Co-Operative Workplaces, Collaborative Communities: An Introduction to Economic Self-Help and Mutual Aid

Abstract

As readers of this Journal know, today self-help groups number in the hundreds of thousands, and they bring together people who wish to address a very wide variety of burdens—from parents of children with various types of disabilities to children with parents with various sorts of troubles. In each group, however, the method is the same: peers come together who are confronting the same type of problem and by creating a non-judgmental context in which they can share their lived experiences as equal persons, they seek to inspire the insight and courage necessary for personal acceptance and change. In the last several decades, in a parallel universe, thousands of people, in this country and in many others, with a common economic need—to earn a livelihood, to have a decent place to live, to have nutritious food—have also come together on an equal footing to build self-managing organizations in which they can earn a living or provide for their food or shelter. They have created all sorts of experiments in cooperative workplaces and collaborative communities— from hybrid organizations like SEWA in India that are part union, part cooperative to micro-credit groups of five women each in the villages of Bangladesh to the workers’ cooperatives in developed nations like the United States. In the examples of cooperatives and self-reliant communities reported in this volume, as in the self-help groups, members reject the conventional dictates of bureaucratic rules and hierarchal relationships because they have found them self-defeating,