By piecing up together incomplete statistics, CICOPA has been able to find out that cooperative employment directly concerns 250 million people in the world, without mentioning indirect and induced employment. In the G20, cooperative employment makes up almost 12 % of the total employed population.
The study also shows that worker members considered as the third category of cooperative employment alongside employees and self-employed producers, are already a significant portion of the total (11 million) and exhibit characteristics that are particularly conducive to the economic sustainability of cooperatives. This is particularly important for CICOPA because this third category of cooperative employment is the main one in the cooperatives of the CICOPA network.
It also calls for the development of multi stakeholder cooperatives, in which the staff are involved as one of the key stakeholders, like in the Mondragon group, in Italian social cooperatives, and in Quebec solidarity cooperatives, to mention a few emblematic cases. The report is available here
