Employees at Equal Exchange, a worker-owned cooperative.
Photo Credit: Paul Dunn
Photo Credit: Paul Dunn
March 3, 2013
Pushing my grocery cart down the aisle, I spot on the fruit counter a
dozen plastic bags of bananas labeled “Organic, Equal Exchange.” My
heart leaps a little. I’d been thrilled, months earlier, when I found my
local grocer carrying bananas—a new product from Equal Exchange—because
this employee-owned cooperativeme outside Boston is one of my favorite
companies. Its main business remains the fair trade coffee and chocolate
the company started with in 1986. Since then, the company has
flourished, and its mission remains supporting small farmer co-ops in
developing countries and giving power to employees through ownership.
It’s as close to an ideal company as I’ve found. And I’m delighted to
see their banana business thriving, since I know it was rocky for a
time. (Hence the leaping of my heart.)
I happen to know a bit more than the average shopper about Equal
Exchange, because I count myself lucky to be one of its few investors
who are not worker-owners. Over more than 20 years, it has paid
investors a steady and impressive average of 5 percent annually (these
days, a coveted return).
Maneuvering my cart toward the dairy case, I search out butter made
by Cabot Creamery, and pick up some Cabot cheddar cheese. I choose Cabot
because, like Equal Exchange, it’s a cooperative, owned by dairy
farmers since 1919.
At the checkout, I hand over my Visa card from Summit Credit Union, a
depositor-owned bank in Madison, Wis., where I lived years ago. Credit
unions are another type of cooperative, meaning that members like me are
partial owners, so Summit doesn’t charge us the usurious penalty rate
of 25 percent or more levied by other banks at the merest breath of a
late payment. They’re loyal to me, and I’m loyal to them.
On my way home, I pull up to the drive-through at Beverly Cooperative
Bank to make a withdrawal. This bank is yet another kind of
cooperative—owned by customers and designed to serve them. Though it’s
small—with only $700 million in assets, and just four branches (all of
which I could reach on my bike)—its ATM card is recognized everywhere.
I’ve used it even in Copenhagen and London.
With this series of transactions on one afternoon, I am weaving my
way through a profoundly different and virtually invisible world: the
cooperative economy. It’s an economy that aims to serve customers,
rather than extract maximum profits from them. It operates through
various models, which share the goal of treating suppliers, employees,
and investors fairly. The cooperative economy has dwelled alongside the
corporate economy for close to two centuries. But it may be an economy
whose time has come.
Something is dying in our time. As the nation struggles to recover
from unsustainable personal and national debt, stagnant wages, the
damages wrought by climate change, and more, a whole way of life is
drawing to a close. It began with railroads and steam engines at the
dawn of the Industrial Age, and over two centuries has swelled into a
corporation-dominated system marked today by vast wealth inequity and
bloated carbon emissions. That economy is today proving fundamentally
unsustainable. We’re hitting twin limits, ecological and financial.
We’re experiencing both ecological and financial overshoot.
If ecological limits are something many of us understand, we’re just
beginning to find language to talk about financial limits—that point of
diminishing return where the hunt for financial gain actually depletes
the tax-and-wage base that sustains us all.
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