Building gender equality through cooperatives

In 8th March 2011 it was the centenary of International Women’s Day. To mark this occasion, Work Together is coming back to the crucial role of women in worker cooperatives.

Despite signs of progress in gender equality over the past 15 years, there is still a significant gap between women and men in terms of job opportunities and quality of employment, according to the International Labour Office (ILO). In turn, women have always had a strong presence in worker cooperatives given that this business model combines economic viability and social responsibility. The agro-tourism women’s cooperative TO Kastri, is an example. Since 2000, Anna Darzenta and 27 active housewives came together to begin working outside the home and opened their own catering company in the Greek island of Syros where there is high unemployment. The EQUAL program for female entrepreneurs, funded through the European Social Fund, has helped them.

"With an egalitarian ethos, participatory decision-making, common ownership and commitment to goals beyond the motive of profit, cooperatives are expanding opportunities for women in local economies and societies throughout the world", declared UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon at the occasion of last year’s International Day of Cooperatives, for which the motto was ’Cooperative enterprises empower women’. About gender equality, he also underlines that the cooperative approach is not only an economically sustainable model, but also an enterprise system in which there are equality indicators between men and women above the rest of the business formulas. According to the Spanish Confederation of Worker Cooperatives (COCETA), 49% of people in worker cooperatives are women. Amongst them, 39% have directors’ positions, though in other enterprises which do not adopt this model, the percentage of women that work in these positions is barely 6%.

Innova Vegetalia del Mar

In Italy, according to ANCPL-Legacoop, the presence of women in worker cooperatives in the fashion industry is 95%, a significant example is the cooperative Stienta CAPA (Rovigo), consisting of around 100 workers who are nearly all members, in a leading producer of the Dolce & Gabbana range which conducts an annual turnover of more than three million euros. In others sectors where there are fewer women, such as the metalworks, chemical and paper production sector had a 20% of female presence in directors’ positions. In addition, during the last six years the female presence in the manufacturing sector has increased significantly from both the qualitative and quantitative point of view.

The New Zealand China Friendship Society (NZCFS), and the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (ICCIC), have begun a project with Shaanxi Province Women’s Federation, focused on encouraging Chinese women in cooperatives. The first phase of training has finished, and vice chair of ICCIC, Dave Bromwich, believes that “cooperatives give women an opportunity to lead, and help them to develop confidence in themselves”.

While the world economy is facing difficult challenges, cooperatives provide a valuable service to many women, especially those in vulnerable communities. The cooperative business model is more resilient in a crisis situation compared to capitalistic companies because of the very fact that those workers are the owners of the company and therefore, it is a model which prevails over individual capital and in which profits are shared with a collective approach.

by Leire Luengo for Work Together

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What is a cooperative

Cooperatives a sustainable employment solution!

A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.

Enterprises represented by CECOP are enterprises in which workers unite to satisfy their needs in terms of creation of sustainable jobs. They can be industrial enterprises or services rooted in the territories and having a long-term strategy. They are a genuine solution for sustainable jobs in Europe: they are broken down into workers’ cooperatives, social cooperatives and other types of enterprises owned by their workers.

Workers’ cooperatives: Workers’ cooperatives are enterprises subject to the same restrictions of competition, management and profitability as other companies. Their originality lies in the fact that their workers hold the majority of the shares, at least 51%. In doing so, the workers decide jointly on the major guidelines of their enterprises and appoint their leaders (managers, boards of directors, etc.). They also decide on how to share the profit with a twofold aim: to give the preference to the workers of the enterprises, in the form of refunds based on the work done and to consolidate the enterprises with a view to handing it over onto the future generations, i.e. creating reserves to reinforce the equity and ensuring thereby the sustainability of their enterprises. In all cooperatives, the internal democratic control is based on the principle of “one man, one vote” whatever the capital share held by the respective workers. Finally, the cooperative spirit promotes its employees information and training, a prerequisite to develop the autonomy, the motivation and responsibility, accountability required in an economic world which has become insecure. (Source: www.scop.coop)

Social cooperatives: Social cooperatives are specialised in the provision of social services or reintegration of disadvantaged and marginalised workers (disabled, long-term unemployed, former detainees, addicts, etc.). A large number of such cooperatives have been set up in Italy but also in other EU countries. Most of them are owned by their workers while offering the possibility or providing for the obligation (according to the national laws) to involve other types of members (users, voluntary workers, etc.).

Other types of enterprises owned by their workers: There are other types of enterprises owned by their workers such as for example the “Sociedades Laborales” in Spain which are real driving forces of economic and social activities which have contributed to lower the unemployment level and to revamp a sustained growth in Spain.