Cooperatives

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up course on the business form most people have used without ever reading: the cooperative. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it says so throughout. The organizing idea is one line, and the whole course is a consequence of it: a cooperative answers the ownership and governance questions with ONE MEMBER, ONE VOTE, not one share, one vote, which makes capital the servant of the members rather than their master. You will read the co-op against the four decisions from course 1 (liability, taxation, ownership and transfer, governance), then meet the Rochdale Pioneers who opened a store in 1844 and left behind the principles the world still uses, codified today as the seven cooperative principles of the International Co-operative Alliance. You will learn the five main types, worker, consumer, producer, housing and purchasing, and then study three worked cases that prove the form is not a curiosity: Mondragon, one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world, and the honest debate about whether it still lives up to its ideals; the rural electric cooperatives that, under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, brought power to an America the private utilities would not serve; and the credit union, a financial cooperative built under the Federal Credit Union Act of 1934 that a large share of Americans belong to without thinking of it as a co-op at all. The last section takes on the money and governance question head on: how a co-op shares surplus through patronage dividends, why raising member capital is its hardest problem, and how the whole structure can be reversed through demutualization, the same move the building societies made in the financing course. The capstone asks you to design a cooperative for a real scenario and defend its member governance against a plain corporation, in the language of the four decisions. Where accounts disagree, this course teaches the disagreement rather than smoothing it over.