What do Spain, Croatia, Finland and now Japan have in common? The less than obvious answer is an official translation of the Worker Co-operative Code of Governance.
The code, developed in 2006 and updated in 2012, with the support of Co-operatives UK, is based on the seven co-operative principles and is designed to help people benefit from their own labour and take collective control of their working lives.
It outlines a series of tools and techniques utilised in some of the UK’s most successful co-ops. And having travelled some 1117 miles from Manchester to the capital of Finland, a further 4,757 - give or take a mile or two - have been added to land the code in downtown Tokyo.
The translation came about as a by-product of Noriko Matsumoto's study into British worker co-operatives. The Associate Professor at Komazawa University, Tokyo, and her translator Noriko Anzai-Jackson, spent several months in the UK in 2014, and worked closely with both Co-operatives UK and The Co-operative College.
Noriko Matsumoto hopes the translation will help forge links between worker co-ops in Japan and the UK, while also inspiring the next generation of worker co-operatives in the Far East.
Read the full article at Co-operatives UK
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