Dame Pauline Green, President of the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), highlighted the role cooperatives are playing in Europe where they have demonstrated their willingness to dip into surplus capital to pay workers, instead of taking the short-term solution to get rid of jobs.

“Human capital is a key to any business, and cooperatives are demonstrating in an extremely tough economic environment that they believe retaining people and expertise is more important in the long-term to their business success than holding surplus financial capital,” she said.

See the agenda here: http://social.un.org/coopsyear/documents/agenda-iyc-closing.pdf