“History shows us that employee ownership schemes – often in combination with a family firm business model – can generate real and lasting commitment to local communities and economies. Such apparently antiquated forms of business ownership are clearly far from being barriers to sustained success. Another excellent example from the North-west region, alongside the Co-operative movement, is the Booths supermarket chain, a fifth generation family firm that has offered employee bonus and share schemes since the early twentieth-century.”
Andrew Popp, Reader in Business History, University of Liverpool Management School
“The long-term success of businesses such as John Lewis and the Co-operative Group deserves closer scrutiny as a more consistent form of business that can benefit all stakeholders. While co-operatives have flourished in the UK for over 150 years, they have been marginalised by a political-business elite that has preferred the more volatile form of capitalism that both produces great wealth yet results in massive crashes.
However, the success of the Co-operative Group, which will have been in business for 150 years in 2013, indicates the vigour and dynamism in this ‘Alternative Way'”
Professor John Wilson Professor of Strategy, University of Liverpool Management School
Clegg isn’t really talking about social enterprises. He is suggesting that workers can be “brought on board” by share ownership in exisiting capitalist enterprises. Such schemes were/are widely used in the banking sector – fat lot of good that has done the employees. If he were to propose giving worker representatives a 51% share of votes on the Board – now that might be interesting.
This type of company structure was championed by Fritz Schumacher in the 1970s and has remained popular with Green political theorists. A good example is that of the Scott-Bader ‘Commonwealth’, who were very successful with Strand Glass, a major player in fibreglass manufacture.
With the current economic debacle apparently becoming ever more entrenched, and economic security increasingly threatened, it perhaps was to be hoped that leading politicians like Clegg would eventually thrash about until they hit on a possible alternative to ‘trickle down’ (to paraphrase the apt words of some wit, ‘to stuff the nose bag of the rich so full that some of it will trickle down to the sparrows). Could this be it?
“Of course well known brands like John Lewis and the Co-Op are not the only example of forms of business that can benefit both those who work there and those who use the goods and services they provide. Merseyside is home to innumerable smaller co-ops and social enterprises using business means to do good. Credit Unions provide cheap credit for those who would otherwise be left by the banks to the mercy of moneylenders, while in Germany and the US local banks give long term support to small businesses that would struggle to get credit in the UK. More radically, towns like Lewes, Brixton and Stroud have their own money, and are using it to have a greater say in the sorts of business they want to see in their community. They are developing their own locally-owned renewable energy generating companies. Go to Latin America and we see companies owned by the workers who run them: they have more than just a share. John Lewes is great: but just one small example of what the possibilities for a real big society could be.”