OT: Atheist joke

All of the employees of these coops are paid exactly the same wage? There are no "bosses" and no "workers"? Note also that your power coop is a legal monopoly, perhaps even tax supported. The power coop up the road from here charges *twice* what my insanely high power company charges. ...and they're about to go bankrupt. No thanks!

I'm glad I have the ability to invest elsewhere.

--
  Keith

If it were an efficient business model, there would be more of them. In the technology industry, I know of none.

John

They don't fit your U.S.-media-condtitioned image of what constitutes a co-op, any more than the Dickensian images of western buinesses practices presented by communist Russian media conformed to western reality.

And the net profit made by the John Lewis partnership is distributed to the employees - from the John Lewis web-site "Every March, all the profit we have made in the previous trading year (over and above the funds we need to keep to develop our business) is distributed to Partners as a percentage of salary. In recent years the bonus has ranged from 8% to 22%." Effectively, the employees are the shareholders.

The Co-op Group is a much more complicated entity, and some of their employees probably are "just employees" - it is the customers who are the share-olders ...

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The British Co-Op was founded (in Rochdale in 1844) as a consumers' co-operative, rather than a workers' co-operative. The divvy book, used to record purchases which qualified the customer for dividend at the year end, used to be an important feature of working- class womens' lives. later, in the days of Green Shield stamps, they replaced the book with stamps of their own- thereby both confusing the customers and losing their distinctive culture. I don't know how they allocate dividend payments these days.

Paul Burke

The Boss shops heavily in the Co-op because she is very much against the all-conquering attitude of say the Tesco's of this world. The Divi comes in the post in the form of vouchers.

The Co-op still retains some of their social-minded ethos, even today. A good example of that is that they were early participants in the 'fair trade' movement.

--
Tony Williams.

Not every industry has the same needs. The goal is not always to form a company whose intent is merely make as much money as possible. Sometimes the goal to provide service to a limited community that would not otherwise be available. This is typically the case for rural power co-operatives. Many are bound by poor geography and marginal demographics. In a competitive market, suppliers are loathe to provide to the high cost low yield segment of their market. Thus the co-operative is born. Those needing the service create the entity that serves them.

Another area that co-operative exist is in the agricultural marketplace. Companies like Cenex, Midland, and Land O Lakes were started as co-operatives as a way to gain the benefit of collective marketing. Pork, sugar beets, and ethanol producers are often co-operatives for the same reason. These types of organizations are not visible to most people living in industrial and high technology centers and those whose world view might be limited to what they see outside their own windows.

Others have intimated that everyone gets the same wage, etc. I think that came from Bill Sloman's original post describing the demands of the protesters. Hardly an advocacy by me (or him). Or a factoid of sufficient merit to dissolve the efforts of those people who worked hard to create a structure that serves their own needs.

And then we get the "my power company charges twice what everyone else does" as a dismissal of the approach. The price structure is an outcome of the cost of providing the service to the base. And, depending on the state, rates are regulated by that state's public service commission.

If we use this logic to dismiss the co-operative, then the failure of Enron, Global Crossings, Tyco, et al should be a dismissal of the free enterprise system.

All we see is simple one line answers that do little except justify the posters own position. Understanding actually takes a bit more time and data than most are willing to invest. The world is a big place. There is no one solution that meets everyone's needs.

Blakely

.

You always resort to insults. I've always be interested in the motivations of those rare individuals like you who have an active need to be uncivil and disliked. There's a lot to be learned there.

And you learned of this... how? When I was in the USSR, the only attitude I could see that they had for US business was awe and envy. They all wished *they* could work for a Capitalist enterprise. I might point out that my opinions of "serious" co-op businesses was also acquired first-hand, and often eaten on the spot.

That last part is really funny. I assume that includes the 1.3 million pounds the CEO pulls down, and a few other details.

The issue to me is not a definition - definitions are not worth arguing over - but the relationship between quality and productivity as functions of the heirarchial-to-egeletarian management of an enterprise. Since I own such an enterprise, with 22 employees, and my first goal is to design as much and as mind-bogglingly great electronics as we possibly can, the issue is far from abstract to me. Of course, your situation is precisely opposite in all respects.

John

The Divi means that they charged too much originally, and are making a great show of returning it later, without interest, in the form of vouchers that can only be redeemed within the same system. The beauty of vouchers and rebates is that a substantial fraction are never redeemed.

John

market.

That works. My Cajun daddy-in-law was a sugarcane farmer and was a partner in a cane mill. It processed all their cane into raw and white sugar and sold it for them. (The first-stage sugar, chunky transparent crystals, light brown, was wonderful.) Except for some mild corruption by the real insiders (this was Louisiana, after all) it worked very well for them. Rural electric and telephone coops usually work well, too (except my dad's electric coop, which took weeks more than the big utilities to power up after Katrina... Louisiana again.)

