Collective actions on the margins of the salariat

Intermittent and Precarious Workers Coordination (CIP)

The CIP emerged in the context of a fight against the reform of Annexes 8 and 10 of the French General Unemployment Insurance Scheme, which concern workers hired intermittently in the sectors of recorded and live performances respectively. ⁵ The ‘intermittence’ model of labour relations in the performance sector is in many ways an original aspect of the French system. It is defined both by a mode of employment and by specific rules for unemployment compensation. With regard to the modes of employment, artists ⁶ and show production staff can be hired on a ‘customary’ fixed-term contract (contrat à durée déterminée d’usage, CDDU), deviating from the norms of a standard employment contract. These contracts can be of a very short duration (a few hours) and can represent regular relations between an employer and an employee. In other words, the contracts can be renewed an unlimited number of times and follow on from one another without there being any minimum periods to respect between two contracts. With regard to protection against the risk of unemployment, there are specific rules governing the eligibility for and collection of benefits. These rules are set out in Annexes 8 and 10 of the General Unemployment Insurance Scheme, created in the 1960s. As in the case of temporary and seasonal workers, and although the rules are specific and adapted to the customary modes of employment within the performing arts sector, the social security of intermittent workers in the performing arts follows the principle of interprofessional solidarity.

However, since the reform of 1979 and until 2003, the eligibility criteria for benefits were relatively flexible, and the unemployment insurance scheme meant that many intermittent workers had a continuous and relatively predictable income over the course of a year, even when they experienced highly unsteady forms of employment. Mathieu Grégoire (Grégoire, 2013) in fact saw this as ‘an emancipation horizon’ for employees. In French employment law, an ‘exceptional zone’ was therefore created, where job instability comes with some income security for the employee. In other words, a zone in which job insecurity does not necessarily affect working and living conditions. Several years of attempts at reform systematically failed due to push-back from intermittent workers. But in late June 2003, the Medef (Mouvement des entreprises de France), the French Business Confederation and main employers’ association, proposed a reform protocol, obtaining the signature of several representative trade unions at the national level (the CFDT, CGC and CFTC), which nevertheless corresponded to a minority of the sector whose employers were not even represented. ⁷ In very simple terms, the reform reduces the period of compensation. At the same time, it makes this period indefinite by removing the notion of the ‘anniversary’, i.e. the fixed date for a review to reconsider whether the entitlement still holds. In addition, it weakens the principle of a mutuality in favour of a logic of personalised compensation. In other words, the benefits are strictly proportional to the wages received. The legitimacy of the agreement was challenged by opponents of the reform whose slogan was ‘We’re not playing anymore’ (‘On ne joue plus’), reflecting two things at once: the refusal to accept a unilateral change in the rules (i.e. a change in unemployment benefit rules by social partners that do not represent the sector’s employees and employers); and the significance of the actions carried out across France during the summer of 2003, when festivals were blocked. This was followed by a large-scale and longlasting social movement, best summarised by another of its slogans: ‘No culture without social rights’.

To better understand the actors involved in this conflict, it is important to recall the characteristics of the French social security system. First of all, the unemployment insurance system is financed by social security contributions and jointly administered by social partners who are members of Unédic, a non-profit association whose mission is to manage the Public Employment Service. The state plays a minor role: it must endorse agreements negotiated between the social partners. However, the reasons justifying the reforms sought by the Medef (i.e. the employers’ representatives within the Unédic) are linked to the alleged funding gap under Annexes 8 and 10 of the General Unemployment Insurance Scheme. Nevertheless, as sociologist Mathieu Grégoire argued during the National Assembly hearing in December 2012, ⁸ the annexes do not represent a separate insurance scheme against the risk of unemployment but specific criteria within the general scheme. It therefore makes no sense to calculate a specific funding gap as if this scheme existed outside the field of interprofessional solidarity. But above all – as had already been denounced by the Intermittent and Precarious Workers Coordination (CIP) in the summer of 2003, then confirmed by a simulation of the reform’s impact carried out in 2004 by a team of researchers, and finally also noted by the Unédic in 2005 – the 2003 reform resulted in a significant increase in the amount of benefits paid, while also reducing the number of recipients by restricting the terms of compensation.

