Industrial Cooperatives: a tool for the challenge of inclusive and sustainable competitiveness

Practical Information:

• Composition of the Study Group:
• Administrator: Adam Dorywalski/Santiago DIAZ-DE-VILLEGAS
• Contact: e-mail
• The EU Youth Test at the EESC is being applied to this opinion. Baltic Sea Region Youth Forum was chosen by a group of interested youth organisations to represent all of them during the opinion-making process.

Background

This own-initiative opinion intends to shed light and promote the industrial cooperatives model, as 2025 was proclaimed the International Year of Cooperatives by the UN. We can recently observe growing recognition by international institutions of the role played by social economy enterprises. In fact, cooperatives operate in almost all sectors of the economy with businesses of different sizes.

The EU has recognized in its industrial strategy a specific ecosystem defined as the social and proximity economy. This own-initiative opinion wants to highlight that the cooperative model has been already able to build competitive and prosperous companies and that their success is based on inclusivity, worker participation and interaction with local communities. In particular that, in these times of global uncertainty, keeping industrial capacity in the EU is crucial for our security and reaching strategic autonomy.

Therefore, the opinion goal is to promote and spread information about benefits of industrial cooperatives model, as well as to advocate for better finical incentives and legislative framework at EU level, supporting existing and emergence of new industrial cooperatives.