Bigre

Description

Barbara Garbarczyk, Saw-B :

"« Bigre ! was formed as a result of a meeting between Coopaname, Oxalis, Grands Ensemble and Vecteur Activités, which have emerged from the business and employment cooperation movements, and SMartFr, the French representative of the SMart group of mutuals, which originated in Belgium and counts 35,000 professionals from the creative sector everywhere in Europe.

It is an open and welcoming cooperative, in which the following support functions are mutualised: management, research, social protection, legal assistance, etc. Together, Oxalis, Vecteur Activités, SMartFr, Coopaname and Grands Ensemble as well as all cooperative, associative or mutualist organisations joining them want their cooperation to overcome the traditional alternative between subordinated salaried employment and precarious self-employed work. Their group - which is essentially mutualist - comes with a strong demand for invention while refusing the commercialisation of social issues and without waiting for public powers, the necessary practices to arrive at a resocialisation of the economy. Bigre ! has a novel form for an economic and social organisation: a work mutual in partnership. In a single and identical community, it regroups several thousand members working on the same footing and mutually offering guarantees based on their economic and social capacity to perform their professions well and make a living from them. In concrete terms, Bigre ! pursues a mission of integrating in its societal structure craftspeople as well as intermittent performers, freelancers, authors and e-businesspeople, journalists or service providers. Thanks to its common structure called «la Manufacture coopérative» and accompanying the cooperative, Bigre ! is also open to all new cooperative, mutualist or associative enterprises wishing to develop emancipated forms of work relationships in thei midst.

Bigre ! will be a novel form of economic and social organisation: a work mutual in partnership. » (http://www.saw-b.be/spip/IMG/pdf/a1515_mutuelles_de_travail_-_traduction_en.pdf)