Cooperation and autonomy: the facing cooperative societies

Abstract

A possible alternative to the exclusion from the formal work market, cooperative working in the working classes, rapidly stops at the social hierarchies (empployer-empployee relationships), but it insists on the disposition of citizenship and in the emerging solidarity through a culture that is installed. The legitimacy of a new psycho-social place is made present in the talk of members of cooperatives, in accordance with research data, in an institutional coverage, carried out in popular urban cooperatives in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The results, from interviews and observations made, point to the perception of the efficiency of collective actions, of the fruits of solidarity and of cooperation in the generation of earnings, and of the possibility of other forms of working links that do not pass necessarily through relations instituted by dependency. The change in self image, the consciousness of unknown potentialities, reposition the worker vis a vis his social group. On the other hand, being formally employed, a title of citizenship in our social organization, highlights the one element that, because of its absence in the cooperative universe, interferes with the investment that the workers make in the cooperative institution beyond the governmental bureaucratic obstacles.