Behind Italy’s beauty (and parmesan) is a radical tradition of cooperatives. In some areas, they make up nearly a fifth of the GDP. We went to Emilia-Romagna, one of the richest regions in the country, to investigate how Italy’s workers built a more democratic economy.
Many thanks to the Bologna Film Commission and the City of Reggio Emilia for the support and for the assistance.
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50 Comments
We need coop financial institutions!!!!
WE NEED THIS NOW
100% employee owned companies are a fantastic way to go. The ones I know of are all successful! It works!
Umm actually, a cooperative is exactly what I would expect.
Will NEVER EVER work in America. We are too greedy AND, the multi billionaires in America haven’t quite squeezed the last penny out of the rest of the country.
We have farming co-ops in Wisconsin too.
It's 40 years too late to try this in the US. There are no small time farmers anymore.
the coop is such a based term. the coop should go worldwide and be adopted by all nations interested in surviving the next 10 years. to bad America will never adopt anything with the slightest hint of socialism.
All farmers need to send this to each other
We are the only species that needlessly drinks the milk of another species. Unfortunately, we chose to prioritize consuming the milk of the species whose offspring needs 4 stomachs just to process its mother's milk. Hence, our intolerance to that species lactose and subsequent measurable immune response to that milk.
This works because they have a culture of hard work and integrity for most people. This is increasingly not the case in North America. I think you would have problems with coops here trying to make sure everyone is reasonably reliable.
this makes me hate america even more than i did before
Well, just to say, I think there are Italians who might have a different opinion about the overall economic health and wealth, well-being of the population there, these cooperatives not withstanding. This reminds me of a man I used to know who wanted his son to improve his grades. He told him he’d take him on a short vacation anywhere in the world. He wanted to know if he achieved the goal that the Dad set up. He told his son to research different cities, according to his own interests and his high school teenage son chose Parma! But when I visited Italy, I opted for Verona for other reasons and it was a gorgeous city. Maybe Parma next time
Great coverage! You hear that America?! No outside investors? How is this even conceivable? A worker democracy?! Impossible! Not with this government!
I've often wondered why America doesn't adopt this model, seems like power to the people. F the Billionaires
Also why there's so much tax evasion.
Co-ops work very well in Spain.
2:59 “Tradition is the result of innovation that was successful” Love this quote!
The largest farmer coop in the world is in New Zealand but it was recently sold to a a French company. There are calling it a windfall for farmers, but soon their capitalists ways will start to show. A lump sum will only support a small isolated farm for so long.
"This is a concept in America we're really not familiar with" speak for yourself we have a ton of cooperatives in northern California and always have. It's why they cracked down on the Black Panthers so hard. The grocery coop is still there.
Private equity should be abolished. They are parasites that need to be wiped out
Don't forget about the Mondragon Cooperative movement in Spain. It's quite old also.
Who would've thought Italians would be better Americans than Americans are 🤨 they have bigger balls than all the self proclaimed red blooded american men.
There are so many coops in the US using the same model you are highlighting here from Italy, surprising how you report as if that isn’t happening here.
This is how a number of corporations in the u.s. used to work. When I joined P&G a lot of people had already retired millionaires from janitors gate guards to scientists engineers and sr management. Then Jack Welch showed up and started teaching the C-suite to loot the rank and file. Greedy companies starting with the Christians of Walmart and then all the tech bros. made it worse and worse. It only took one generation to make people forget we all voted our shares in cos. Like P&G. Venture capital is a toxic approach that loots people. Billionaires shouldn't exist. Get rid of citizens united they are bad for every normal citizen in the country.
COMMUNISM! No seriously. That’s always what is said when the working class organizes anything. Ironic considering Italy’s history with Mussolini
4:06 Babish?
Umm, do you know how small Italy is compared to the US? The framers settled on a republican form of government because of the issues of scale in democracy. I fully believe and advocate for increasing the democracy side of America, and I know local co-ops, so clearly this can work. But I don't think this would scale very well across the US. I may be wrong, but to even entertain the idea I would think there would need to be a country using this type of socialism at a scale at least close to the US.
Our plutocracy is one of the most repugnant things we United Serfs have to deal with. Cooperation amongst the bottom 90% of citizens is certainly the way to change things. But I don't think this would truly get rid of inequality. We don't have the amount of homogeneity needed for such a thing to exist here. Like it or not, the fact that the United States is a melting pot of cultures is a large reason for why we have such issues.
