Since the 1990s, workers’ cooperatives have multiplied throughout Brazil. Economic restructuring and the adoption of neoliberal policies have resulted in the privatization of state companies, reduced industrial sector protectionism and attempts to deregulate the labour market. This growth of cooperative enterprises, in theory worker-managed, has taken form in two directions. One was business oriented: lower production costs were an incentive for business groups and the state to organize cooperatives that acted as sub- contractors for private companies and came to be known as ‘fake’ cooperatives. The other version was supported by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and unions and was linked to worker- management proposals to minimize the rise in unemployment and guarantee income for workers made redundant in the labour market; these became known as ‘genuine’ cooperatives. These co- operatives, in turn, could be preferentially market-oriented (‘pragmatic’), or linked to the movement’s so-called ‘solidarity economy’ (‘authentic’).
What distinguished the different cooperatives, in the debate that accompanied the growth of this form of organization of production and work, was the genuine or, alternatively, fraudulent cooperativist character of their orientation and priorities. Cooperatives were either market-oriented, aimed at profit maximization (businesslike), or socially oriented, attending to the interests and welfare of their associated members (social-like) and the democratization of work relations (Taylor, 1994), embracing the emancipative, socialist perspective that is present in the Latin American conception of solidarity.
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