Trade unions expressed widely differing positions in response to the employers’ rhetoric. The CFDT, who signed the agreements, has never spoken out about the paradox of this reform, and has always been open to the hypothesis of a gradual, albeit partial, removal of the intermittence model from the general unemployment insurance scheme – and therefore from the social sphere of interprofessional solidarity. In that case, the idea would be to set up an occupational insurance fund. The CGT, on the other hand, did not sign the 2003 reform protocol, nor those of 2006 and 2014. It actively participated in the movement of intermittent workers and defended the political principle of interprofessional solidarity. A major issue has nevertheless always placed it in opposition to the CIP: the question of workers known as ‘employee-employers’ for lack of a better term, i.e. those who propose and develop their own projects (this is particularly the case for directors and producers). These workers then need to seek the collaboration of other artists and production staff for whom they act as de facto employers, without being so de jure. They represent a hybrid figure within wage labour, hitherto ignored or negatively defined. We will see that this figure is very similar to that of the ‘entrepreneur-employee’ within Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs). Most often, these atypical employees combine work done in the context of traditional labour relations and work done within structures that they have themselves created, in order to carry out their projects. While being problematic for unions, this situation concerns around one-third of intermittent workers at some point in their activity (Corsani and Lazzarato, 2008). It has also been criticised by experts, for whom it results in an inflation of intermittent contracts and a confusion of roles, leading to a weakening of employers’ responsibilities and a deregulation of the labour market (Latarjet, 2004). With government support, a social consensus was thus created aiming to professionalise trades and regulate intermittent work (incentives to replace intermittent jobs with permanent jobs, tightening the scope of intermittent contracts, more checks, etc.). The CIP, which has forged occasional collaborations with the sector’s employers’ organisations (like the SYNDEAC) and with the SYNAVI (the union which represents small structures, companies and places of independent creation), has developed in a relatively autonomous way with respect to employee unions and the state, in the process producing other ways of representing intermittency, work, artistic production, culture and politics.

Within the performance industries, intermittent work does indeed cover a wide range of jobs, from the stage-hand to the playwright-director, from the producer to the managing director, etc. There are many types of employment and work practices, many different tendencies and subjective aspects involved in the process of manufacturing cultural goods. In contrast to professional trade unions, the CIP works in a transversal way, attempting to hold these disparate pieces together, and giving rise to contradictions. Within the CIP, ‘employee-employers’, these atypical figures of wage labour, have also found a space for political expression.

This Coordination came about through action: the occupation of symbolic cultural spaces (in Paris, the Théâtre de la Colline at first, then the Grande Halle de la Villette). At the beginning, the only thing this diverse group of people had in common was their opposition to the reform. When it was set up, the Coordination was rapidly confronted with the issue of a collective identity: what name to choose for itself? And it is the name it chose that represents everything that distinguishes it from trade unions, including those with which it frequently collaborates and undertakes common actions, such as the CGT. During the assembly of 28 June 2003, attended by more than a thousand people, the name ‘Intermittent and Precarious Workers Coordination’ (Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires) was adopted after some debate. It marked the collective will to give up the relative comfort of professional identity, in order to open up a space to experiment with a new collective identity, activating unprecedented processes of subjectivation through the addition of the term ‘precarious’. The questioning of intermittent work and precariousness is based on lived experience, and therefore means stepping away from established representations of intermittent work and thinking differently about precariousness. As Patrick Rozenblatt wrote in the 1990s, when the first coordinations were emerging, the structure of the coordination creates a space in which collective identity is created through action. Action is inseparable from the collective production of knowledge and a different representation of the world, an alternative to established visions (Rozenblatt, 1994).

Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) and the ‘work mutuality’ project

When exploring the sphere of the employment and activity cooperatives (CAE, Coopérative d’Activité et d’Emploi), at first glance we find ourselves in a very different space, even though the concept of Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) was forged by social workers in Lyon in the mid-1990s, at the same time and in the same city that saw the birth of the first Coordination of Intermittent and Precarious Workers. The history of BECs can be read as the meeting of two sources of inspiration, both theoretical and practical. The first source of inspiration plunges us into the social history of the ‘canuts’, the silk workers of Lyon’s Croix Rousse neighbourhood. In the 1960s, these craftsmen launched an important cooperative movement. Creating customised products for their clientèle, self-employed and using their own tools, the workers of the Croix Rousse came together to create a workers’ cooperative, COOPTIS, in order to gain an employee status and the social rights that came with it. They kept control over their work and their relations with ordering customers, while benefiting – thanks to negotiations with the institutions – from unemployment benefits during the recurrent periods of crisis in the textile industry. The second source of inspiration comes from a tradition of critical thought developed by social workers with regard to the established practices of their profession, judged to be devoid of any real ambition for social transformation. At the end of the 1970s, these reflections led to associative and cooperative projects, quite apart from the institutions responsible for implementing social policy. This is the case of the Works and Services Handling Company (Société de Manutention de Travaux et Services, or SMTS), which was created in Grenoble at this time and strove to reconcile a goal of economic integration for people in difficulty with the aim of encouraging collective entrepreneurship.

The concept of BEC gradually developed from a critical analysis of the richness and limits of these experiences, in a context where the labour market crisis became structural, while employment policies were moving towards a logic of support for employment and business creation, encouraging every job-seeker to be a ‘self-entrepreneur’. The invention of the BEC can thus be understood as a retaliation on the part of social workers, who were ordered to frame the behaviour of the unemployed according to four objectives – motivation, self-reliance, autonomy and responsibility – while at the same time being subject to controls over their own practices and behaviour (Divay, 2012). Thus, the birth of BECs is one response among others in a socio-economic context of employment crises and mass precariousness, but also of a changing logic of employment policies, culminating in the creation of the status of ‘auto-entrepreneur’ in the 2000s. For advocates of BECs, it is not a matter of opposing business creation in itself, but of grasping all the dangers of such a policy, i.e. the precarious conditions in which most self-employed people are likely to find themselves. In addition, the creation of BECs was based on an observation: people who come up with projects aspire to create their own business rather than to become entrepreneurs (Bost, 2011). Thus, contrary to the social philosophy that aims to make a ‘self-entrepreneur’ out of everyone, BECs propose to view business in a new light (Veyer, 2010).

While the BEC is a cooperative, its employees are also entrepreneurs: they are therefore entrepreneur-employees, combining formal salaried employment and freelancing work, ‘the autonomy of individual entrepreneurship with the dynamics and the collective security of wage labour’ (Demoustier, 2006: 129). Anyone proposing a project can apply for membership in a BEC, and then go through a series of phases during which their status evolves. In the initial assessment phase of their social and professional situation, they may be employed part-time in a traditional company, receiving unemployment benefits or an active solidarity income. ⁹ When their activity starts to generate revenue, they can become an entrepreneur-employee, i.e. formally employed by the cooperative. Finally, they may choose to become an associate member of the cooperative. Depending on the evolution of their revenue and personal preferences, entrepreneur-employees define the number of working hours that appear on their contract, together with the person they have been assigned to within the cooperative. The working time is therefore purely hypothetical; it constitutes the adjustment variable between the net turnover and the hourly minimum wage, ¹⁰ given the period (number of months) over which each entrepreneur-employee wishes to distribute the revenue. If they interrupt their activity, they can either be temporarily suspended or obtain a ‘contractual termination’ (an amicable agreement between employer and employee to end the contract between them) and thus have the right to unemployment benefits.

