www.coop.tennis is a platform for independent tennis contractors
www.coop.tennis
is an online platform cooperative for freelance and independent tennis contractors coaches and players and others.
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Some background information:
Online platform cooperatives and freelancer cooperatives are mutually complementary. If they can gain sufficient traction, both could empower freelancers and independent workers to control and manage their economic destinies. They could help overcome years of stagnant wages, gutting of the safety net, and declining job quality and underemployment, and provide new incentives that foster a more broadly shared prosperity.
Cooperatives for self-employed workers.
Besides on-line platform cooperatives, there is another typology of cooperative that has great relevance for precarious workers today. Business and Employment Cooperatives (BEC) could play a key role for freelancers and solo self-employed workers.
In France, a business and employment cooperative is know as a Cooperative d’Activités et d’Emploi (CAE). The CAE is a cooperative to help the self-employed secure support for their occupations. Members of a CAE avoid going it alone by becoming employees of the co-op, legally speaking, which results in greater worker rights. Co-op services provided to CAE members include affordable workspaces, office services, invoicing and debt collection (for customers that refuse to pay), help with marketing, low-cost insurance and a collective system for securing sickness and benefit payments from the government.
THE CAE OFTEN OPERATE ALMOST LIKE GUILDS BY SPECIALIZING IN A PARTICULAR TRADE SECTOR
In addition, because CAE enterprises are considered a startup, they qualify for subsidies provided by the French government and the EU. One such CAE is Coopaname, founded in 2004 in France, which has more than 850 members including craftspeople, freelancers and service providers. It is a co-op for those working alone or in co-operative groups and delivers assistance to members at various stages of their development. Coopaname provides for a range of economic and service needs, and it offers all members the opportunity to integrate co-operatively. Members of the co-op are paid partial salaries based on the revenue that their business is earning, as well as provided social protection benefits. They are in effect employees of the CAE, which helps these freelancers and entrepreneurs to succeed by providing some of the infrastructure as well as legal protection of a traditional employer. In return, the CAE receives 10% of the gross revenue earned by those working under its umbrella. In this way, freelance entrepreneurs can be „independent without being independent.“
The CAE model has expanded in France to become a national network of 72 local cooperatives employing more than 5000 entrepreneurs. In different localities, the CAE often operate almost like guilds by specializing in a particular trade sector, such as Coopénates, which specializes in home care services, Artenréel, which works with regional artistic and cultural workers, and Antigone, which works with a variety of self-employed workers.