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Market power to the people

By Harry Throssell - posted Wednesday, 26 August 2009


Homes

Much of the housing built in Norway and Sweden in the second half of the 20th century was by combined effort. In the USA housing co-ops are popular among higher income groups and retired people, in New York 27,000 homes abandoned by private landlords were taken over and renovated for low income people. In Britain, management co-ops have taken over unpopular council estates, and tenant-owned organisations are challenging conventional landlords to be more involved in governance.

In an affordable housing project in Canada consisting of apartments, town houses and freestanding homes, every occupant has a say on management and elects a board of directors each year from among themselves. On taking up residence members make a small down-payment but since the members own the property there is no need for a profit. Government and other interest-free loans are available, for which the government requires a quarter of residents be eligible for rental subsidies. In one case residents' annual incomes ranged from under $10,000 to more than $100,000, the age-range from the 20s to the over-60s, with two-parent and single-parent families, and a mix of ethnic backgrounds.

South America

“In Venezuela”, writes Naomi Klein, “[President Hugo] Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure - toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics - handed over to the communities to run. It's a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing - rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services”.

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Co-op News reported in June 2009 “As Argentines prepared for mid-term legislative elections in June co-operatives made a surprise appearance as part of the debate. President Cristina Fernández gave a speech at an event organized by one of the associations of recovered factories in which she promised to promote a change in the bankruptcy law so that workers are the first to be given the opportunity to buy the assets of a company before it's auctioned off among other creditors. The Argentine government has carried out an unusual type of rescue in the case of a large bankrupt paper factory, Papelería Massuh by which the company has continued operations through a trust fund financed by the government and co-managed by government and worker delegates. Once the fund expires in 2011, the workers will be able to continue operations as a worker cooperative”.

Co-op News also reported “it is clear that the cooperative model is increasingly becoming an attractive alternative in the midst of the recession … brought on by the global crisis”. Argentina’s The Working World/La Base co-operative made a major shipment of 1,650 pounds of clothing products to the United States.

In Peru, when the government nationalised tin mines then pulled out, leaving whole communities with no alternative work, 10,000 miners created four co-operatives to keep the mines going. A recent figure showed the country with 15,000 personnel in 200 manufacturing and other organisations operating as co-operatives.

Money

Financial services are a common form of co-operative, with 49,000 credit unions serving 177 million members in 96 countries under the umbrella of the World Council of Credit Unions.

Alphonse Desjardins started credit co-operatives in Quebec, Canada, in response to the poverty and unemployment he observed at the turn of the 20th century. Working people couldn't borrow money at interest rates they could afford so Desjardins started a credit union (“caisse”) in which members pooled their savings and took turns for affordable loans. The Mouvement des Caisses Desjardins is now a countrywide organisation with both community and industrial credit unions.

Lamrabat concluded “Cooperatives may not be the solution to the world's problems, but they are certainly part of the solution. An International Year of Cooperatives can firm up the international will to strengthen cooperatives, in so doing help achieve the MDGs and alleviate world crises.”

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In his 2009 BBC Reith Lectures Harvard Professor of Government Michael Sandel emphasised the need in developed countries like USA to return to a greater “sense of community” and advocated a “politics of the common good” which would rebuild the infrastructure of civic life rather than focus on access to private consumption. This would include “public schools to which rich and poor alike would want to send their children; public transportation systems reliable enough to attract commuters from all walks of life; public health clinics, playgrounds, parks, recreation centres, libraries and museums that would, ideally at least, draw people out of their gated communities and into the common spaces of a shared democratic citizenship”.

The virtues of democratic life - solidarity, trust, civic friendship are, he said, “like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise”.

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About the Author

Harry Throssell originally trained in social work in UK, taught at the University of Queensland for a decade in the 1960s and 70s, and since then has worked as a journalist. His blog Journospeak, can be found here.

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