As GEO enters its second decade, we wanted to reflect on what we have learned about co-ops, starting with the most obvious question: what is a co-op? Generally speaking, there are two types of cooperatives-consumer cooperatives and producer cooperatives. Within these two broad categories, there are many different organizational structures. ESOP'S would be one example. At GEO, we emphasize the worker-owned co-op.

CONSUMER and PRODUCER COOPERATIVES

We'll start with consumer co-ops because most everyone is familiar with them. Consumer cooperatives purchase goods in bulk to cut costs and save money. Your local food co-op where you might put in a few hours of work per month to further cut costs is one example. Many food co-ops buy from cooperatively organized wholesalers.

As important as consumer co-ops are, we always end up asking ourselves: who makes the goods we are buying? More and more, we are seeing folks band together with like-minded folks to form a co-op which buys a given product that has specific characteristics such as food that is grown organically or electricity that is made without nuclear power. With deregulation in the energy sector, we'll be hearing more about electricity co-ops.

In the U.S., producer cooperatives in the agricultural sector can be composed of farmers and large agri-businesses who form co-ops to market their products or to get higher prices for their crops from a distributor. An important new type, the value-added co-op, includes food processing plants owned by farmer members. This benefits the individual owners of these businesses. Yet the businesses internally are not themselves cooperative in character. The workers do not benefit directly as they would in a worker owned cooperative.

WORKER-OWNED COOPERATIVES

We at GEO advocate worker-owned co-ops where:

1. the work force owns the company
2. decisions regarding significant matters, such as choosing a manager, are made democratically on a one-person one-vote basis
3. the labor involved in running the enterprise, and the wages and other benefits that result, are shared on a democratic basis.

WHY WORKER-OWNED CO-OPS?

We like worker co-ops because we want the goods we buy to be made by people working under democratic and sustainable conditions, and we want to work in enterprises that themselves are democratic and sustainable. From our definition of a worker-owned co-op above, we see that such co-ops turn the workforce into owners eliminating "the boss;" they democratize control of the workplace so no one feels like a cog in a wheel. Because the property of the company is owned collectively by the workers and no one else, no absentee owner makes a buck off our labor.

COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP

Collective, indivisible and inalienable ownership means that workers have only one vote regardless of the number of shares he/she might have, and it means that no one cooperator can sell his/her shares to some rich guy down the block who then hires someone else to work in her place! All the owners work in the co-op and only the owners work in the co-op. This way our co-op cannot be bought piece by piece by some giant corporation which installs a boss, cuts the workforce, pollutes the environment, or moves production out of town.

This is the basis of the (in our opinion) ideal worker-owned co-op producing a given product or service. What do you our readers think? Are we right? Is the co-op you work in structured in this way? What advantages/disadvantages do you see to such a model? Please write us with your comments or questions.