Roelants’ appointment is good news as he has led work to help reform laws in Europe to expand workplace economic democracy and he has also promoted efforts to develop specific social and solidarity economy laws in European countries.

The work of CICOPA internationally has been important as low paid precarious work globally has expanded since 2000, while over this period inequality has escalated. In 2013 Roelants and Claudia Sanchez Bajo co-authored the book Capital and the Debt Trap – Learning from Co-operatives in the Global Crisis. Their analysis showed that co-operatives have been effective in creating new jobs since 2008. Moreover, their impact helps reduce inequality while providing more secure and stable employment. However, they show that supportive public policy is crucial to the scope for co-operatives to be given adequate development space. For example, thanks to support legislation passed some 30 years ago, Italy has over 20,000 worker and social co-operatives and in the non-public care sector, social co-operatives are the largest provider. This contrasts with the UK where 8 in 10 jobs in care services are provided by the private sector.

Roelants has been a champion of the International Labour Organisation’s Recommendation 193, that the Co-operative College played a key role in researching and evidencing. Passed in 2002, this Recommendation promotes co-operatives as best practice and demonstrates that they are a highly effective way to move precarious workers from informal to formal employment, where they offer secure decent work, workers’ rights, legal protection and solutions to poverty.

In research and policy reports since 2002 for CECOP and for CICOPA internationally Roelants has championed the SSE which has become an integral part of the UN local development agenda since 2013. A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) report on inclusive growth has shown that the development of the social economy is crucial to tackling inequality, the housing crisis, climate change and the needs of marginalised groups. Employment in the social economy accounts for 6.5% of European jobs. In the UK employment level is below this average at 5.6%. Sweden, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands have much higher ratios ranging from 9% to 11.2% and have benefited from supportive public policy.

The JRF findings shows that the SSE is a key provider of affordable childcare, housing and transport and enables local people to take part in economic decision-making. The social economy also builds social capital and generates community well-being. However the JRF research also show that in the UK the social economy is not being championed by influential actors, is poorly understood and inadequately supported by local government. The social economy is also wrongly perceived as primarily an answer for market failure and thus not supported well by procurement policies and other pillars for growth. Moreover as JRF shows, the expansion of the social economy is restricted in the UK by inadequate infrastructure. JRF highlights this by showing that where these weaknesses have been overcome in cities like Barcelona, Montreal, Lille and Gothenburg, the social and solidarity economy is much stronger, is growing and gaining in self-confidence and public awareness. The appointment of Roelants augurs well and should help advance co-operative development by deepening solidarity economy understanding.

Originally Published in SolidarityEconomy.coop

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Brussels, 25 September 2017 – CICOPA, the international organisation of industrial and service cooperatives, published today its second global report on “Cooperatives and Employment” [PDF]. .

For Bruno Roelants, Secretary General of CICOPA:

“Employment is one of the most important contributions made by cooperatives throughout the world. This report shows that people involved in cooperatives constitute a sufficiently high percentage to be considered as a major actor in the United Nations “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, as well as in the worldwide debate on the “Future of Work” launched by the International Labour Organization. In addition, the intent of the study is to improve the methodology and the quality level of cooperative statistics. This is particularly timely, as the next International Congress of Labour Statisticians will take place in 2018. The public authorities and the cooperative movement itself should pay particular attention to this forthcoming event.”

Turning to qualitative aspects, the report also examines cooperatives’ specific contributions to addressing problems related to work and employment in the informal economy:

  People working in the informal economy who join savings and credit cooperatives, mutual insurance cooperatives, multi-purpose cooperatives and consumer cooperatives have an easier access to credit, education and training, affordable goods and services to meet their basic needs and a certain level of social protection based on solidarity and mutual help.
  Self-employed producers and entrepreneurs who join shared service cooperatives gain access to various services which help them to attain economies of scale and a higher bargaining power.
  For the self-employed workers and freelancers who have considerably increased in number over the last decades, cooperatives could be used by trade unions or member based organisations as a tool to organize them, but could also provide innovative models which could guarantee both flexibility and protection.
  Worker cooperatives, which aim at providing decent jobs to their worker-members, can be a direct solution to the formalization of informal employment.

However, to fully display the potential contributions of the cooperatives, “a favourable environment and an appropriate legal framework are necessary” and “the cooperative model should be better explained to trade unions, member-based organisations, NGOs and local governments”, concludes the report.

Photo by Andrea Marutti

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