OLDEST -- Workers Co-operative in the UK
Posted by: Dragontree
N 52° 15.368 W 000° 40.204
30U E 659025 N 5792084
The NPS factory building in Wollaston is the oldest surviving Workers Co-operative in the UK.
Waymark Code: WMB67H
Location: East Midlands, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 04/10/2011
Views: 3
Wikipedia describes a Workers Co-operative:
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'A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and democratically managed by its worker-owners. This control may be exercised in a number of ways. A cooperative enterprise may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which managers and administration is elected by every worker-owner, and finally it can refer to a situation in which managers are considered, and treated as, workers of the firm. In traditional forms of worker cooperative, all shares are held by the workforce with no outside or consumer owners, and each member has one voting share. In practice, control by worker-owners may be exercised through individual, collective or majority ownership by the workforce, or the retention of individual, collective or majority voting rights (exercised on a one-member one-vote basis). A worker cooperative, therefore, has the characteristic that the majority of its workforce own shares, and the majority of shares are owned by the workforce.'
There is a plaque on the building which reads:
'Wollaston Parish Council
Northamptonshire
Productive Society
(Shoes) Ltd
UK's oldest surviving Workers
Co-operative. Established in 1881
by Wollaston shoemakers in a
Dove House in Thrift Street
and nicknamed
The Duffers.
AD 2004'