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| European Commission > Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities > EQUAL > News | Search on EUROPA |
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| Business and Employment Co-operatives – a three-phase career | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Stage 1 |
Supported entrepreneur | Initially, the 'candidate business' works up his idea while remaining unemployed in legal terms. He or she continues to receive benefit while developing a marketable product or service, testing the market and establishing a client base. The BEC handles the business administration and accounting. | |
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Stage 2 |
Salaried entrepreneur | The entrepreneur agrees a part-time employment contract with the BEC, and in return pays over 10% of sales. He or she continues to build up the business, as well as receiving training and administrative support. Meanwhile he or she benefits from social insurance cover. The salary grows as the business grows. | Optionally, the business can spin off as a totally independent entity. |
| Stage 3 | Member Entrepreneur | When the business is self-supporting, the entrepreneur can choose to join the BEC as a full voting member, and take part in its management, continuing to pay an administration charge of 10% of sales. | |
At the end of 2005, the 90 sites in the BEC network numbered 2,618 supported entrepreneurs plus 1,138 salaried entrepreneurs (including 60 member entrepreneurs), with a combined turnover of 16.5 million in 2005. Two-thirds of entrepreneurs start off as unemployed, two-thirds are aged between 30 and 50 and 53% are women.
Maria Woglinde from the Egenanställning (Self-Employment) EQUAL project in the Swedish town of Uppsala said that although the idea is new in Sweden, the project has widespread support and they are working very fast. The first BEC was launched three years ago, and there are now 10, spread from the north to the south of the country. They have proved a very effective route to integration for immigrants and also ex-offenders, who may find they are asked to repay their debt to public authorities before they are allowed to set up in business on their own. Pär Olofsson, chair of the Swedish network of BECs, noted that Sweden has two types of structure: some are traditional co-operatives, owned by the people who work in them, while others are owned by business support agencies. The network gives them a way to set common standards – they use a standard contract of employment – and generate trust in their endeavour.
In Germany too, said Hans-Gerd Nottenbohm from the innova partnership, EQUAL has helped relaunch the co-operative movement into labour market policy. "The co-operative law reform that was adopted this August now allows us to create community co-operatives, social co-operatives and 'founder's co-operatives' or Gründergenossenschaften, which work along the same lines as BECs," he said. "However they don't cater for unemployed people, they only provide common services for those who have already created their business."
The movement is also an inspiration further afield, and particularly in the French-speaking world. Québec has its first BEC and in Morocco, the experience has led to a significant legal reform, according to Ali Boulanouar, head of the Social Economy Department of the Ministry of Industry. Co-operative law has been refashioned – notably by reducing the minimum number of members to three – to suit the needs of the fast-growing tourism and craft sectors.
The European Commission supports BECs from a number of angles. For Eddy Hartog, who heads the Lisbon strategy unit in the Regional Policy DG, they contribute to the Commission's big priority – creating growth and jobs. And they do this not by lowering standards but through innovation – understanding 'innovation' not in its high-tech sense but in the sense of doing things differently and making use of Europe's diversity. BECs are a type of incubator, a way of bringing more people into revenue-generating activity, without obliging them to become either bosses or employees. And generating activity is something that is going to continue to attract EU support. Carl Schlyter made a similar point: "Thinking only of high-tech is in some way colonialist. India and China have more engineers than we do, so we can't win through technical innovation. We need to innovate through corporate social responsibility," he said.
Walter Faber, head of the EQUAL unit in the Employment DG, stressed that the Lisbon strategy was not just about creating jobs, but about creating full employment, integration and cohesion. He recalled that in 1995 the Commission published a study identifying 17 'new sources of jobs'. They are in areas such as care, quality of life, culture and new technologies, and are provided largely by the social economy. Trends since then have proved this prediction right – jobs have been created in sectors like health and education, and not in manufacturing. That is why the social economy and BECs have such an important role to play. Noting that initiatives are increasingly being asked to demonstrate their costs and benefits, he had seen some impressive examples of the social return that social economy can bring.
Finally Apostolos Ioakimidis from the Enterprise DG admitted that the Commission has no clear policy on the social economy as such. Nevertheless it is recognised: the European Co-operative Statute has been adopted, social enterprises benefit from the same help as other businesses, and a number of EU policies, such as those on state aid, VAT, company law and accounting, pay them special consideration.
Despite some legal problems, the model of a collective structure that nurtures individual entrepreneurship is firmly established, and is spreading fast. As Hugues Sibille, president of AVISE, France's Agence de Valorisation des Initiatives Socio-Economiques, joked: "Next stop the United Nations."
Nabil M'Rad
Président
Coopérer pour entreprendre
37 rue Jean Leclaire
F-75017 Paris
Tel. : +33 1 42 63 47 71
E-mail : info@cooperer.coop
Web site: www.cooperer.coop
Les Coopératives d'Activités et d'Emploi – L'entreprise partagée, AVISE, 2006. ISBN 2-908334-40-2, downloadable from www.avise.org
News
Another is the
regularisation of informal work. On this topic, Annie Favrie of Coopérative
Initiative, Cité et Développement cited the case of Madagascar, where the
vast majority of craftspeople work informally, not necessarily because they want
to but because the formalities are so off-putting. The country's first BEC is to
open in January 2007, and out of just over 100 eligible craftspeople, most of
whom are in the textile trade, 77 have already signed up. As a tool for
development, the BEC is in fact only one part of a three-pronged co-operative
approach, as it goes along with a purchasing co-operative and a mutual guarantee
fund.