INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION

Otago Witness, Issue 3488, 18 January 1921, Page 24

INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION

A number of Milton wage-earners met together in the Commercial Hotel on Monday, 10th inst., to discuss the question of the formation of a Milton Industrial Go-opera-tive Society on similar lines to those of the Dunedin, Kaitangata, and other workers’ cooperative societies already run successfully in various parts of New Zealand. Mr Isaac Robinson was voted to the chair, and called on Mr G. S. Thomson, from Dunedin, to give an address on “How Ca n We Save Money '!” Mr Thomson explained how from the

“ Rochdale Pioneers ” and other small groups of earnest workers some 60 or 70 years ago the industrial co-operative movement had grown until to-day the British C.W.S. (Co-operative Wholesale Society) was probably the most important trading concern in the world. Quite recently delegates from the British C.W.S., at the request of the New Zealand dairy producers’ organisations, had visited New Zealand and made arrangements for the cutting out of the middlemen in London by the shipment of the New Zealand produce direct to the C.W.S. instead of through the London financial speculators. Mr Thomson told how in the second half-year of the existence of tho industrial co-operative society in Kaitangata that society had made, roughly, £SOO clear profit for the half-year, and that in spite of determined opposition. The speaker next explained that, in spite of no end of difficulties, the committee ot the Dunedin Industrial Co-operative Society, Ltd.— although making a loss On the first six months’ trading in the wood and coal business- had in the following five months wiped out the previous loss and ended up the period to September 39, 1920, with a handsome profit. Mr Thomson explained that in Dunedin the shares wore £5 shares, and that no shareholder could hold more than five shares, and that even then all shareholders had equal voting power. A Provisional Committee (with a chair-

man and secretary) was set up to arrange for a larger meeting to be held later, when it is hoped that speakers from Dunedin and Tvaitangata Co-ops. will, along with Mr Thomson, explain matters more fully.