Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- The cooperative model accounts for $154B every year in America.
- America leads the world with cooperatives, with over 30,000 businesses operating under this model.
- Co-op advocate Nathan Schneider believes this model can help level the economic playing field.
What is a Co-operative?
Nathan Schneider plays a game at strip malls. The activist-journalist and University of Colorado Boulder media studies professor tries to guess how many businesses were directly or indirectly inspired by co-ops.
The number is higher than you’d expect.Whether it’s organic food or fair trade coffee or Visa labels in the windows of the small business or chains like Dairy Queen and Best Western, cooperatives are built into their model.
Reading Ours to Hack and Own, a book on the cooperative tradition that Schneider co-edited, I learned that the nation with the largest number of cooperatives is right here. America has over 30,000 businesses built under this model. Co-ops account for $154 billion every year in the U.S. I met Schneider because I too work for one, and during our talk he educated me on the vast influence of cooperatives on American businesses, a fact I had never stopped to contemplate.
While there are a number of variables in the cooperative model, the basic principles, followed by co-ops around the world, were created by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844:
- Voluntary and open membership
- Democratic member control
- Economic participation by members
- Autonomy and independence
- Education, training, and information
- Cooperative among cooperatives
- Concern for community
The Next Economy: Worker-Led, for Public Interest
According to Worldwatch Institute, in 2012 one billion people around the planet were part of a cooperative. The 300 largest co-ops are worth $2.2 trillion. Dating the cooperative model to an origin point is impossible since tribes generally worked under this model. The problem, Schneider says, is that players in the capitalist model take credit for the work that cooperatives have done. For example, credit cards.
Visa, he says, was originally Bank Americard. This early Visa credit card, founded in 1958, was not working under the guidance of Bank of America. A decade later, Dee Hock founded a network of banks that ran under the cooperative model.
That was what made the credit card phenomenon really work. After the cooperatives built that industry, it got demutualized, privatized, turned into this kind of rapacious and exploitative industry. But it was actually the cooperative movement that enabled that feature of capitalism…
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