Secretary General Bruno Roelants appointed as Director-General of the ICA

Manuel Mariscal, President of CICOPA, and Giuseppe Guerini, President of CECOP-CICOPA Europe, are grateful to Mr Roelants for his hard work and absolute dedication during the last 15 years, and wish him the best with his future engagement. Mr Roelants’ contribution to the sector of industrial and service cooperatives in particular has been extremely significant, and without a doubt his experience will benefit now to the cooperative movement as a whole.

Regarding the succession of Mr Roelants at the head of CICOPA and CECOP-CICOPA Europe, an official decision will be taken within the next few weeks by the board’s members of the two organisations.

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ENDS

CONTACT

reza.opdebeeck@cicopa.coop
(+32)485/506.671

NOTES

CICOPA, the international organisation of industrial and service cooperatives represents 65,000 of worker, social and producers’ cooperatives providing 4 million jobs across the world. Many of those cooperatives are worker cooperatives, namely cooperatives where the members are the staff of the enterprise, i.e., worker-members. Those enterprises are characterised by a distinctive type of labour relations, called « worker ownership », different from the one experienced by conventional employees or by the self-employed. Two growing typologies of cooperatives represented by CICOPA are social cooperatives, namely cooperatives whose mission is the delivery of goods or services of general interest, and cooperatives of self-employed producers. CICOPA currently has a total of 48 members in 32 countries. CICOPA has two regional organisations : CECOP- CICOPA Europe and CICOPA Americas.

CECOP-CICOPA Europe is the European Confederation of worker, social and producers’ cooperatives active in industry and services. It groups national organisations in 15 countries which in turn affiliate over 50.000 cooperative and participative enterprises in industry and services, the vast majority being SMEs, and employing 1.4 million workers across Europe. Most of them are characterised by the fact that the majority of their employees are member-owners, while some of them are second-degree enterprises for SMEs. Furthermore, around 4,000 of these enterprises are specialised in the reintegration of disadvantaged and marginalised workers (persons with disabilities, long-term unemployed, former prisoners, addicts, etc.).