What is CommonGoods Network?

CommonGoods is an economic social network designed to help people build a sustainable and equitable economy from the ground up. CommonGoods helps workers and customers connect to share information about the businesses in their lives, and how those businesses affect the world around them. CommonGoods helps its users build an economy in which every worker receives fair pay for the work that they contribute to society; and in which customers are able to get their needs met without supporting businesses that wreck the environment in the process.

Why was CommonGoods Created?

Businesses play a huge role in determining what kind of a world we live in. Businesses allocate society's wealth, determining how much goes to business managers and owners, and how much of it goes to the workers. Businesses also determine whether our common inheritance, the world around us, is conserved for future generations or consumed through depleting natural resources, damaging ecosystems, and emitting pollution. And businesses shape society and consumer attitudes through advertising, encouraging customers to buy products even if they have to go into debt to do so, and even when those products are produced in a way that destroys the environment or harms workers.

But businesses don't have minds of their own. They are run by people, and their actions are limited by what society will permit of them, by law or customer preference.

In today's big-business capitalist economy, politicians have been convinced or coerced into making laws that benefit certain large businesses at the expense of the rest of society. And businesses have been able to convince customers to buy their products even when workers are exploited and the byproducts of their industrial activity compromise the very web of life on earth, on which we all depend.

How does CommonGoods work?

CommonGoods' market-based platform helps customers and workers take control of the economy by sharing information and encouraging each other to support those businesses that create the most value in society with the least harm to customers, workers, or the environment. CommonGoods allows workers to anonymously publish the labor practices of the business where they work--to tell consumers whether they are getting fair wages for their work or whether the business is responsive to their perspectives in shaping its policies and activities. It allows whistle blowers to report environmental harm or consumer safety problems. It lets customers share concerns about fraud, lousy customer service, or poor product quality.

Most of all, CommonGoods helps people find businesses that contribute positively to society. It helps people find businesses with great products and reasonable prices, with environmentally-safe production methods and fair labor and compensation practices.

Each time you leave feedback on a CommonGoods business profile, you are telling thousands of other customers whether you think the business is helping improve the world we live in, or exploiting people and the environment for a quick buck. And every time you buy goods or services from a highly rated business listed on CommonGoods, you are making the world a slightly better place to live--reducing demand for destructive businesses and increasing demand for socially responsible businesses.