The International Organisation of Industrial, Artisanal and Service Producers’ Co-operatives, or CICOPA, is a sectoral organisation of the International Co-operative Alliance. Its full members are representative organisations of producers’ co-operatives from different sectors: construction, industrial production, general services, transport, intellectual skills, artisanal activities, health, social care, etc. Its associated members are support organisations promoting cooperatives in those sectors.
Many of those cooperatives are worker cooperatives, namely cooperatives where the members are the staff of the enterprise, i.e., worker-members. Because of this, those enterprises are characterized by a distinctive type of labour relations, called “worker ownership”, different from the one experienced by conventional employees or by self-employed.
With the recent transformation of the world economy, industrial, artisan and service co-operatives are no longer a marginal phenomenon. Numbers have increased in both industrialised and developing countries over recent years. CICOPA now has a membership of 57 organisations from 39 countries, and new national organisations of such cooperatives are continuously being established, e.g., in 2002 in Slovenia, in 2003 in South Korea, in 2004 in the USA.
