Images of Democracy: Co-ops

I was introduced to another image of democracy when I went off to school in the late ’70s: the co-operative, or “co-op”, as most people called them.  There were bike co-ops, living co-ops, grocery co-ops, even a taxi co-op (most of which are still flourishing).  At the time, I chalked off the prevalence of co-ops to Madison’s left-leaning political culture.  But when I looked into the subject years later, I learned that co-ops are literally everywhere.   I hadn’t been aware as a child, for example, that my home town in western Wisconsin was served by a utility that was organized as a co-op.

What image of democracy do co-ops present us with–and why are they so popular?  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say in response:

A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise“. Cooperatives may include:

• • businesses owned and managed by the people who use their services (a consumer cooperative)
  • organizations managed by the people who work there (worker cooperatives)
  • multi-stakeholder or hybrid cooperatives that share ownership between different stakeholder groups. For example, care cooperatives where ownership is shared between both care-givers and receivers. Stakeholders might also include non-profits or investors.
  • second- and third-tier cooperatives whose members are other cooperatives
  • platform cooperatives that use a cooperatively owned and governed website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services.

Research published by the Worldwatch Institute found that in 2012 approximately one billion people in 96 countries had become members of at least one cooperative. The turnover of the largest three hundred cooperatives in the world reached $2.2 trillion.

Cooperative businesses are typically more economically resilient than many other forms of enterprise, with twice the number of co-operatives (80%) surviving their first five years compared with other business ownership models (41%).Cooperatives frequently have social goals which they aim to accomplish by investing a proportion of trading profits back into their communities. As an example of this, in 2013, retail co-operatives in the UK invested 6.9% of their pre-tax profits in the communities in which they trade as compared with 2.4% for other rival supermarkets.

Co-ops are directly democratic, then, both because they are jointly owned and because they are run democratically.  Perhaps for these reasons, they attract huge numbers of members and also tend to be committed to their communities.  My small neighborhood grocery co-op, for example, prides itself not on its size, but on being owned by its members and on the responsiveness of its governing board, which is elected annually by members during a face to face meeting.  For twenty years, it has lived up to its motto, “Locally Grown; Neighborhood Owned”–which is to say, “of, by, and for the neighborhood.”