This is Geoff Gilson.

I am a worker-owner with Weaver Street Market Co-operative. Just recently, we workers got a little scold from the powers-that-shouldn’t-be in our bi-weekly employee “Market Messenger” about not meeting “our” sales targets. And the fact that this would decrease the profit available for worker-owner and consumer-owner dividends.

I was just about to make a mental note to work a bit harder, when I managed to catch myself. Who says we are not meeting the sales targets? Who set the sales targets? Who says this results in how much profit? And who says how much of that profit gets spent on dividends?

People, whether we are owners, consumers or workers, need to get away from this continuing attachment to top-down, we-know-best hierarchy in a co-op. Co-operatives are the essential building block of economic democracy. Which means that consumers and workers decide, not some self-appointed tier of managers.

Moreover, as I keep pointing out ad nauseam, we have in our specific co-op a Board policy which demands that we workers be involved in the decision-making which determines the nature of our workplace and our remuneration.

In other words, we should be involved in the decisions that set the budget each year, that determine what will be the required sales increase (if any), what the money will be spent on, what the profit will be, and what the dividend will be. We should be involved, because co-op policy requires our inclusion.

This goes for all owners, consumer as well as worker. We workers should find the nerve to ask in our annual store meetings why it is that financial decisions are being taken without our inclusion. And consumers, you should be asking the same at the annual owners’ meeting. Those meetings are supposed to be about governance. Not a glass of wine and a raffle. I know it takes a lot of nerve to speak up. But economic democracy does not occur simply because we put a tooth under the pillow…