Yet pooling management and administration tools, and providing permanent individual and collective support through the Cooperative, are not enough to remove the risk of poverty. Many entrepreneur-employees find themselves working on very small part-time jobs and cannot generate enough revenue to guarantee a salary at least equivalent to the monthly minimum wage. Faced with this reality, in recent years Coopaname – a BEC created in 2004 in Paris and which in many ways stands out due its size (over 700 people in 2016), its governance and the ways it operates – initiated an action-research to envision its future, with the aim of going beyond the principles of the Employment and Activity Cooperative on the basis of which it was formed. The ambition laid out in the founding document of this project is ‘to reinvest the principles of mutuality in order to innovate in the areas of work and employment’. ‘What could a work mutuality be?’, ask the authors: ‘Simply a group of people who would protect each other’s careers – in other words, each person’s ability to live decently from their chosen professional activity […] Within the framework of Coopaname, several hundred members could perhaps organise systematic mechanisms for mutual support, mutual learning, mutual employment, mutual training, mutual protection, mutual aid (etc.) that would support and protect each individual – thanks to the others – in his or her ability to earn a living doing what they want, collaborating with whomever they choose, and at a pace that’s right for them.’

While the document focuses on the notion of protection, it considers several possible interpretations of the ‘work mutuality’ idea from the outset, noting that we can pursue different goals, depending on the vision we have of work itself and the place we want to give to it. For the authors, this mutuality system can be envisaged in different ways: as a form of support for emancipation in the workplace, in order to resist different types of subordination and heteronomy; as a vehicle to facilitate career transitions or even to organise by dint of re-reading Fourier (1829), an effective ‘papillonne’, ¹¹ transforming the need to produce into a pleasurable activity; or as a way to allow everyone ‘to live as best as possible by working as little as possible’. This third vision is reminiscent of the Fruit Mordoré cooperative, that great utopian social laboratory from the early 1940s, created in Marseille at the initiative of Sylvain and Lucien Itkine. It quickly grew to include around 200 poets, artists and exiled painters, ¹² who became cooperative workers, striving to work less and earn more through cooperation and mutualisation.

Indeed, the search for new forms of mutualisation is what draws together the two experiments discussed here; it is by focusing on mutualisation that the CIP and Coopaname are striving to invent new rights.

Imagining a new social security system based on collective expertise

The possibility of imagining something new begins with the deconstruction of established knowledge. The Intermittent and Precarious Workers Coordination therefore questions the legitimacy of experts and scholars, countering their evidence with other forms of knowledge and other ways of producing it. It positions itself as a permanent space of collective expertise, and uses the production of knowledge by the people concerned as a weapon in its struggle. The mobilisation against the reform thus followed the double course of the minority struggles studied by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1975, 2001). Much like these struggles, which question the ways in which both democracy and knowledge are produced, the struggle of intermittent workers has expressed both a critique of the knowledge produced by institutions (the state, trade unions and employers’ organisations) and a critique of the institutions that govern unemployment insurance (Corsani and Lazzarato, 2008). The movement thus constitutes, in some sense, a unique combination of revolt on the part of ‘minority knowledge’ and a struggle for social rights. This is due to the very particular approach adopted by the movement from the very beginning, namely that of encouraging a collective process of knowledge production. According to Foucault’s methodology, the production of knowledge is an integral part of the processes of political subjectivation, and constitutes a struggle against the universal concept of both knowledge and power.

