Just to start off this is meant to be a workers rights issue so I’m going to try and keep this post as apolitical as possible, as I know it’s a little dicey to talk about such things.
So as you all are aware that governments around the world are freezing the assets of Russians with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Among those that have been sanctioned is a guy called Roman Abramovich who is also the majority owner of the London football club Chelsea fc. Now that his assets have been frozen this has left the football club pretty much dead in the water as they aren’t able to do any kind of business at all since the clubs bank accounts have been frozen. This is not going to only affect the extremely wealthy players and higher ups at the club, but this is going to be felt most of all by many thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of people who work at the club. This includes people serving the bars, the janitors, the people selling the merchandise of the club, people producing the merch ect… We now have this disaster of people being laid off indiscriminately because the club literally can’t pay them anymore.
Abramovich has made very tall claims about his intentions to sell the club and donate the money to Ukraine but the government is not even allowing this, which is quite frankly going to be disastrous for everyone working there. So we have a situation where the government has seized someone’s business and the owner of that business has said he doesn’t care about the money and just wants the club to live on and the government saying the club will not be sold under any circumstances. Why don’t we take the next logical step and transfer the ownership (or the part of the club that was abramoviches) to the workers?
There are several benefits of converting the club to a worker owned coop including;
Keeping the jobs,
Worker owned coops report higher worker satisfaction and productivity than capitalist counterparts in general,
Much better worker rights including fairer wages and would be a huge win for the workers rights movement,
Get rid of the authoritarian hydra guy and the leach ceos making money for simply owning a thing,
And finally, I know a lot of you probably don’t care but sports are are really important part of British culture, a lot of the fans are extremely unhappy about this and having the club not able to compete is a huge hit on the competitive integrity of the league. Keep the fans happy by allowing them to stay!
I know this isn’t as easy as just do it 4 head but it’s far from impossible. Worker owned coops are a thing and they are entirely viable, if you want to lean more about them I would highly encourage you to watch some lectures by dr Richard Wolff (who most of you will already know). We could even have a thing where the government gives the workers a loan in order for them to buy the company, and then transfer the proceeds over to the Ukrainian aid efforts, where the government initially drops the clubs value in money into a Ukrainian cause, then reclaims the donation as if it had lent the club money.