The worker cooperative movement in Britain

Abstract

The worker cooperative movement in Britain has never been as strong as the consumer cooperative movement and the reasons for the relative success of the one and the relative failure of the other are directly connected. If we look at the development of strong worker cooperative sectors such as in Mondragon, Italy or France, we find that they have had access to untapped cumulative savings, direct allocation of public resources, or some other 'windfall': the labour and savings of the Basque people, preferential treatment by Government or resources already present in failing businesses. In Britain the consumer cooperative movement harnessed the needs and savings of the growing working class. Eventually, of course, it was strongly challenged by the private sector, but for nearly one hundred years it experienced tremendous growth and embraced 12 million people. Even now the consumer movement is holding more than 5% of the food market. There were attempts to form worker cooperatives throughout the nineteenth century but very few experienced long term success. Although nearly a hundred producer cooperatives were formed, less than twenty survived into the second half of the twentieth century and no more emerged to join them. The reasons were complex. Legislation militated against worker cooperatives as the Industrial and Provident Society Act (1852) demanded open membership for share-holding members but did not allow those shares to profit as they would in a traditional company. As Sidney and Beatrice Web b pointed out, this meant that producer cooperatives tended to degenerate into private businesses as outside and inside share-holders sought to gain access to the accumulated surplus of the company. A second major factor was the decision of the consumer movement to set up its own productive units rather than self-managing independent cooperatives. There was considerable debate over this issue, but the view prevailed that any profits the productive units made should accrue to the consumer societies and not the productive units themselves. It also seems that there was no broad grass roots impetus to form worker cooperatives in the nineteenth century and many of the producer cooperatives formed were 'top down' - set up by weII meaning people such as Christian SociaIists.