Economics in the Zambarau Concord

Co-operatives
The economy of the Concord is not, in fact, a free market economy. The Zambarau Concord is split up into large regional workers' co-operatives, usually with each co-operative running each solar system. The difference between a workers' co-operative and a corporation is that while in a corporation there is a employer who can hire or fire employees, in a workers' co-operative the workers (employees) can democratically hire and fire 'worker-managers' (employers) to manage the workers. Each regional co-operative is split into a multitude of much smaller 'nested' co-operatives that each have a respective worker-manager. The advantage of this system is that workers can never be made redundant.

The currency in the Zambarau Concord is also tightly controlled. The minimum wage has always been 1 Unit of currency and each co-operative will democratically vote on how many Units different positions will get; the most popular wage system is to have each worker paid 5 Units while worker-managers get paid 9 Units. In the Consolidation Era robots and Clones are returning to the workforce and in some co-operatives a system has been introduced in which robots and Clones (despite not being conscious 'people') get paid like normal workers, but their payment then gets shared equally among the self-aware members of the workforce (harking back to the days of the Pre-Obsolescence Era, this extra amount of payment is called an 'allowance').

In most co-operatives, however, instead of sharing allowances amoung workers, money from the labour of robots and Clones is used to provide many public services such as transport, education, entertainment and medicine. Such systems are actively encouraged by the Zambarau.

There are no individual companies in co-operatives. Everybody in the system works for and buys things from their co-operative only. Prices of all products are decided by the Prices Commissioner, a role that has now been taken over by powerful computer networks run by each co-operative. It has often been said that the Concord's 'economy' is less like the true economies of Pre-Formation times and more like a way of just allocating production.