CECOP - CICOPA Europe

Info

CECOP – CICOPA Europe is the European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives

Geschiedenis

Most of the enterprises of the CECOP network are SMEs, while some are large enterprises. We also find several strong horizontal cooperative groups: in Italy, we can mention CCC-ACAM in the construction sector, CNS in the service sector, and CGM among social cooperatives; another example is the well-known Mondragon group in the Basque country (intersectoral but mainly made up of industrial cooperatives), the 7th Spanish entrepreneurial group employing over 100 000 workers. Most of these enterprises are worker cooperatives and are characterised by the fact that the majority of their staff are members-owners. Around 9,000 of them (employing 270,000 workers) are specialised in the provision of social services or in the reintegration, through work, of disadvantaged and marginalised workers (disabled, long-term unemployed, ex-prisoners, addicts etc), and are generally called social cooperatives. A further 1,000 are second degree cooperatives for small enterprises (truck drivers, taxi drivers, mechanics, masons, etc), and are often called artisans’ cooperatives.