Properly motivated and organized, co-ops can do some rather remarkable things.
Back in 2005, I did a study for a Costa-Rican co-op that had been organized to
provide electricity to large area, Los Santos, some sixty to eighty miles south
of San Jose, Costa Rica's capital. What the co-op was trying to do was to
engender stability in the area. Essentially, by providing all of the rural
people of the region with electricity, it was helping to ensure that they would
have a quality of life similar to that of urban dwellers and would not feel
they had to move into town to improve their lot.
The co-op I worked with was not the only co-op in the area. Others ground and
sold coffee, did retailing and provided health services. Much of the
businesses and service work done in the area was via co-ops. You had to wonder
why. My guess was that the huge churches that one saw in the centre of town
had something to do with it. The continuity, operation and maintenance of
co-ops seemed to need a deeply imbedded moral basis like "love thy neighbor as
thyself". I do know from some of the reading I did at the time that priests or
religious leaders had a lot to do with the foundation of the Mondragon movement
and several other movements that depended on people working together and
helping each other.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Hudson" <[email protected]>
To: "RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION"
<[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 3:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] AlterNet: Why Unions Are Going Into the Co-op Business
> At 16:03 19/03/2013, SL wrote:
>>This story has been forwarded to you from
>>http://www.alternet.org by Keith Hudson
>>
>>I've been following this initiative - seems very relevant to innovative
>>thinking about the future of work. While 30 jobs in a laundry doesn't seem
>>like much, I imagine the conditions of that work are important to how
>>those folks feel about themselves.
>>
>>-------------------------------------
>>Why Unions Are Going Into the Co-op Business
>>http://www.alternet.org/food/why-unions-are-going-co-op-business
>
> Excellent article by Amy Dean. If we are to have a practical socialist
> future then, as the United Steelworkers Union President says "We need a new
> business model . . . " But, as Amy Dean suggests at the end of the
> article, the new (Mondragon-type) model is still vulnerable to globalized
> competition from countries with lower wage rates. (Even the Chinese are now
> facing this from several other Asian countries such as Thailand, etc. This
> means that China might not succeed in pulling up the rural half of its
> population anytime soon.) So what should co-operatives do?
>
> Michael Peack, Mondragon's spokesman in the piece, doesn't have an answer.
> He can only hope that labour costs will rise elsewhere -- and quickly
> enough. I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
>
> The only way forward for Mondragon-type co-operaives is to broadly raise
> their skills level, with particular concentration on the highest priced
> skills. The present elite in any country is not going to persuade the
> government to help because they already recruit enough professionals to
> keep them in a dominant position. Co-operatives must set about the
> educational task all by themselves. The factory workers of the 19th century
> in England almost succeeded in getting this started themselves but failedd
> when the civil service captured education with free schools etc .
>
> Keith
>
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