Hey, there's a theme here: the worth of a co-op depends on the culture of its members. As opposed to the profit motivation, which is pretty much uniform everywhere.

That's the Berkeley-model co-op, a different animal, nearly extinct.

of

regulated

Right. It's expensive to distribute power in rural areas. Uniform statewide rates sunsidize the rural customers at the expense of the urban ones. A local co-op can't take advantage of that.

Global

Failures are an occasional, and necessary, part of a dynamic economy.

own

meets

Yup.

John

That isn't an insult. You live in the U.S. and most of the information you are going to get about co-ops is filtered through the U.S. media. which isn't exactly sympathetic to what they see as left-wing social experiments.

you who have

I don't perceive an active need on my part to be either uncivil or disliked. I do feel motivated to make my opinions clear and unambiguous.

The East European film industry and the Russian novels pulbished in translation via the regular routes (rather than the stuff that got smuggled out) did have to hew closer to the party line. Obviously, individual Russians didn't believe the propaganda, and developed an equally unrealistic idea of the efficiency and effetiveness of western business practices, that served them poorly when the communist regime finally did come apart.

Where? The Russian business was never run on co-op lines - the party machine dominated the whole system, and I've enver heard of a really large-scale U.S. co-op.

I'm sure that it does. That seems to be the going price for managerial talent - a grossly exaggerated price, but many other orgainsiations seem to find it worth their while to pay that sort of money to their top executives.

With 22 employees, you aren't managing an organisation but a team. I've worked for one company - Chessell Recorders - who were part of the Eurotherm Group whose policy was to keep every company in the group smaller than about 250 people, so that each company could get by without a personnel department and that kind of impersonal administration. Racal was supposed to work the same way. I could see the advantages, but got out after five months when one of the disadvantages provoked four of us to resign in the same week (which won us an interview with the Eurotherm Group chairman and founder, much good that that did anybody).

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That comment is EXACTLY DIAMETRICALLY INCORRECT. Out media is so left-wing-sympathetic as to be retch-inducing.

[snip]

And your credentials are ???

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
     It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

Of course it's an insult. I was talking about concepts, and you started talking about me. You are saying that I get all my information from US media (I haven't watched a network news show in a decade, at least) and that I can't think for myself. And you don't know much about US media, where you can find just about any preducices you fancy. I doubt the Khmer Rouge, at their peak, were as lefty as the Pacifica chain radio stations.

you who have

Of course not. There aren't any, because they don't work. There are some big "membership" food and department stores that work like the UK ones you refer to, but that's largely bogus, to encourage shopping loyalty (more profit) and reduce shoplifting (more profit.)

But I did hang out in Berkeley in the 70's, where real employee-equally-owned businesses were the rage.

John

Hey, cut him some slack, he's drunk.

John

Does Grise have a degree in taxidermy ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
     It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

No, his "handler" does, though.

--
   Keith

Rich Grise's handler? Talk about a job that no one wants. Must be one of those H1B where they have to hire a foreigner to do a job that no American wants to do.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Not really. It is the profit margin that commercial outlets would add. The use of this and the interest from it provides commercial flexibility- a hand-to-mouth operation would just be too brittle. The dividend is in fact calculated taking into account interest received anyway.

Paul Burke

The U.S. media - right-wing sympathetic as it may seem to people who live outside the U.S.A. - still isn't sufficiently sycophantic for the extreme right wing of the Republican party and their McCarthist sympatherisers, of whom Jim does seem to be a representative sample.

I don't need credentials to report personal experience.

The subject would be business administration, I guess, and a relevant credential would then be a masters degree in business administration, if such a qualification were worth having.

The Harvard MBA used to be doublly unique in that a new MBA was worth more - in terms of starting salary - than any other academic qualification, and a five-year-old MBA was worth less. Five years after graduation, Harvard MBAs had dropped back to earning the same sort of money as untrained equivalents from their cohort, where virtually every other academic qualification gives a progressively increasing salary differential.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I don't believe in Platonic concepts that exist outside of the brains that understand them. Any discussion of concepts includes and element of exploration of what we separately understand to be the concept.

I quite explicitly said "most of the information" - not, as you claim, just three lines later "all my information".

And the people you interact with don't watch news news either? You may believe yourself to be free from media influence, but you live in a heavily media-influenced environment - as we all do.

This I doubt. Though there is the point that the Kymer Rouge were more lunatic than lefty - forcing the educated classes to work as peasants in the rice-paddies hasn't got much to do with the anarcho-syndicalist preference for employee-controlled work-places.

you who have

there.

That's one explanation of the absence of U.S. examples, which doesn't explain why such businesses do work elsewhere.

*Small* employee-equally-owned businesses. There does seem to be a qualitative difference between businesses with fewer than 250 employees (where practically any business model can be made to work by a good and attentive manager - usually the owner's secretary) and businesses with more employees, and the interesting question is whether the co-op approach offers any advantage in businesses above this threshold.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen