Labor Movement Can Crush Consumer Exploitation by Building Cooperatives
Labor Movement Can Crush Consumer Exploitation by Building Cooperatives 1937 Was Year Of Fine Growth For U.$. Coops By WALLACE J. CAMPBELL A** is taut Secretary, The Cooperative...
...The Cooperative League opened a Co-op College for the training of future executives and educational directors in the rapidly growing movement...
...Yet these represent a very small factor in the movement as a whole...
...The Consumer .Distribution Corporation, set up...
...Consumers Cooperative Association serving 360 cooperatives in the eight states surrounding North Kansas City, Missouri, added twenty co-ops to those alreadyserved...
...It is equally important for a man to get his money's worth for his ten dollars as it is to get the ten dollars in the first place...
...Cooperative wholesales in New York and Chicagp, serving urban cooperatives around those metropolitan centers showed increases of 90% and 150% respectively, as the city co-ops, most of them organized since 1934, began to come into their own...
...Coops By WALLACE J. CAMPBELL A** is taut Secretary, The Cooperative League...
...It may well be that the depression of 1937 will mark the entrance of the ranks of organized labor into the consumers cooperative movement, just as the depressions of 1921 and 1929 forced the farmers and the white collar workers to/>rganize cooperatives...
...The co-op Fashion Shop handles co-op, union-made women's clothing, while the District of Columbia Cooperative League has contracts for the cooperative purchase of coal, milk, and other commodities not available through the gas station or store...
...It is particularly .interesting to note that the co-op wholesales reported no failures among the retail co-ops affiliated with them...
...Konsum, toe first gas and oil co-op ih' the nation's Capitol, was opened in November and plans are already being laid for a second...
...Eastern Cooperative Wholesale, ^serving 190 cooperatives from Washington, D. C, to Maine is packaging 250 items under its own "Co-op" label .and handled a half million dollar business during the year...
...CEVERAL new cooperative venh-* tures got under way during the year...
...Twenty-two students completed the first fourmonth term at the end of January and already the majority of them have found jobs in the movenfent...
...Rochdale Stores grew out of a cooperative grocery delivery service...
...In almost every instance co-op business in the major cooperative wholesales throughout the country has held up well in spite of the "re-panic...
...A YEAR OF GREAT DEVELOPMENT npHE year 1937 will go down in * the history of the cooperative movement as" a year of great development...
...Among the intangibles which may lead to more important labor pai-ticipation are endorsements during the last year by the American Federation of Labor, the United Rubber Workers of America and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee...
...In the Middle West three cooperative wholesales combined thenpurchasing power to step back toward the field of production bytaking over the complete output of an Oklahoma oil refinery...
...Very important co-ops have been developed by labor groups in Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Dillonvale and Akron, Ohio, New York City, and Minneapolis...
...workers must organize as consumers Dl'T although the farm and sections of the urban population are making rapid strides with cooperatives, the response of industrial labor has been very slow...
...and a few local co-ops added grocery departments...
...With declining industrial production it has become almost impossible to force" wages up, even with the most militant organization...
...The younger co-op wholesales in Harrisburg, New York and Chicago reported gains of 86%, 90% and 150r'c for the year...
...It has become increasingly important for workingmen to think of themselves as consumers as well as producers...
...The Washington development can be duplicated in a dozen other American cities...
...Over-the-counter business in New York City pulled up to above normal and CD ended the year with business well over $10,000 a month...
...These instances, however, are well above the general co-op average...
...The Ohio Farm Bureau co-ops...
...The Cooperative Wholesale, Chicago, was organized a year and a half ago to serve city co-ops in Illinois...
...added groceries to its lines of petroleum products, farm supplies and household appliances, and set up its own grease and paint factories...
...opened its first business enterprse a few years ago...
...Pennsylvania...
...Indiana, Ohio and Lower Michigan...
...Because of the obstacles in the way of organizing the workers as producers, labor must eventually turn to consumer organization...
...Cooperative Distributors, a mailorder cooperative with headquarters in New York cut sail egainst the impending depression, took on a new manager and pulled into the black...
...r Big Unions Begin To Work With Cooperatives jflTH private profit business trying desperately to pull itself out of the most disastrous decline since 1920, it is well to look at the record to see how cooperative business is taring...
...It opened its own warehouse building last spring and did well over $100,000 volume...
...Central Cooperative Wholesale Superior, organized in 1917 with $15.50 capital, celebrated its 20tha Anniversary with* a business of more than $3,000,000...
...which began their cooperative activity with automobile insurance, moved rapidly into fire insurance, life insurance, gas and oil, farm supplies, rural electrification and household appliances...
...And that, in every instance, the number of employees on the payroll of the wholesale was greater at the end of 1937 than in December, 1936...
...United Cooperatives, Inc., serving Farm Bureau consumer cooperatives in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania phi's three other eastern co-op federations, completed its $150,000 oil blending plant in Indianapolis, and made plans for a smaller processing plant in Warren...
...by Edward A, Filene, two years ago...
...The Cooperative League has just completed the compilation of statistics covering month by month business for the last two years...
...Other aew ventures included the establishment of the Bureau of Cooperative Medicine, 5 E. 57th St., New York, to faster the organisation, of cooperative health associations...
...The second term, opening February 15 in New York will add an extra month of academic work making three months in the city and two months at field work with the cooperatives...
...Midland Cooperative Wholesale, America's first cooperative gas and oil wholesale, did ten times its 1926 business and laid plans for a grocery division...
...The Ohio co-op's $10,000 nest egg in 1926 grew, chiefly from accumulated savings, to a $5,000,- , 000 capital in its insurance business and an $8,000,000 annual business in commodities...
...and the Cooperative Book Club, 118 E. 28th St., New York, which will serve as purchasing agent for members ih all sections of the country...
...farm co-ops enter new fields ^JONSUMER co-ops in rural sections consolidated their gains in their fields of operation and in many cases reached out to enter new fields...
...Most of the co-op wholesales ended the year with business more than 20 per cent greater than in 1936...
Vol. 21 • March 1938 • No. 10
