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If co-ops and mutuals have advantages over other firms, why are they so rare?
This infographic article tells the amazing story of Vanguard: a customer owned mutual that dominates an industry dominated by conventional capitalist firms.
If co-ops and mutuals are better, why are they so rare? Vanguard and the mutualist paradox.
Why does Kerala top many rankings of educational attainment in India?
Key facts about why Kerala is the flagship of Indian education system
A recent groundbreaking four-day work week trial has yielded very promising results.
https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2022/12/key-findings-from-a-four-day-work-week-trial
In the last 20 years, over one third of all grassroots music venues in the UK have been forced to shut down.
Own Our Venues campaign by Music Venue Trust offers a straightforward and simple solution; bringing music venues under community ownership.
The music industry, for all of the bombast that still surrounds it, is succumbing to an increasingly corrosive corporate consolidation. Far away from the colossal spectacle of the modern concert experience is a world of extortionate ticket selling services and smaller, more communal venues strugglin...
Platform Socialism by James Muldoon sketches an impressive outline of how a future platform technology can conceivably be less exploitative, more democratic and still maintain its astonishing scale.
Rapid technological progress has been one of the hallmarks of the 21st century and, it has come to increasingly dominate more and more of our economic landscape, our political discussion and any vision of the future. The companies that dominate how we buy commodities, watch entertainment and indeed....
Regional Mayors have been strong supporters of co-operatives development across the country.
We spoke to South Yorkshire Mayoral hopeful Lewis Dagnall about how co-operatives are key to his vision for transforming South Yorkshire's economy.
Many local authorities in the UK have become a haven for co-operative friendly politics, especially Regional Metro Mayors. In Manchester, Andy Burnham has set up a co-operative commission, Dan Jarvis made South Yorkshire the first regional partner of the Ownership Hub and Jamie Driscoll has created....
The pandemic has led to increasing numbers of employers monitoring their employees in the office and at home, to the detriment of workers mental health.
How can we gain more autonomy at work and end the intrusion into our homes?
Workplace surveillance is becoming increasingly common in an age of technology. At my workplace, this fear was confirmed when a short convivial conversation, while the boss was away, resulted in an alarming email warning that work was not a time for chatting. And if you thought this was an isolated....
Austerity has cut councils budgets across the country, but Community Municipal Investments could help reduce the emissions of cash strapped councils and their surrounding community.
It’s safe to say that climate change is a hot topic that politicians across the spectrum, for the most part, are working to mitigate, so much so that over 300 councils in the UK have now officially declared a climate emergency. Despite such widespread support for change at the local level, it is ...
Our homes emit more carbon emissions than all of the country's power stations yet we are still fitting 1.5 million new gas boilers every year. What should be done to decarbonise our housing stock?
The UK has the draughtiest and oldest housing in Western Europe that has contributed to 13% of English households living in fuel poverty, but lost heat is harming our planet alongside our bank balances. The inefficient gas boilers that heat our homes emit more carbon dioxide than all of the country'...
Only two boroughs in the UK were hit harder by austerity than Wigan. Despite being forced to make brutal cuts, social outcomes have improved: the healthy life expectancy in the most deprived areas has improved by 7 years.
What is behind the "Wigan deal"?
In 2011, the council for Wigan was faced with the daunting inevitability of austerity. Somehow, and from somewhere, they would have to make a savings of £160m from their budgets. It was certain to decimate their local services and population. So many others had suffered from the remorseless effects...
Sister Midnight wants to show the cooperative model can provide an alternative to the increasingly corporate music industry and put the community at the heart of the decision making of a venue
It should come as no surprise that the music industry continues to be dominated by large corporations, motivated primarily by profit above all else. The advent of streaming has made musicians more reliant on touring, whilst label executives, ticket companies and streaming giants have continued to th...
Newcastle's takeover by the Saudi regime reveals owners are still king in English football and, unlike in Germany with its fan control, puts money over fans or ethics.
The day has gotten darker for football. The unholy trinity of oil-rooted dictatorships has completed their purchase of poster football clubs. Dubai, then Qatar and now, at last, Saudi Arabia, have ensured that football could not be further from a moral compass. The beautiful game has become contamin...
The number of worker co-ops in NYC has increased from less than two dozen to well over a hundred since the launch of the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative. Now the model is being scaled and replicated.
New York could be considered the heart of global capitalism, home to the infamous Wall Street, yet within the city, a thriving network of worker cooperatives has begun to flourish. In 2014, New York City only had 23 worker cooperatives but today that number is well into triple figures and the city p...
Amazon's efforts to stop unionisation have proved as effective as they are unethical. It's time unions collaborated globally to fight the corporate giants.
The shock result of Sharon Graham winning the General Secretary position of Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union, had not yet settled when Graham already began charting a target that was both audacious and ultimately necessary – Amazon. Graham’s largely unexpected victory, signalled a shift in...
This article presents three taxes based on a simple principle - corporations and individuals should, as far as possible, not be taxed on the basis of what they produce, but on the basis of what they exclude others from.
We tax ci******es so to discourage smoking, yet we want to simultaneously tax work and entrepreneurship while seeking to create more jobs and entrepreneurship. An alternative tax system could be based on a core principle where corporations and individuals should as far as possible be taxed not on th...
Social Care doesn't just suffer from chronic underfunding. It struggles due to being dominated by five large corporations.
Changing who owns the sector may hold part of the solution, with co-operatives providing a successful alternative model.
Due to an unknown but certainly high number of deaths in UK care homes, attention has now pivoted from hospitals to the care sector and rightly so. For too long this aspect of healthcare has remained hidden, facing eye-watering cuts and continual privatisation to the point where it is estimated that...
