Co-operative and Mutual Economy 2023 report is out.
There are interesting findings around resilience; overall growth in co-op numbers (against a backdrop of a decline in business numbers overall); worker co-ops, proportionally, provide more employment (have more workers), on average, than other types of businesses.
But compared to the remarkable 62.6% increase in the number of community-owned pubs, worker co-ops have basically flatlined if reduced over the same period. We’d have gone from 400 to 650. We knew this, one of the reasons we wanted to set-up workers.coop
So the question:
What do we need to do over the next 5 years so that Co-operatives UK could report similar growth in our sector? For context thats 250 new worker co-ops, another 50 a year, or roughly one a week.
What do we already have? www.workers.coop/start