The labour law of workers’ cooperatives – insights for the future of workers’ protection?
Andrea Iossa, Lund University
Miriam Kullmann, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
For many years, labour law has been the institution that served to protect the (majority of the) workforce. Historically based on an exchange, labour law ensures the authority of the employer over the employees while recognising their rights before the employer itself. Flexible forms of work inexorably are on the rise since the 1970s/80s, and business strategies to increase the hiring of self-employed workers. While not hampering the authority of the employer, this trend has altered company structures as well as it has undermined the role of labour law as protective instrument and deprived those workers from acceding to certain employment rights that preserve their dignity. It is thus apposite to hypothesise that if an increasing number of workers is not working under a relationship of subordination which is key to the standard employment contract anymore, which role then is left for labour law as a means to regulate the labour market while protecting the workforce?
One form of work (institution) that has received only scant attention in the labour law debate is that of workers' cooperatives. Often seen a means to achieve more democratic control over economic production and business organisation, workers’ cooperatives challenge the hierarchical structures put forward in the capitalist system, without however denying the need for rules to regulate the organisation of production. Assuming that labour law in principle has not lost its value to give rights and disperse obligations, in this paper we aim to address the question what kind of labour law would be needed for workers’ cooperatives. To do so, we will select a few cases of existing workers' cooperatives in Italy and the Netherlands and looking at their internal statutes and how the work is organised and regulated, against the background of the applicable regulations in the respective countries studied. We hope to find insights that may perhaps be used to contribute to the theorisation of labour law, and the concept of subordination which is the core of the employment relationship in particular.