UK model to help co-ops

UK-Japan News May 2015

An academic from Komazawa University in Tokyo has been studying the UK’s cooperative sector in the hope it will lead to the development of workers cooperatives in Japan, Co-operative News reported on 14 April.

Part of the project has involved translating the Worker Co-operative Code of Governance—updated in 2012 by Co-operatives UK Limited—which outlines the tools and techniques utilised in some of the UK’s most successful co-ops.

According to the researcher, Noriko Matsumoto, “It is important for [those] Japanese entrepreneurs who now choose to form workers’ cooperatives to know that there is the same movement in the UK”.