The ILO views cooperatives as important in improving the living and working conditions of women and men globally as well as making essential infrastructure and services available even in areas neglected by the state and investor-driven enterprises. Cooperatives have a proven record of creating and sustaining employment – they provide over 100 million jobs today; they advance the ILO’s Global Employment Agenda and contribute to promoting decent work. Based on the only international governmental instrument on cooperatives, the ILO Promotion of Cooperatives Recommendation, 2002 (R.193), EMP/COOP serves ILO constituents and cooperative organisations by focussing on four areas:
- Public awareness raising through evidence based advocacy and sensitization to cooperative values and principles;
- Insuring the competitiveness of cooperatives by disseminating cooperative values and principles, and developing tailored tools to cooperative stakeholders; concerning for instance management, audit, vertical integration, etc.
- Inclusion of cooperative principles and practices at all levels of the national education and training systems; and,
- Advice on cooperative policy and cooperative law, including participatory policy and law making and ensuring that cooperative law be understood in its broadest sense encompassing, for example, taxation of cooperatives, labour law in cooperatives, accounting standards and competition law, as well as the implementation of the law.
EMP/COOP works in close partnership with the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), the representative world body of cooperatives. Besides creating synergies, this collaboration allows EMP/COOP to gather information and to reach out to the real world of income generation of hundreds of millions co-operators around the world. Besides this, EMP/COOP is part of a network of other institutions (e.g. the Committee for the Promotion and Advancement of Cooperatives - COPAC), including training and research institutions.
A cooperative is defined as an “autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise”.
ILO R.193