Guide to worker-owned cooperative development

Working together to create jobs: A guide to worker-owned cooperative development

The guide was developed out of ILO's concern about structural adjustment, poverty, unemployment and job creation and an awareness that worker-owned cooperatives can move actively address the pressing problems of unemployment in developing countries as well as the economic restructuring in Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism in 1990.

Worker-owned cooperatives should be promoted because they have great potential to enable workers in both rural and urban areas in the Asia-Pacific Region to provide employment for themselves and income for their families and thereby help fulfill the ILO's mandate spelled out in the Declaration of Philadelphia - "to achieve full and productive employment and raise the standard of living of all people, in particular the promotion of economic and social advancement in the least developed regions of the world."