While Deliveroo pays its couriers sometimes as little as £2 hour, Wings Coop, provides an alternative democratically owned by the couriers. Could it strengthen the wider coop ecosystem by expanding ownership to restaurants and partnering with other coops?
Deliveroo is famous for bright blue bags and worker exploitation. The company has fought hard to stop their workers unionising while paying wages that can dip to as low as £2 per hour according to the IWGB, a union attempting to organise riders and other workers in the gig economy.Wings is a new wo...
The acclaimed Preston Council, allied with Cooperation Town, are setting up food subscription co-operatives to empower communities to fight food poverty via solidarity, not charity
Nweeda and Martyn are Preston City Council Councillors Giving away that surplus appliance to a family member, friend or neighbour is an act of charity that makes you feel good. More recently, FareShare and other localised donation and distribution arrangements have harnessed this idea on a larger sc...
Red Metropolis by Owen Thomas Hatherley explores the lesser-known history of municipal socialism in London and what lessons the left should learn to re-paint the city red
The resounding defeat of the Labour Party at the national ballot box in 2019 appears to be a seismic event in the history of both the party and the British left. The optimism that came with the surprise result in 2017 has now been replaced with the dour reality of 14 years out of government by the n...
As society has become more atomised, loneliness has begun to plague society.
If we are to solve this problem, we must confront the impact a changing economy has had on communities.
The journalist and author of ‘Hired’ James Bloodworth once penned an article talking about the identity crisis of the working-class. In it, he wrote about the lingering nostalgia that wraps itself around those who remember a more cooperative past when jobs had greater security and solidarity to ...
Ageing bosses and a struggling economy create the perfect opportunity for more worker buyouts in the coming decade.
Italy has created the blueprint for encouraging worker takeovers; it’s time other countries followed their lead.
A Worker Buyout (WBO) is when the workers collectively purchase a business from its previous owner, often creating a worker cooperative. Worker buyouts usually occur to try and save a business facing closure due to insolvency or the former owner retiring. The next decade may yet hold huge opportunit...
Reductions in working hours should be combined with policies that enable and encourage people to use their spare time in ways that are beneficial to themselves and others, like exercising, editing Wikipedia or enjoying free online education.
When those on their deathbed are surveyed what they regret the most in life, one of the most common answers is having worked too hard. Yet when our economic system produces an invention that allows us to spend less time producing the same amount of goods or services, we instead work the same amount....
Neoliberalism promised to unleash entrepreneurship but delivered the opposite result.
Contrary to the common perception of a "start-up economy", Americans are dramatically less likely to start a business than they were before the neoliberal era.
The election of leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s promised a society driven by the competition of dynamic entrepreneurship, rather than the impersonal, hulking bureaucracies of state-run enterprises. Instead, there would be competition and the inno...
De-industrialisation, globalisation and automation are key themes as Jon Cruddas discusses how work but critically the type of work, has shaped the communities and therefore politics of Britain’s working class in his book "The Dignity of Labour".
Questions about the future of work in Britain are inherently tied to our economic past and present. The era of heavy industry and stable blue-collar jobs collapsed, replaced by highly insecure jobs within the private sector. This decline in quality work has laid the groundwork for a contagious sprea...
MIT professor Alex Pentland has a radical plan on how the 125 million members strong US credit union movement could reprogram the economy through data cooperatives.
The legislation and the technology are already in place. We only need to turn the key.
The current data economy is based on apathetic approval - everyone clicking on “I accept the terms and conditions” without reading them, let alone bargaining for better terms and conditions. However, MIT professor Alex Pentland has spearheaded a small movement with another idea on how things cou...
By not recruiting enough young workers trade unions are now in the perplexing position where they no longer represent workers in the most precarious, underpaid jobs in the economy.
How do trade unions attract a new generation of members?
The decline in fortunes of left-wing parties across Europe has partly been due to a loss of support among the traditional working-class communities that once formed part of their electoral base. The SDP in Germany and Labour in the UK, among others, have become culturally detached from many of these...
The accelerating spiral of decline in our high streets must be reversed. These places often play a key part in making the community a community, not just a group of atomized individuals.
They say that memories are associated with smell, that we are transported through time from what it evoked from our childhood. The uniqueness of a community such as Green Street in Newham is its sprawl of supermarkets and restaurants decorating the town with the rich smells of South Asian culture. T...
Successful social democratic movements were built on cooperatives, unions and a parliamentary party forming an intertwined ecosystem of mass membership organisations that provided tangible benefits in the everyday life of the ordinary people who participated in them.
The social democratic movement has primarily been based on two simple organising methods. One was to get a group of workers together and have them elect a representative to bargain for higher pay and better working conditions on their behalf. These became known as trade unions. The other was to get....
One type of institution within the co-operative movement has helped countless co-operatives start and become successful.
They can be directly credited for causing a record number of worker co-operatives and helping cause a 20 fold increase in the number of worker coops since 1970.
In the early 1970s there were only around 20 worker cooperatives in the UK, most of which had been found in the turn of the century. Now the number is more than 400 and growing, with one of the latest new arrivals being VME, the largest software company ever to have converted into a worker cooperati...
Social Media is in dire need of reform but new regulation alone is not enough to solve its problems without handing big corporations like Google and Facebook more power.
Democratisation may hold the solution to the problems facing the digital sector.
On January 6th, former US President and notorious Twitter personality Donald Trump incited thousands of his followers to storm the country’s legislature, with a vague plan to reverse the results of the recent presidential election. Like millions of other US Americans, these fans of Trump had been ...
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