The Mail THE COOP

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Coop management must think that its customers and nominal owners are very stupid, for how else can one explain Mr. Milton Brown's attempt, in his letter to Society members, to justify with such transparently false reasons "the worst year in the modern history of the Society"? Were the space available, I would comment on all five of his "reasons," and I suggest that an article doing just that should be written by your staff. In this letter I will confine myself to analyzing the most interesting "reason," the relationship with the Harvard Trust Company.

According to Mr. Brown, the patronage refund paid to members by the Coop for the fiscal year ended June 30th, 1970, would have been approximately two percentage points higher if the Coop had maintained its previous practice of disallowing patronage refunds on charge purchases not paid by the end of the billing month. This practice was not maintained because, according to Mr. Brown, the Harvard Trust Company now charges 11/2% per month interest on late payments, and, I suppose, both to deny the patronage refund and allow the bank to charge such a high rate of interest on late payments was considered an arrangement the customers would not accept.

Instead, under the new practice, the patronage refund is allowed on late payments and the bank collects 11/2% per month on such payments. While Mr. Brown emphasizes that the effect of this practice is to increase the number of people "sharing a given number of dollars available for patronage refund," he neglects to mention the significant fact that, as a result of the new procedure, the Harvard Trust Company is now receiving as interest some amount of the patronage refund funds which would previously have remained with the Society and been available for distribution to its members! Therefore, the actual net effect of the Coop's arrangement with the Harvard Trust Company is to give the bank some of the patronage refund funds which should by law go to its members. I believe that this procedure is arguably illegal, but the politics of it are more interesting than its illegality.

Who is getting short-changed by this new practice of the Coop? Not Mr. Brown. His salary is probably higher than it was last year. Not the Harvard Trust Company. It is getting part of the Coop members' patronage refund as well as usurious interest. Not the other banks that loan the Coop money to build unnecessary buildings, such as the Business School Coop, and to carry ridiculous inventories, such as refrigerators and color televisions. These banks are paid their interest charges even before the Harvard Trust Company gets its cut. Two affected groups remain: the employees and the customers. Mr. Brown would like us to believe that the employees are partly responsible for the lower patronage refund, but that is just the usual businessman's argument. Many students at Harvard know that the Coop has always paid lousy wages and relies primarily on its ability to force local high school students to work for low pay to keep all of its wages down. In fact, therefore, far from being a cause of lower patronage refunds, the Coop's employees are victims of the same man-agreement that is short-changing the remaining groups, the customers; and this same group, I believe, is always short-changed by business, be it the Coop, the Harvard Trust Company, or General Motors.

In essence, therefore, the Coop's lower patronage refund is just another example of business making profits by exploiting employees and short-changing consumers. I believe that it is in our interest to stop this short-changing and exploitation. I suggest that the way to do it is to organize a fight against the management of the Coop and support, in general, the struggles of employees everywhere against their businessmen bosses. Unless we realize the need to take this kind of political action, I fear Mr. Brown and his like will continue to live at our expense and, perhaps, others' agony.