wallonia, who, focused on recruiting new workers after the vote, didn’t find immediately a new activity for volunteers, who were numerous at the time (sometimes, over 1000 people could be mobilized just for one Saturday). As he recalls, “At the beginning of the 1980s, there were years during which 50 new jobs were created. I must admit we neglected the volunteers a lot. [...] Since we stopped calling them overnight, our pool of volunteers tended to disperse”. Despite the efforts made during the 1960s and the 1970s to constitute and coordinate a significant pool of volunteers (see CTP “Creation and Projects in the South”), the sudden transition to salaried employment had negative side-effects vis-à-vis the historic members of Terre.
On a general level, the success and the further developments of Project Wallonia were not necessarily anticipated. When questioned on this issue, Salvatore Vetro responded: “I don’t think I knew we would achieve this kind of development, but the founder, who passed away in 1993, might have. He was an extraordinary person, with an incredible prophetic vision: you only meet this kind of person once in a lifetime. They have not only a prophetic vision but also a social fiber that makes a lot of people crystallise around them, even though it is not enough”.
On a less general level, the group had clearly anticipated that the transition from voluntary to salaried work, accompanied by an increase in economic activities, would require legal adaptations, as explained by Salvatore Vetro: “Creating jobs means creating economic activities and this requires the development of adequate legal and administrative tools. It was not complicated to organize a lot of things with the association and with the volunteers, but once you have to pay wages, it’s far more complicated”. They recognized soon enough that they would need to resort to external competencies to image and implement those changes, as explained by Salvatore Vetro: “At one point (in 1984 I believe), we brought in a purely economic consultancy with expertise on legal issues. We worked during one year with two consultants to imagine the entire group structure. Thanks to them, we had the idea of neutral capital”. Neutral capital became one the main financial feature of the group, according to which maximum 51% of the capital belongs to the group itself. The workers have the usufruct of this capital, meaning that they can decide on the allocation of the financial results. They can participate to all strategic, political or operational decisions, regardless of their financial weight in the enterprise. The underlying idea of this system is that money is not an end in itself but rather should be a tool serving the enterprises and the workers.
In addition to financial advice, the consultants also suggested legal changes in order to further economic development. They suggested that the noise insulating board’s activity should be led by a commercial company and not an association, resulting in the birth of the Pan-Terre company. The group then applied this piece of advice for the creation of two other companies, first Co-Terre and later-on (in the next decade) Recol’Terre, in order to be able to respond to public calls for tenders.
This period was very critical, since it determined the dynamics of development of the group and, consequently, the rest of its history. A particular accent on employment protection and growth would be made from there on, reflecting a growing distancing from voluntary work. The group would kept on spreading (achieving around 150 employees in the mid-80s and 350 today), following a positive stance according to which each crisis would be overcome thanks to growth instead of cuts, as explained by Salvatore Vetro: “To us, critical phases have always corresponded with growth, because each time we were faced with serious crises, we always addressed them with investments, developments and job creations. So when we hear everywhere discourses like ‘we are in a crisis, we need to prune and dismiss people’, we are like ‘this is not true, actually you can do the contrary; really, it is a matter of choice. It just reflects a political will”. This way of thinking led to a progressive professionalization of the activities of the group. Over the years, significant investments, as well as legal adaptations in order to ensure sustainable economic development were made in order to protect employments and especially non-qualified jobs so as to give a chance to disadvantaged people who cannot find their place on the job market. This way of thinking (and of doing) is directly linked in our interlocutor’s opinion to their participative management system and collective intelligence.
Obviously, when workers are involved in decisions, they less probably will vote for lay-offs, and will try to find alternative solutions to cope with a crisis. And this incentive for creativity is actually working, as explained by Salvatore Vetro: “I think that one of the reasons explaining this way of thinking is collective intelligence. If we have a problem, such as a financial loss, we all sit at a table and we ask ourselves what we can do about it. Everyone gives his/her opinion and, obviously, you have sometimes wacky ideas. But one wacky idea can give a less wacky one to another person, and so on... All that allows that, in the end, we find creative solutions we would probably never have thought about in the first place”. Indeed, the participative management system is aiming at bringing out the potential of each worker in order to sum them up and find the best solutions available, not only from an economic point of view, but also from a social one (for more information on this system, see CTP “Strengthening participative management”).
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