Delivered. When Anne-Catherine Wagner carries out, for her investigation, an interview with the president of the board of directors of the cooperative SCOP TI, this one takes place in the office of the direction, under… the portrait of Che Guevara. The site manager was previously secretary of the works council. And his office is also that of the CGT.
The company has become a symbol. That of the militant takeover of a company (Fralib) threatened with relocation by a large group (Unilever). Its transformation into a cooperative and participatory society (SCOP) after a struggle of one thousand three hundred and thirty-six days marked the spirits. A symbol but also, in a way, a decoy. Because if these takeovers of companies in difficulty by their employees have an important place in the collective imagination, they represent only a small part of the creation of cooperatives (12.5% in 2019).
Through his work, Cooperate. SCOPs and the making of the collective interest (CNRS Editions), Mme Wagner, professor of sociology at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, proposes to put this world of cooperatives into perspective and to describe all its complexity. In fact, this booming sector (3,611 cooperative societies in 2020, compared to 522 in 1970) is proving to be of great diversity.
While some SCOPs are born out of social struggles, many others are the result of a transformation from an association to a cooperative, from a business transfer “healthy” or are created ex nihilo. Industrial entities are in the minority: two-thirds of these companies are in the service sector. Among them, many are companies “engaged” (for a healthy diet, for example), supported by cooperators in “quest for meaning” and mostly from the educated middle classes.
“A factory full of injustices”
The SCOPs thus constitute a plural reality in which the sense of collective ownership differs: a takeover of the means of production in the face of the distance from the decision-making centers for certain workers’ cooperatives, a common commitment to a social project for the SCOPs of services, etc. The symbolic rewards put forward to complement the monetary rewards also vary, as do the degree of autonomy of these companies in relation to their environment or the limits encountered, internally, in the exercise of “corporate democracy”.
The author also points out that “SCOPs are not bubbles in which social constraints, the value of money and diplomas or forms of internalization of feelings of incompetence would magically disappear”. She also raises “forms of reproduction of inequalities, depending on militant experience, qualification or gender”.
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