The reform protocols (in 2003, then in 2006 and 2014) are read collectively, as are the ‘expert’ reports. The consequences of applying these reforms and expert recommendations are gauged by the ‘employment practices’ and ‘work practices’ of those concerned. Thus, in 2003, it was by pooling the experiences and skills of as many people as possible that the reform protocol was criticised, not only for leading to unequal treatment and exclusion, but also for its incompatibility with employment and work practices. The experience of ‘expertise’ within the intermittent workers’ movement helped to focus the fight on the production of knowledge-power, what Foucault termed ‘regimes of truth’. But it also helped to grasp better the challenges of social security reform. Indeed, the expertise carried out within the CIP in 2003 brought to light the additional financial costs generated by the reform, which offered a ‘premium’ to the highest incomes through larger allowances. The CIP thus seems to have exposed the philosophy behind the 2003 reform (Corsani and Lazzarato, 2008), which was never called into question by the social partners heading Unédic during new negotiations in 2006 and 2014: it was less a case of reducing the amount of benefits than of weakening the mutualist aspects of the social security system.

‘We have a proposal for you’ ushered in the second stage of collective expertise: the crisis was an opportunity to develop a ‘New Model’ of unemployment benefits for employees with unsteady employment and variable income that could go beyond the limits of the former unemployment benefits scheme. Elaborated collectively and written up by the ‘Claims’ committee, the ‘New Model’ first lays out a set of fundamental principles specifying the (extended) scope and eligibility criteria, including the fixed annual date for a review of entitlements. It also consists of two mathematical formulas which respectively determine the daily allowances and the monthly ceiling (a maximum threshold taking into account salaries and allowances). These two formulas translate the objectives set collectively into a mathematical form. In a text published by the Coordination and titled ‘The Power of Us’ (‘La puissance de nous’), we can read: ‘I learned that mathematical formulas are constructions of the world, and that this world does not resemble the one I had imagined. I learned that we could change the formulas to change the world.’ Indeed, the New Model of unemployment insurance proposed by the CIP, and whose mathematical formulas remain, it must be said, obscure for a layperson, is a way of rethinking social security. In particular, the New Model strives to take into account relevant work and employment practices, characterised both by interruptions in employment and continuous work. Its goal is twofold: to be adapted to the employment and work practices of intermittent workers, and to allow as many people as possible to benefit from a regular income, with a lower limit set at the minimum wage. According to Jérôme Gautié, this demonstrates a concern for equity and solidarity (in particular with the introduction of a lower and upper limit), but also for efficiency, insofar as calculating the daily allowance as proposed discourages underreporting (Gautié, 2012). Built on a principle of mutualisation, it provides for a redistribution in favour of those with lower wages and experiencing the greatest interruptions in employment. Designed to be open to all workers with ‘unsteady employment’, beyond the performance sector alone, the New Model thus aims to be a radical alternative to the reform. In defending this New Model, the CIP is shifting the struggle for stable jobs towards a demand for new social rights to prevent impoverishment, to allow everyone to gain better control of their time (Bureau and Corsani, 2012a), and to curtail new forms of power over employment (Corsani, 2012). But the strength of this proposal rests above all on the underlying social dynamics, on the fact that this New Model is the product of a diverse and variable collective made up of the people who are primarily concerned. A path towards participatory democracy is therefore traced out: investigate working practices, social security needs, and the desired forms and modes of solidarity, and then formulate new visions of a social security system.

While the New Model, as developed by the CIP, has never been adopted as it stands, it nevertheless inspired the agreements of 28 April 2016, signed by the sector’s employers and trade unions. ¹³ After 13 years of struggles, the annual entitlements review was established, a clear-cut lower limit set, clauses included partly to relax the eligibility criteria, and, above all, a greater degree of redistribution implemented. However, what was certainly the CIP’s boldest proposal, that of a single annexe for all workers with unsteady employment and variable income, was removed. Thus, while the agreements of 28 April 2016 recognised the CIP as an ‘instituting factory’ (fabrique instituante), they also severed the link between intermittent and precarious workers.

Inventing a multi-active shared business

Much like the CIP, BECs seek to curtail precariousness while preserving autonomy and control over working time, but they approach this through different means. First of all, they aim to introduce legal and social regulations into an area of the working environment that lacks them. As Joseph Sangiorgio, co-CEO of Coopaname until 2014, says, it is a question of guaranteeing social rights, not as a reward for acquiescing to subjugation, but as a form of risk pooling; it is a question of breaking the links between access to social rights and subordination. In other words, it is a matter of ‘hacking’ the institutions of wage labour – in particular a social security system based on the principle of interprofessional solidarity – while refusing the subordination that characterises and sets wage labour apart.

