Working in the solidarity economy: between precarity and emancipation

Jacob Carlos Lima

Angela Maria Carneiro Araújo

Marcia de Paula Leite



Since the early 2000s, the discussion on the role and nature of cooperatively organised work in Brazil has been intense, reflecting its multiple facets: as a form of cost-cutting and labour precarisation; as an alternative way of generating jobs and income; or as a democratic form of labour organisation, based on the principles of cooperativism and self-management.

Between 2007 and 2011, we researched the management experiences of cooperatives formed by local authorities, NGOs and trade unions in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo (De Paula Leite et al, 2015), asking questions like: To what extent are cooperatives and associations a form of employment creation and income generation? We also examined their scope for transforming gender relations: who are the men and women who work in these cooperatives? How does the form of work organisation affect gender relations within the workplace?

To overcome the difficulty of finding reliable, current data, we surveyed associative labour in the State of São Paulo and conducted field work at several solidarity economy units.

Worker Cooperatives as a Response to the Crisis

Pierre Laliberté

In recent times, it has become commonplace to say that we are not so much facing an economic crisis as much as a crisis of the prevailing economic model. Undeniably, not only has neoliberalism failed to deliver decent social and environmental outcomes, but it has even failed on its own terms: delivering economic growth and stability.

The dominance of the financial interests and liberalisation has wreaked havoc on workers and communities alike. It has imposed new costs on governments and led to increased insecurity the world over. Yet for all the obvious limitations of the “model”, the way forward is not always clear, as if even the victims and critics of the system had internalised Margaret Thatcher’s infamous TINA.[i]

Beyond the necessary mobilisations to resist self-defeating austerity measures and to reform political and economic governance, it is important that workers and their organisations get a tangible sense that organising the economy around more ethical and democratic principles is both possible and viable.

It so happens that cooperatives have proven just that. Every day, throughout the world, tens of thousands of workers go to work in workplaces that they run themselves along cooperative principles.