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inCooperazione rapresents the advantages that the cooperative world offers to citizens, including agreements and discounts
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Founding a cooperative means creating an activity oriented towards people and the territory. Cooperazione Trentina stands alongside those who want to create a new coop, and supports those who decide to join.
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inFederazione makes special services and training courses available to associated cooperatives infederazione.it
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Frequently asked questions
Can Cooperation be an alternative to the capitalist economy?
If we think about today's Italian context, the approximately 70,000 cooperative enterprises effectively constitute an alternative to the capitalist market. Speculator companies have as their final objective that of appropriating profit, of creating as much value as possible and then taking it, while cooperative companies are created with the aim of satisfying the needs of members: to give credit and food to those who request it, to provide job opportunities to those who need them and to provide care services to people who need them. So it is true that cooperative enterprises are in absolute terms a small number of the entire entrepreneurial panorama, but it is also true that those enterprises operate in key sectors and very often reach the final consumer directly, the end user. And this makes the cooperative enterprise an extraordinary force.
Who's the owner of a coop?
The owner of the coop are the members and it is a widespread ownership because, depending on the number of members, the pro-quota, the ownership is distributed. This topic introduces an issue that has been debated for a long time, namely the issue of compensation. The member of the cooperative is also the owner of the cooperative but he has no economic advantages from being the owner; therefore it is as if he were the owner of a small piece of capital which is the cooperative itself but has no economic return. In fact, a cooperative can generate a positive operating surplus, what in normal businesses is called profit. In joint stock companies this profit can be distributed in the form of dividends. The question therefore arises why it could not also be distributed to members in the form of a refund. This is the question we are thinking about. Naturally there are advantages and disadvantages, because within a cooperative there are both employee members and employees who are not members and who all contribute to the construction of this surplus. So who would have the right to benefit from it? Only the partner? This is a very complicated and very open topic but certainly interesting.
Why decide to become a member of a coop and how to do it?
First of all, it is a personal decision linked to each of us's vision of the world. This is because deciding to join a cooperative means having it clear in your head that you are not joining to make a profit but to exchange skills, to travel a path of mutual and mutual help together. It means sharing a vision of the common good embedded in the objectives of the individual cooperative, which can be an agricultural cooperative, rather than a social cooperative, rather than a consumer cooperative. In any case, the central idea is the achievement of well-being which will then be shared; therefore the availability is also required not to keep a strict accounting of what each member does but of the overall work done to achieve the objective. It is quite easy to become a member of a cooperative or at least decide to become a member of a cooperative. Simply submit an application to the cooperative's Board of Directors who will evaluate and decide to what extent the person's profile and intentions are consistent with the cooperative's purpose. It should also be said that there are various types of members. Therefore, when you decide to become a member of a cooperative, you must also specify whether your contribution will be in terms of economic support to the cooperative, therefore a supporting member, rather than a worker member, a volunteer member or a user member. Once you have identified the category in which you believe you are best suited to becoming a member, it is a fairly simple process from a formal point of view.
What are my duties and rights if I am a member of a coop?
The first duty of a member is to participate in meetings. The annual meeting is a very important moment for the coop because, beyond the formal obligations such as the approval of the budget, it is the moment in which the coop's activity is realized and therefore also the projects that have been achieved and those that are intended to be achieved. The second duty is to always have the achievement of the common good as its main objective. This is not always easy on a day-to-day basis because it also means calibrating one's work based not only on the achievement of common well-being, but also on the specific objective. As far as rights are concerned, being part of a cooperative is already a great right. It is also important, especially nowadays, to have the right to vote. Finally there is the right to have a possible refund.
Who benefits from working in a coop?
Everyone is better off working in a coop; both to people who have skills, profiles and experience their work in complete normality but also to people who have some handicap and who would have great difficulty finding a job in a company that operates on the market. Cooperation, on the other hand, also welcomes this type of worker; not only welcomes him but also takes charge of his acquisition of skills and guarantees supervision. In fact, it should not be forgotten that the cooperative must respond to the principles of competitiveness, it must have its strengths, it must win on the market by having to deal with companies that have completely different objectives. It can therefore be said that the cooperative world also constitutes a great opportunity for the placement of people who do not have all their physical or sometimes even mental abilities fully available. When we talk about workers, we must then remember the figure of the worker member. He is simultaneously the one who carries out an assigned task within a very specific organizational chart but also the one who is part of the cooperative and who with his work tries to achieve the best, always attentive to the principles of reciprocity and mutual help which are the basic characteristic of cooperatives. These principles are not necessarily found in other types of companies, where the important thing is to fully fulfill the task that has been assigned within the management of resources in a fairly individualistic vision and not as a system of workers as a whole.
What are the tax benefits for cooperatives?
There is a widespread idea that cooperatives have great tax advantages, even if in reality this is not true. We must distinguish between two types of advantages: those that apply to all cooperatives and those that concern individual types of cooperatives. In the first group there is only one type of advantage, which differs depending on the cooperative, and concerns the exemption from IRPEG for undistributed profits. However, it should be noted that until 2003 all cooperatives were totally exempt from IRPEG on undistributed profits, i.e. brought to reserve and therefore made part of the cooperative's assets. Since 2003, however, there has been differentiated taxation: ranging from cooperatives, such as social cooperatives, where practically no IRPEG is paid on profits brought to reserve, up to consumer cooperatives which have a much more limited exemption, which is around half of the profits brought to reserve. As regards the tax benefits that concern individual types of cooperatives, it can be said for example that social cooperatives have VAT at 4% and do not pay social security contributions on hired disadvantaged workers. In worker cooperatives, however, the salary refund is not subject to social security contributions. These are therefore small advantages that are specific to each cooperative. The interesting thing is that, since cooperatives distribute more value to work than capital companies and in particular compared to S.P.A., the conclusion is that, if we look not so much at the individual tax benefits but at the amount of overall taxes paid compared to the value of production, cooperatives pay more taxes than S.P.A.