In fact, BECs are faced with laws built on the binary distinction between salaried work and self-employment, and they regularly find themselves at odds with the institutions of wage labour. Advocates of BECs have therefore made the decision to draw up their own texts, based on their own practices, before entering into discussions with lawyers or negotiating with public authorities. The first major issue is that BEC employees are ‘employees without a boss’. There is therefore no subordination relationship to justify classing them as employees. How can self-employed workers be recognised as employees? How can an employee status be recognised in the absence of a relationship of subordination? Finally, what is the relationship of subordination? Thus, the very notion of a relationship of subordination has, from the beginning of BECs, been the subject of numerous and endless debates. Firstly within cooperatives, but also and above all in technical committees with public officials in charge of employment or taxation. A partial and tentative solution has been to consider that a BEC employee is not self-employed if the BEC is the one issuing the invoices. And it is almost 20 years after the creation of the first BEC, and after many battles fought by BEC proponents, that the French social economy law of 31 July 2014, known as the Hamon Law, gave a legal form to the much-contested concept of the entrepreneur-employee, now classed as a salaried employee.

The second initiative has been to make BECs into shared businesses, rather than simply providers of shared services offered to project leaders. In other words, it was a case of inventing a radically new form of company, involving project leaders in the creation, management and development of a cooperative business, rather than each having to create his or her own company. Coopaname was the driving force behind this initiative, which it quickly followed with another: turning BECs into work mutualities. Embarking on a long-term project to imagine and construct a work mutuality, Coopaname is a kind of laboratory in which diverse and variable collectives are formed, offering a wide range of possible individual and collective action. While passion and the pursuit of pleasure are considered to be the driving force behind individual actions, the challenge facing Coopaname’s management nevertheless remains to produce rules that make it possible to promote and consolidate these sharing practices without altering the overall dynamics (Devolvé and Veyer, 2009). We have identified four different forms of collective integration that currently coexist within the BEC: trade groups, co-working spaces, project-based collaboration, and brand groups.

The trade groups (representing writers, human relations or communication professionals, photographers, etc.) formed very early on in the history of the cooperative and have been particularly active. They meet at least once a month, and according to the Coopaname members we spoke to, their function is twofold: first, providing technical training by pooling knowledge, and even regulating the profession through more or less successful attempts to agree on common rates; second, providing a space in which to interact and build trust, and thus promote the emergence of more or less sustainable collaboration, on the basis of smaller commitments. Like co-working spaces, hackerspaces and fablabs, Coopaname also provides a common physical space that can be used by a wide range of professionals, thus promoting unforeseen encounters and collaborations and, consequently, innovation and new collective projects. Here, creatively taking advantage of chance (or serendipity) is more important than fostering trust, which becomes less vital in a context where the diversity of skills reduces competition. Far from the standard functioning of professional groups, complementarity and shifts in perspective lead to innovation.

