ABSTRACT
Suma delivered its best trading performance for 35 years, turning over US$49 million. Equality is one of its values as a co-operative and as such this means operating on the basis of equal pay. The list emerged from an extensive global dialogue, involving consideration of values at around 10,000 meetings in different settings across the world. People know that co-operatives come in all shapes and sizes, and this also holds true for what they do in terms of values. Every co-op people sampled does communicate values of some kind. The global value that is most commonly promoted is ‘social responsibility’, followed by reference to democracy and then openness. The Spanish worker co-operative Mondragon draws on its values to extend the core list of co-operative principles from seven to ten. The impact of the co-operative sector having a global set of values is hard to test.
