Not necessarily (the coop I work for is one though). There are 3 possible types of coops in France: SCOP, SCIC and CAE. To make it short:
- SCOP: adheres to the international definition of coops
- CAE: a coop of freelancers. You are an employee of the structure (with a work contract) but you have to bring in your own revenue to pay your salary. A percentage of your revenue goes towards the coop budget for shared services (accounting, hr, ...) and cash reserve
- SCIC: a multi-party coop. A good use case would be platforms where you could have multiple groups of stakeholders: employees of the platform, users and service providers. (eg. with a Uber like coop: employees, users and drivers could all be separate groups of owners). Each group has a voting percentage. No group can have more than 50% ownership.
I see great potential for the 2 other types of coops that France has in the context of tech. I do not know of any equivalent elsewhere (but would be happy to learn it exists!)
- SCOP: adheres to the international definition of coops
- CAE: a coop of freelancers. You are an employee of the structure (with a work contract) but you have to bring in your own revenue to pay your salary. A percentage of your revenue goes towards the coop budget for shared services (accounting, hr, ...) and cash reserve
- SCIC: a multi-party coop. A good use case would be platforms where you could have multiple groups of stakeholders: employees of the platform, users and service providers. (eg. with a Uber like coop: employees, users and drivers could all be separate groups of owners). Each group has a voting percentage. No group can have more than 50% ownership.
I see great potential for the 2 other types of coops that France has in the context of tech. I do not know of any equivalent elsewhere (but would be happy to learn it exists!)