Tracking Legal Events involving Electric & Telephone Cooperatives

Cooperation between people goes back to early humanity, but it was not until during the 1800s that cooperative business models as we know them today were first developed.  While cooperatives have a long history, the industrial revolution is generally considered the era that heralded in the modern form of cooperatives.

In Germany, in the 1830s there was the option of deposits being placed with a cooperative organization as developed by Raiffeisen.  This concept caught on and eventually a bank was established.

England

Meanwhile, during the 1840s in the United Kingdom at a place called Rochdale in Lancashire (near Manchester), pioneers were establishing a trading business in basic commodities of flour, sugar, wheat etc on the basis of giving fair and accurate measure for the purchase.  Such fairness in trading had been lacking with unscrupulous traders giving short measure and poor quality of goods, like having chalk in the flour.

From the development of the Rochdale business came a set of business principles which were adopted and extended into various forms of business.

Today in Toad Lane, Rochdale, the Rochdale Pioneers Memorial Museum is open to the public. It celebrates the establishment of the cooperative trading businesses in the very building used by the famous Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society when it commenced business on December 21, 1844. Rochdale may not have been the first such cooperative but from its decisions, methods and practices, what we now know as the Rochdale Principles evolved to provide the pattern  for consumer cooperation.

Worldwide

In 1895 a world apex body was established to develop and protect the interests of cooperatives internationally.  This was the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) which is based in Geneva,  Switzerland.

The operation of cooperatives was quick to catch on in many countries and a considerable period of growth ensued.  The concept was widely adopted and emerged in many countries of the world.  The first general cooperative was formed in New South Wales, Australia in 1859 and since then cooperatives developed throughout Australia.

One of the most successful cooperative endeavors, perhaps the most famous, is the Mondragon  Group in Spain’s Basque country.  This began in 1956 in the town of Mondragon and enormous businesses have been developed through the widespread adoption of the cooperative business model.  This is a worker cooperative, which is owned collectively by those who work for the cooperative.  To this day, it is a model example of how cooperative business can operate for the success of the people who own it.

There are strong cooperatives in most countries in Europe.  With the changes taking place in the Chinese economy, there are moves for state-owned businesses to move to ownership by the people who participate and thereby become fully-fledged cooperatives.

United States

A little know fact is that in the United States, bastion of what is known as the free market, cooperatives provide half a million jobs with the six largest cooperative sectors counting 21,367 co-ops that serve nearly 130 million members, or 43 per cent of all Americans.

Worldwide, some 750,000 cooperatives serve more than 800 million members and provide over 100 million jobs, according to ICA figures.