An Italian Region Where Co-Ops Produce a Third of GDP (2016)
Funny, I grew up there.<p>At scale, Emilia co-ops are the same as any other business: they want to make money, screw workers. The veneer of social conscience is pretension, these days. A lot of jobs (most?) higher in the food chain are assigned through old-boys’ networks and political patronage (which is common even in the private sector, in Italy). Most large coop groups are struggling and surviving only with mergers. As the political system that allowed them to get established (stable 50-year left-wing governments across the whole region) slowly crumbled, their markets were blown open to competition, and they reacted by turning into more and more traditional businesses - or going bankrupt under clouds of political scandal.<p>A lot of people in the area think this type of development has fundamentally betrayed its origins and should be reformed at the very least.<p>EDIT: re-reading, I might have been a bit unfair. Coops had a tremendous social impact, until around the early 1980s. They were part and parcel of a development model that had little to envy to Scandinavian social democracy. It&#x27;s just that they eventually changed, as all institutions do, prioritizing self-preservation and enrichment over their social role. This is particularly true for larger ones (generally in construction, food distribution, maintenance services, banking, and insurance).