New Global Report Finds 91,000 Worker Cooperatives

The world's leading organization of worker cooperatives, CICOPA (the International Organisation of Industrial, Artisanal and Service Producers' Cooperatives) identified over 91,000 worker cooperatives around the world, according to its year-end 2013 report. In addition, another 20,000 organizations have related organizational forms, such as social cooperatives and artisan's cooperatives. CICOPA defines social cooperatives as enterprises "specialised in the provision of social services or reintegration of disadvantaged and marginalised workers (disabled, long-term unemployed, former detainees, addicts, etc.)," and roughly half of the worker cooperatives are also social cooperatives, a form especially common in Italy.

Although the report is constrained by the difficulty in obtaining consistent data across countries, CICOPA conservatively estimates that these 111,000 organizations together employ around 4 million people. The great majority (83%) of organizations are in Europe—Italy and Spain together account for 77% of all enterprises. Together with the next nine countries (Argentina, Colombia, China, France, Poland, Brazil, Finland, Romania, and Japan), they account for 98% of the organizations. Cooperatives in South America tend to have large numbers of employees, so they account for 42% of people employed by cooperatives.