229 14 Developing Public‒Cooperative Partnerships Pat Conaty The era of curtailing state power by passing more and more of it to private corporations could be coming to an end. In the UK, the country that has championed privatisation in all forms since the 1980s, contractors of public services have increasingly been found to be totally unreliable. The collapse of Carillion, for example, not only revealed a balance sheet overwhelmed with £900 million of liabilities and a company pension scheme deficit of £590 million, but has called into question the
2 CO-OPERATIVE OWNERSHIP OF FORMER COUNCIL HOUSING David Clapham, Peter Kemp and Keith "Kintrea A new consensus seems to be emerging that many of the problems of council housing in Britain can be overcome by devolving the management and sometimes the owner- ship of the housing to co-operatives. In this article an assessment is made of the evidence for this view and a pioneering example of the establishment of co- operatives in former council housing in Glasgow is described. It is concluded that the success of such schemes will depend on their ability to provide
Introduction Central England Co-operative is one of the largest independent co-operative retailers in the UK, with gross sales more than £1 billion, over 400 trading outlets, a family of around 8,600 colleagues and more than 330,000 regular trading members. We trade across 16 counties, from Yorkshire through the Midlands to the East Coast – through more than 250 food stores, 100-plus funeral homes, filling stations, post offices, florists, masonry outlets, a crematorium and a coffin factory. The business is owned and democratically controlled by its
Key messages In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist scholars of the built environment argued that affordable and supportive housing was central to women’s emancipation, that is, to the designing of ‘non-sexist’ cities. To date, a systematic study of gender-conscious affordable housing projects is missing from the literature. While in the US, it was the community development corporations through which early experiments in housing for women were realised, in Canada, it was the shared-ownership, member-resident cooperative model to which women turned to. Earlier
179 ELEVEN Social Investment and the causes of energy poverty: are cooperatives a solution? Michael Willoughby, José Millet-Roig, José Pedro García-Sabater and Aida Saez-Mas Introduction This case study looks at the example of a local energy cooperative and its relationships with local authorities to provide a Theory of Change and sustainable solutions that might be transferred to other agents in the energy chain. The price of all commodities for households in Spain has undergone a dramatic rise, yet the price of electricity in particular, as compared to
99 SIX Innovation, cooperatives and inclusive development: rethinking technological change and social inclusion Lucas Becerra and Hernán Thomas Introduction In South America, during the past 10 years, the relations between technological innovation and inclusive development have been stabilised into research and policy agendas. However, our conventional understandings of what constitutes innovation still guide the ideas and practices that are embedded in science and technology public policy. This chapter aims to provide a reconceptualisation of the notion
139 SIX ‘the feeling’s mutual’: respect as the basis for cooperative interaction Peter Somerville This chapter reviews our understanding of mutual respect and recognition, identifying it as a general form of cooperative interaction, underpinning practices of civility, sociability and intimacy. It distinguishes between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ variants of civility and sociability, and throws new light on the nature of solidarity. It makes a connection between disrespect and social inequality, and attempts to show how the latter leads to the former. It criticises
Courier Drivers Union against Uber in the UK Supreme Court to secure Worker Rights and the national minimum wage comes after a five year battle through the courts. (Russon, 2021). In addition to legal action campaigns, communities affected by precarious forms of work need to consider how the lopsided risks and heavy overhead costs can be collectively overcome, and replaced by fair trade terms and protective conditions. Worker co-operatives exist all over the world and, at times like these, attention is turning to the theory and practice of worker control. In New York
Introduction An intense migration from the rural areas to the emerging urban settings of Ecuador took place during the second half of the 20th century. Most of the population concentrated in Quito and Guayaquil. This spawned high demand for housing units and, ultimately, because of the government’s lack of response, a great housing deficit. Therefore, working-class groups found answers and solutions through self-building and self-management practices. Such experiences included housing committees and cooperatives. The latter were highly studied in Chile and
143 FIVE The preference for cooperative bilateralism among European strategic police leaders ‘I get frustrated by all this talk about multilateral cooperation in Europe: much of it comes from bureaucrats with vested interests in keeping their jobs. My own experience, and that of many of my colleagues, is that the organisations which are supposed to encourage police cooperation do nothing of the kind, and take weeks about it. The simplest way is to pick up the bloody phone, call your opposite number in the other country and take it from there
