Employment and social policy: Sven Giegold

The EU must work to promote favourable business conditions for social-economic organisations, writes Sven Giegold

The European economy needs a strong foundation beyond the crises. This is my main motivation – to unite the European parliament behind a text which reaffirms and strengthens its position supporting cooperative enterprises and the social economy in the European Union.

Cooperatives come in very different forms, but they all have provide more advantages to society than only-for-profit enterprises probably ever could. Worker cooperatives provide a healthier and more resilient working environment.

They also ensure that short-termism does not become the leading motive in a company. Consumer cooperatives allow people to unite their purchasing power to buy goods the market would otherwise not supply, for example renewable energy in remote areas, or healthy, organic food.

They also strengthen producers, as the example of fair trade clearly shows. Apart from taming the financial industry, one of our political imperatives today should be to provide a good legal framework for enterprises, which care not only about their profits.

During the past decade, most politicians have lost sight of the importance of cooperative entrepreneurship. Much European legislation has been drawn up without bearing in mind the diversity of enterprises in the European economy.

This has contributed to an unlevel playing field and made life difficult for many of these enterprises and their employees.

The present initiative of the European parliament regarding employee participation in cooperatives using the statute for a European cooperative society (SCE) is a good opportunity to draw attention to this situation and to propose improvements.

After discussions with many experts from social economy organisations and officials with the commission, it has become obvious that the directive on employee participation should not be modified for different reasons.

The most important objective in this sense is to make sure that working standards for these employees remain high, while taking into account the specificity of cooperative employment – for example co-ownership and democratic participation.

More important improvements can be attained with regards to the regulation on the SCE, which is an important tool with strong political value. It is the most visible European effort in the field of social and solidarity economy.

Thus, it sends a strong signal, especially to support the cooperative movements in those member states, in which cooperatives were abused by dictatorships during the 20th century.

Still, the SCE has suffered from a relatively modest pick-up rate. Since its introduction, the use of the SCE was modest in absolute terms.

According to the latest research, the EU counts 17 SCEs with a total of 34 employees. The main reason for this meagre result is the high complexity of the regulation and its strong dependence on member state legislation, both need changing.

Other urgent improvements are more cross-cutting and concern cooperative business support measures, social aspects in public procurement rules and cooperative specificities in financial regulation, among others.

Therefore, my report calls for strong cross-sector measures to end discrimination of the social economy and asks for favourable business conditions.

Sven Giegold is parliament's rapporteur on the statute for a European cooperative society with regard to the involvement of employees