Page 464 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

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The Story of the C»W.S.

A trade union may compel a man to join and pay a regular
subscription; but by custom and by law a co-operative society is
debarred from enforcing membership and trade. Compulsory
trade unionism for C.W.S. employees, therefore, would involve the
anomaly of an institution depending upon a voluntary attachment
for its own objects, while impressing its servants to obUge its friends.
And this leads us to deal briefly with the point—or lack of
. . .
point—of the C.W.S. housing its employees in model villages. At
various times it has been raised both in and out of the C.W.S.
Quarterly Meetings. Speaking to co-operators at Birmingham
(September 28th, 1912), the Dean of Worcester (Dr. Moore Ede) did
a httle more than raise it. Since this passage in his speech embodied
a t3rpical misconception, without prejudice it may be fitly quoted
here. He remembered Pelaw, he said, when it was a station amid
fields :
The Wholesale erected workshops—and a very magnificent set of
workshops they were. They could have acquired the land adjoining those
workshops and created a model industrial town, but . . . rather than
run the risk of a brief decrease of dividend, they allowed the opportunity to be
lost, and around the magnificent factories private enterprise had erected
hideous streets of jerry-built houses. A similar opportunity was lost at Luton.
There was too much of the worst spirit of commercialism in the Wholesale.
Co-operators ! believe in your principles, and extend their application.
Rightly or wrongly, however, the C.W.S. simply has kept within its
principles. If it had built upon a big scale at Pelaw, and a fair
proportion of the employees had chosen to five at Gateshead or
Shields or Sunderland, the Society would have been left with the
alternatives either of becoming a general landlord, or of bringing
pressure to bear upon its workers, two courses each outside its
scope. Garden villages are much to be desired, but if they are to be
democratically co-operative, it is necessary that they should originate
with employees or other tenants themselves, or with local
co-operative societies. And this better way may be illustrated in
part by the history of the Manchester Tenants Limited. The village
created by this association is in the country a mile or two beyond
the C.W.S. Longsight Printing Works, and the society began in 1906
at a meeting of C.W.S. employees held in a room at Balloon Street
freely lent by the C.W.S. Committee. ... As for other branches
of systematic " welfare work," the best of these on investigation
usually resolve themselves into exercises of benevolent despotism,
impositions of discipline, no doubt for the workers' own good, but
quite contrary to the free spirit of co-operation.
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