Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 19 (IANS): It will be an emotional moment for the employees of the nearly-century-old ULCCS, Asia's largest workers cooperative, when on Thursday, its 52-year-old headquarters begins to be dismantled brick by brick, without using modern demolition equipment, for widening of a national highway.
So emotionally attached are the employees to this building, that on Wednesday, many of them came and took pictures of it.
"Since the building has an emotional significance not just to the society but to many others from across Kerala, the building will not be demolished using excavators. Each brick, door, window, and pavestone will be dismantled individually, in a heartbreaking labour of love," said an ULCCS official.
The dismantling will begin on Thursday at 6 p.m.
ULCCS, one of the largest primary co-operatives in Asia, has its headquarters at Madappally, near Vadakara, in Kozhikode district and lies along NH-66. As the highway is being widened, the building has to come down.
The history of ULCCS dates from 1924, when one of the then local newspapers published an article on a notification of the Malabar District Board, inviting people to form cooperatives in the region.
This led 14 young people to form the Uralungal Workers Cooperative Society, and it has grown from 37 paise to its present Rs 5,000 crore, in a period of 96 years, by its ethical practices of labour welfare and vigilant measures of "capital accountability".
The ULCCS has not lost a single day due to the innovative ways of employee centric comradeship andits labour welfare-centric approach makes it unique in the world as an organisation "Of the workers, by the workers and for the workers."
Presently ULCCS has 12 members on its board and interestingly all directors are full time workers of the society as ULCCS restricts its membership only to people who contribute directly to the work it undertakes. The society employs a well trained and experienced team of more than 1,000 technical professionals.
The 2013 Indian Cooperative Congress has acknowledged ULCCS as the best worker's cooperative society in India and the World Cooperative Monitor published by the International Cooperative Alliance has ranked it in second position after the world leader in Cooperatives, Modragon of Spain. This ranking is based on the ratio of turnover over gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.
The ULCSS building was constructed on the land bought for Rs 500 then and the office began functioning in it from 1969. It was in this building that discussions on new ventures of the society from then to the present took place, and all the major decisions of the organisation were taken.
It was much later that the development of NH 66 was planned. At that time itself, the Society, which is committed to development, announced that it would dismantle the headquarters at its own expense when the highway was widened.