It Started with the Arts and Now It Concerns All Sectors: The Case of Smart, a Cooperative of ‘Salaried Autonomous Workers’

This chapter aims to analyse how new forms of collective organisation can be developed to counteract the ongoing process of precarisation and individualisation of labour. In particular, attention is paid to the Smart cooperative, an interesting laboratory exploring new forms of solidarity within a general trend characterised by the lack of trade unionisation and labour organisation. Smart is a cooperative of ‘salaried autonomous workers’ created in Belgium in the late 1990s to support freelance artists in a way that allows them to work autonomously while also accessing a salaried status, which provides the best social protection. Over the years, Smart realised that it was offering opportunities to support the careers not only of creative workers but more generally of freelancers, who work in a wide range of economic sectors and experience very different working and income conditions. In this chapter, we investigate, through the example of Smart, how a cooperative model can develop new forms of collective organisation and autonomy among artists and creative workers, and how this model can also address the lack of bridging solidarity and enact a compositional project able to support a broader range of workers in different employment sectors.