In the changing world of work, institutional frameworks for the rights and protection at work, mainly based on the employment relationship, have been weakened. The informalisation of employment over last decades both in the developing countries and industrialised countries has produced new forms of work and employment which are not sufficiently covered existing formal arrangements. Cooperative model has been considered and used as a significant instrument for addressing problems related to the informal employment as well as the current informalisation trend. However, different kinds of contributions made by different types of cooperatives in different situations of the informal employment have not been sufficiently analysed. This is partly due to conceptual ambiguity concerning cooperative types and their role related to work and employment.
To understand and clarify different answers made by different types of cooperatives regarding the informal employment issue, this paper will rely on document analysis which considers various documents as argumentative sources for justifying or criticising certain roles of cooperatives in addressing the informal employment issue. We will use two different corpuses: for the informal employment in developing countries, documents published by the international institutions and development actors; for the industrialised countries, mainly newspaper articles and articles on websites concerning employment issue raised by the technological development and accompanying social changes, and “platform cooperativism” and “commons” movement as solutions with cooperative model.
As the concept of the informal employment is complex and as it reflects diverse situations, the role of cooperatives in addressing problems related to the informal employment cannot be simply stated as evident. By focusing on different contributions of cooperatives, particularly, concerning the possibility of providing rights and protection at work, which is directly related to the formalisation of informal employment, the paper will argue that the typology of cooperative would be useful for clarifying different contributions of cooperatives. It will also argue that conceptual ambiguities in the typology of cooperative, in particular, distinction between producers’ cooperatives and worker cooperatives should be more clarified to help better understanding of the role of cooperatives.
After illustrating different contributions of different types of cooperatives in different situations of the informal employment, this paper will propose several issues to be discussed further in order to clarify and strengthen the role of cooperatives in providing rights and protection at work, which would become more important needs and challenges to be addressed by cooperatives in the future of work.
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3. Governance, employment and human resource management