Starting with this interplay of trust and complementarity, the interactions sparked within trade groups or in these shared spaces sometimes lead to more lasting professional relationships: sharing orders, collaborating on a project, jointly responding to calls for tender, etc. In the context of their profession, Coopaname members can slowly surround themselves with competent people to whom to outsource work and are thus able to respond to orders that they could not shoulder alone. A surplus of work can then be shared, since trust in the capacities of other members has progressively been built. This practice appears to be quite common at Coopaname, for example in the field of outsourced secretarial services. Another way of collaborating is to respond jointly to calls for tender, by mobilising multiple complementary skills. Various attempts have emerged from the trade groups and occasional collaborations to change the balance of power with ordering customers and/or to build a common service offer by bringing together complementary services. Thus, ‘mini-cooperative societies’ (or brand groups) were created within the cooperative, and BEC members have given a great deal of thought to how to link together these different forms of collectives. An internal contract was drawn up to govern the relationship between the cooperative and the economic entities that develop within it. This contract sets out a form of autonomy within a clear framework. In terms of its accounting, the entity constitutes a production centre and a business unit, but it is not a legal entity. Instead, it agrees to respect the principles of the cooperative and remains subject to the decisions of the BEC’s Board. The contract also provides for two-way commitments between the BEC and the economic entity, based on the following principle: since one of the aims of the cooperative is to ‘create an economy together’, i.e. to ensure the long-term sustainability of the company through collaboration and pooling, the idea here is to promote internal collaborations, without these being obligatory.

Acting collectively within the Coordination

The Coordination experiments with forms of democracy that are radically different from delegative democracy. There are no delegates, no official spokespeople. Anyone can speak on behalf of others according to the principle of rotating mandates.

The horizontal knowledge-production process, which, as we have seen above, has made the CIP into a political laboratory, is nourished by the contributions of each member within the ad hoc committees that spring up whenever a new issue arises. The committee-based system also allows each member to seek, and even to invent, their own role within the organisation. These roles are not fixed, much like the committees that are formed and disbanded as needs and desires arise. The results of the committees’ work and the ensuing proposals are always submitted to a General Assembly vote. These are long, repetitive processes, and backtracking may take place whenever a new voice joins the discussion. Admittedly, certain voices always come across as louder than others, but there is power in numbers, and since widely varying social and political ideas are represented, many different points of view can coexist. Agreements must be reached, even if this means taking the time when it comes to making urgent decisions.

While, unlike trade unions, coordinations operate horizontally, thus experimenting with forms of democracy without delegation, they are also a type of ephemeral organisation. Their existence is closely linked to that of the social mobilisation against the reform of the intermittent system in which they are involved. The CIP survived the end of the social movement, but was inevitably weakened and forced to re-examine itself. What is a coordination when it becomes long-term, outliving the movement that engendered it? Is it possible to make a coordination sustainable without it becoming a ‘joint collective’? The answers are always partial and never definitive. But beyond the possibilities of a coordination’s long-term survival, the ideas behind the New Model remain a point of reference and inspiration for a long-term project aiming to create new social rights that encompass more than just the performance sector.

Organising both production and democracy within a multi-active cooperative

By fostering diverse and variable collectives, Coopaname in some sense revives Fourier’s ‘Passionate Series’ utopia (Fourier, 1829), offering everyone the opportunity to choose which collaborations they wish to partake in and for how long, to move between different levels of commitment, and between several forms of ‘multi-party independence’ (Bureau and Corsani, 2012b). Some emerging Coopaname collectives have therefore thought about how to organise both the entity’s production and democratic functioning, constructing a mini-cooperative society within the cooperative. One of them, the Novéquilibres collective, is in this respect often cited as an example by Coopaname members, in particular for its three-circle structure, corresponding to different levels of commitment: the core group; active members; and partners or resource-persons. One of the initiators of this mini-cooperative society, a former director of human resources in an IT company, made the choice from the outset to take part in this collective initiative without developing any other personal business activity, thus breaking with the BEC’s initial standard practices. Participants in this initiative wanted to focus on distinguishing project organisation and leadership. Novéquilibres thus has an elected executive committee (the core group), in charge of project leadership, but the nine partners (or active members) meet monthly to make decisions without resorting to a vote. Specialised in offering services to organisations to promote quality of life at work, the group brings together several professionals with experience in human resources. It also relies on specific decision-making techniques and practices, borrowed, for example, from sociocracy, so that during the monthly meetings it can come to a final decision that is agreeable to everyone. According to Gerard Endenburg, ‘the term “sociocracy” refers to a mode of decision-making and governance that allows an organisation to behave like a living organism, to self-organise’ (Endenburg, 1988). In fact, the term ‘sociocracy’ was first used by Auguste Comte to designate the governance of the socios, i.e. people linked to each other through meaningful relationships. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Jaurès-influenced socialist Eugène Fournière saw in this a positive outcome to the options between pure democracy and authoritarian socialism (Fournière, 1910). Sociocracy was a form of self-government by society itself, based not on an undifferentiated mass of individuals but on associative organisations.

