cooperative organizations

cooperative organizations Businesses which are owned and run jointly by their employees and customers. Their purpose is to ensure fair working and trading conditions rather than the maximization of profit, in marked contrast to capitalist enterprise. They tend to be particularly appealing in areas undergoing rapid social and economic change where low wages, job insecurity, and low consumer protection are the norm. They developed in England from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as (a) consumer cooperatives to provide cheap food, (b) producers' cooperatives to provide work in cases of strikes, and (c) utopian cooperatives where alternatives to capitalism were tried out, most famously Robert Owen's Rochdale Pioneers of 1844.

In 1864 a federation of cooperative societies, the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS), was formed in Britain, which developed as a manufacturer and wholesale trader, opening factories and developing its own farms. The cooperative movement has also exerted some political and economic influence through the Labour Party and the trade union movement. In the USA the first cooperatives were mainly agrarian, established in the early nineteenth century to open up the prairies. In Canada, they became influential in rural areas from the 1860s, when over 1,200 cooperatives were set up. The Co-operative Union of Canada was formed in 1909.

During the twentieth century the breakup of private estates in both Communist and capitalist societies through land reforms and split inheritance has resulted in the extensive development of farming cooperatives which provide the individual farmer with the expensive technology and know-how to run his/her small plot of land efficiently and to gain competitive prices for his/her products. In addition, as a result of rapid urbanization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, housing cooperatives developed which remain an important provider of affordable housing in most industrially developed countries. Finally, credit cooperatives and credit unions have developed in many countries to provide small investors, other types of cooperatives, and trade unions with their financial wherewithal. These have developed into large institutions in some European countries, while in the USA there exist over 22,000 credit unions.