Cooperatives
A group of us, here in Thunder Bay, have formed a workers cooperative. The Hazelnut Permaculture Workers Cooperative provides permaculture education, communication and design services. Why a cooperative? A number of reasons; we begin building the community we want as we develop our livelihoods together. This week we begin our look at food related cooperatives.
Cooperatives:A Quick Overview
Consumer cooperatives purchase goods in bulk to cut costs and save money. Your local food co-op where you might put in a few hours of work per month to further cut costs is one example. Many food co-ops buy from cooperatively organized wholesalers. This can benefit the local economy as money may remain in local circulation longer.
As important as consumer co-ops are, we always end up asking ourselves: who makes the goods we are buying? More and more, we see people getting together with people they can identify with, they have found a common ground. Sometimes the relationship that evolves into a cooperative venture. Which, for example, will buy a given product that has specific characteristics such as food that is grown organically or electricity that is made without nuclear power.
With deregulation in the energy sector, we'll be hearing more about electricity co-ops. I am a member of the Superior Renewable Energy cooperative. We are looking at issues such as community power. We will explore community energy and farming eventually.
In the U.S., producer cooperatives in the agricultural sector can be composed of farmers and large agri-businesses who form co-ops to market their products or to get higher prices for their crops from a distributor. A cooperative model that is creating considerbale interest is the value-added co-op. The value-added co-op includes food processing plants owned by farmer members. The owners, not the workers, benefit from this relationship. The worker has little involvement in the decsion-making process. This benefits the individual owners of these businesses. The workers do not benefit directly as they would in a worker-owned cooperative. It is possible to form a cooperative where every person who is part of the enetrprise, benefits equally.
This is why we formed Hazelnut as a workers cooperative We are the cooperative and we make the decisions and carry them out. One voice: one vote. We all perform valuable services. Next week the consumer-producer relationship. This is what economics is all about.
Resources:
http://www.geonewsletter.org/faq.htm
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