Dr. Olive McCarthy:

Our thinking is that while three might be a minimum it should not necessarily be a target. Growth is particularly important. In the area of worker co-operatives, many start-up companies would have one, two or three people establishing those companies and so to put the worker co-operative on an equal footing three would be an ideal number to enable more worker co-operatives to get started. We are not of the view that the minimum should remain at three forever. Perhaps what a worker co-operative should be trying to do is to grow its numbers and become much bigger over time. We see examples of this in France, where worker co-operatives start-up with three members but, on average, over the last four years, there have been 70 worker co-operatives wherein the numbers have grown to almost 21. We would see three as a starting point to facilitate the set up of co-operatives, but not necessarily as the number at which the minimum will always be set.