To guarantee democracy at the global level of the BEC, Coopaname members generally favour adjusting and sometimes hacking (in the sense of creatively altering) labour institutions. For example, in view of the number of its employees, since 2005 Coopaname has been legally obliged to have staff representatives. The members of the BEC therefore gave thought to defining the role of the representatives, in this very particular context where each member is both his own employer and his own employee. Devolvé and Veyer (Devolvé and Veyer, 2010) describe this process: ‘When the time came to elect the puppet staff representatives in order to bring the cooperative in line with the law, it was decided to adhere to the spirit of the law in order to imagine a method of representation truly adapted to the needs of the cooperative, even if this meant taking more time, and taking a few liberties with the letter of the law.’ Redefining the employment contract between each entrepreneur-employee and the cooperative as a voluntary subordination to the collective, they see the staff representatives as a protection against various forms of dependence. They are a way of helping entrepreneur-employees protect themselves from the intrinsic precariousness of self-employment, but also from their ordering customers. This representation of the entrepreneur-employees aims to protect collectively the employees from the self-employers that they equally embody. It is seen as the linchpin of a ‘guide to resistance’ against the abusive tendencies or even malpractices on the part of contractors and clients, who have a tendency towards social dumping. Lastly, it constitutes a counter-power to limit the moral authority that the management of the cooperative has over its members. Designed in this way, the representation of entrepreneur-employees may be seen as an institutional innovation: it adapts a key mechanism of professional relations to a context where the psycho-social risks do not stem from a relationship of subordination, but from other forms of economic and moral dependence, as well as from the over-investment of entrepreneur-employees in their own activity. However, this attempt to adapt social dialogue bodies, as conceived within the framework of the standard capitalist enterprise, to the specific framework of BECs, has partially failed. The staff representative bodies are unable to renew themselves because of a lack of candidates for election. This failure is largely explained by the fact that the entrepreneur-employees do not recognise the divergence of interests that would justify representing their concerns before management. In order to promote corporate democracy, and following the failure of the staff representation initiative, other bodies have been set up to respond to the specific needs of social democracy within the BECs. These three committees must make decisions regarding sensitive issues likely to affect Coopaname members: the action committee, the ethics committee, and the training committee. The first can be called upon to assess the financial, legal and social aspects inherent in the decision to award an entrepreneur-employee a cash advance, an investment aid, or even to maintain their salary level despite a drop in activity. The second committee, the ethics committee, is supposed to propose ways of preventing and, failing that, dealing with the conflicts of interest that may arise as a result of the diverse roles within the cooperative. It may also intervene when two or more entrepreneur-employees plan to respond to the same call for tender and do not wish to collaborate on it. Finally, the training committee decides on the response to be given to training requests according to the criteria and priorities set by the employee representative committee.

Within Coopaname, power relations are constantly being reassessed, making this BEC first and foremost a political laboratory. Thus, while Coopaname is not a self-managed company, it is an organisation unlike any other. It is an open project, a laboratory where experiments in participatory democracy take place within a business setting. The unifying principle is not so much adherence to a predefined model as participation in its invention. As such, there are many opportunities for members of the cooperative to meet up: monthly meetings, General Assemblies, the Autumn University, etc. These meetings are open, and the issues facing the cooperative are addressed collectively, although there are also many ‘joint’ committees, made up of management and entrepreneur-employees. The slowness inherent in the process of creating a participatory democracy is in constant friction with the urgent need to ensure the viability of Coopaname’s economic model.