CECOP report: ALL FOR ONE – Reponse of worker-owned cooperatives to non-standard employment

Summary

“All for One – Response of worker-owned cooperatives to non-standard employment”, a new report produced by CECOP sets out to show the contributions made by cooperatives to the issues related to non-standard employment, such as precariousness, low income, insufficient social security coverage and workers’ isolation.

The report adopts an approach based on the concept of decent work deficits in order to identify specific problematic situations to which worker-owned cooperatives have been responding over the time. However, this report focusses particularly on independent workers (also called freelancers) whose situations are not covered sufficiently by political and institutional debates on non-standard employment.

As the examples from Belgium, Finland, France and Spain illustrate, cooperatives have been a laboratory for experimentation on innovative and sustainable forms of work and employment, providing a response to the needs of workers in non-standard employment situations, as well as their aspirations for creating a working community of the 21^st century. The cooperative laboratory for new forms of work and employment suggests several possible scenarios which might allow us to embrace present and the future of Work. We invite you to discover them, as well as policy recommendations we are addressing to EU and national authorities.