Oy, I'm just rambling, now. There are too many facets that could be discussed on this topic. This piece of "journalism" is just idealism and one-sideism.
6:50 What? workers own the company? Is that not like Socialism or dare I say, Communism?
We need an American "French" Revolution and start taxing billionaires into extinction
I'm trying to buy land and let several friends live on it and work together as a homestead / coop. But darn, it seems as though rules are set up to block it. What am I missing?
How does someone set a property for 5-10 families to live on with the simplest of legalities in AZ?
If the employees take a cut to pay into being a share holder, yes, and they treat the company as a owner and share the financial responsibility… Otherwise it's not fair to the founder who incurred all the debt and the risk for it to become established and making enough money to hire said employees. I have no problem investing in something I'm proud of especially if it will help line my pockets by working harder.
Questions.
If the business unintentionally runs up huge debt. Do the creditors come after the shareholders?
When the person spends their whole life working for the co-op and retires or has to leave for some reason or other. Do they remain shareholders?
What happens to the least productive members. Are the lowest 10% fired every year?
I'm not being difficult. I am trying to understand how it is sustainable.
"This [co-ops] is a concept in America that's not really familiar." Not true. Wisconsin used to have many farmer and energy coops out of necessity for rural people. Most of them were very intentionally destroyed by corporations, and some (like energy coops) were made so complex/regulated that it became "illegal" to have a coop in my state, or it was so expensive it was no longer feasible.
imo calling worker co-ops radical is silly. The billionaire system is what is radical.
Can we get a look inside Mondragon next please 🙏🏾?
come to turkey too, you'll see very interesting stories
If only each of us could either move to Italy or build that kind of world here. Maybe be nice if we built it here.
Socialism is a good thing. Shocking.
Italy is great but uh… not exactly an economic superpower with huge tech breakthroughs or ambitious people becoming mega successful. Yes, if you have little to no ambition and are fine with being average until the day you die then this is a great way to live.
(15:54) how was it that the cooperative was sold in the first place? why was that allowed to happen?
OMG this is practically making me light headed from shock and ah…
I’ a USian who has lived most of his life in Emilia-Romagna: crazy how just a tiny bit of education and a pinch of socialism can skyrocket the economics and standards of living of an entire region.
The regional capital, Bologna, has been called three things historically: La grassa (the fat, for the food), La rossa (the red for its brownish medieval architecture and for its leftist tendencies) and La dotta (because it’s one of the biggest university cities in the country and has got the oldest one in the western world); just to say that education works, worker’s rights work.
I think the US historically has had too much fascists and plutocrats in power and too much control over its people’s culture: people, inform yourself, there’s always a better alternative (not that I think Italy’s situation is perfect, far from it, but surely it has figured something America has not)
Sure except your not allowed to produce healthy food in America, were those cows farting?
60%? Nah. More like 70%
While I definitely support the idea of co-ops, they're not exactly impervious to capitalism, either. Here in Finland the grocery business is controlled by a duopoly of two entities: a nation-spanning co-op called S-Ryhmä (Group S) and Kesko, which is more of a traditional shopkeeper ran chain of stores.
While S-Ryhmä is in all senses a co-op, it is huge, owned by almost half of all Finns who, most importantly, don't usually really vote in the co-op elections. In a sense S-Ryhmä is a society within a society, but running with much less democracy than the rest of Finland. In many places S-Ryhmä holds great power over zoning and land-use, and of course they have the obvious power that comes with being a huge chain: they decide which products end on their shelves, how much they're paying for produce and so on. With only two larger players, you can imagine there isn't much price competition when a farmer here in Finland wants to sell their produce.
When it comes to money, S-Ryhmä isn't really that much less greedy than their private equity counterpart, Kesko. Like the competition, they want to pay the producers as little as possible while making as much money for their owners as possible. Since the ownership base is so huge and controlled by the tiny percentage who actually vote, it hasn't exactly made economy any more democratic. If anything, S-Ryhmä is the one that's more active in pressuring the democratic side of the society than Kesko is.
Something Malaysia and much of Southeast Asia can learn from
keep it up.
Are skilled foreigners/immigrants allowed to join of intern at said co-ops? Or are they only reserved for Italian citizens only?
Such a great video! There is an alternative to the billionaires