Coops maintain jobs better than traditional companies
First of all Cooperatives are enterprises with economic and social objectives. Coop' is one way to create new jobs, but beyond job-creation cooperatives are a lot more. It's also a question of solving a shortage situation, to gain power and influence, it's about quality of life but it's also simply a question of survival.
Plenty of social and economic needs are solved in cooperatives.
We are now facing both opportunities and risks or obstacles entering the post-industrial society.
We do have difficulties to describe the cooperative movement as it is today because the statistics are not well organised. Just one figure; on the basis of figures from Eurostat 1990 and more recent study from ICA 1996 there would be a growth in employment from 2.2 million to 3.25 million jobs during this period.
We can see the following;
- In sectors that are declining, the cooperatives are better in maintaining jobs than traditional companies
- In new sectors, services and social, the creation of new jobs is heavily expanding.
The emergence of new cooperatives
- Social cooperatives in different escapes are one of the most dynamic phenomena
- CUMA Cooperatives using agricultural machinery is a way for farmers to combine fewer costs of investments into machinery through the purchase and collective use of materials. Its both a way to involve younger farmers and to use the common machines offering services to others, public sector and private companies in the region.
- In the area of commerce we'll find coops dealing with ethical, faire and interdependent trading.
- Ethical financing and other new forms of financing cooperatives, for example a new growth of credit unions
- Community and village cooperatives, in general these are multi-purpose or multistake coops, combinations of social services for different groups of users, local crafts, community-based micro enterprises.
- School coops, everything from parental child-care coops to primary schools but also cooperatives dealing with lifelong learning vocational training.
- New types of worker coops which we may call integration coops, training for reintegration, rehabilitation.
- Female entrepreneurship while our society is undergoing profound changes for example with a growing demand for female employment, there is a great need to become economic independent, we'll foreseen a great number of women coops in all different sectors even if the main part is in traditional female sectors such as social caring.
Concluding this part it can be said that cooperatives constitute more than 130 000 enterprises and more than 3,7 million jobs. We can also see that the fast expansion new forms are appearing as much in areas of the classical cooperatives as credit, consumption, commerce, agriculture etc. but talking about job creation it's mainly in sectors such as social services, local services, education, leisure, tourism and local development.
Comments or questions? Contact the COPAC Coordinator.
Posted: 19 July 2000
