A Survey of Modern British Co‐operatives

There are three broad categories of worker co‐operatives, of which only one is covered by our survey. We concentrated on the common ownership (CO) movement (initiated by Scott Bader Chemicals in 1950), and recently given a boost by the Industrial Common Ownership Act (1976), restricting ourselves to small businesses (under 200 employees) engaged in production or ‘urban’ services, i.e. excluding agricultural co‐ops and communes. Before going on to describe the findings of our survey it is appropriate to describe briefly the two other classes of worker co‐operative.