Working Democracies

Managing Inequality in Worker Cooperatives

Joan S. M. Meyers

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501763694
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

In this inside look at worker cooperatives, Joan Meyers challenges long-held views and beliefs. From the outside, worker cooperatives all seem to offer alternatives to bad jobs and unequal treatment by giving workers democratic control and equitable ownership of their workplaces. Some contend, however, that such egalitarianism and self-management come at the cost of efficiency and stability, and are impractical in the long run. Working Democracies focuses on two worker cooperatives in business since the 1970s that transformed from small countercultural collectives into thriving multiracial and largely working-class firms. She shows how democratic worker ownership can provide stability and effective business management, but also shows that broad equality is not an inevitable outcome despite the best intentions of cooperative members.

Working Democracies explores the interconnections between organizational structure and organizational culture under conditions of worker control, revealing not only the different effects of managerialism and "participatory bureaucracy, " but also how each bureaucratic variation is facilitated by how workers are defined by at each cooperative. Both bureaucratic variation and worker meanings are, she shows, are consequential for the reduction or reproduction of class, gender, and ethnoracial inequalities. Offering a behind the scenes comparative look at an often invisible type of workplace, Working Democracie s serves as a guidebook for the future of worker cooperatives.

1 WORKER COOPERATIVES

What Workers Want

Working-class people … want to come in, do their job, and get home to their families. They don’t want to sit through endless meetings.

—Herbert Gubbins, People’s Daily Bread Bakery

Everyone knows … their boss is an asshole who doesn’t know anything, and if the boss would just go away they could get the job done more efficiently.

—Jan Bridges, One World Natural Grocery

The 2001 annual meeting of the Western Worker Cooperative Conference has occupied the whole of Breitenbush Hot Springs, a health spa and rustic resort of cabins and a lodge scattered around a geothermal hot springs along a tributary of the North Santiam River in the Cascadian Range in Oregon. Its soothing beauty is appealing to conference organizers, but at least equally important is that it is a worker cooperative: a company collectively owned and run by its workers. That is, rather than investors extracting profit by paying below what the scheduling, housekeeping, grounds maintenance, cooking, and administrative labor of running a resort generates, the Breitenbush Hot Springs workers make up the collective entity that owns the business, and they share profits among themselves. In choosing this site as a place for worker-owners to share practices and insights, the international principle of “cooperation among cooperatives” (International Cooperative Alliance, n.d.) is brought to life.

In October, the thick surrounding forest is starting to flare into oranges, reds, and yellows; trails through them to the many natural saunas and hot tubs that dot the property are tempting. Nevertheless, the cheery central lodge room—its floors strewn with pillows used by most conference-goers to sit on, its walls hung with tapestries and the sort of batiked fabric that proclaims an alternative vibe—is warm and full of West Coast worker cooperative members gathered for a presentation on coordinating power between cooperative teams. Like the attendees, the presenters are almost entirely also members of worker cooperatives, although a few are members of nonprofits that provide development services, and occasionally an academic researcher like me is present. Two white women and one white man from One World Natural Grocery are explaining how their fourteen work groups choose their own method of democratic control (consensus, majority rule, or two-thirds rule) and how this affects the decisions the grocery makes together in its monthly meetings. During the question and answer period that makes up half the session, conference-goers probe members of this cooperative grocery about personal dynamics and managing conflicts. There are many approving nods when the presenters describe their system of communication notebooks and policy manuals, but it seems like half the room gasps and the other half giggles when, after being asked how they manage so many books of rules, a grocery presenter claims that any rules that do not work get “buried and forgotten.” He shrugs off their reaction: “That’s how it works!”¹

A worker-owner from People’s Daily Bread Bakery, Herbert Gubbins, is frowning. He, I know, is the bakery’s CEO, although here he tends to use the title more commonly used within the bakery of “lead coordinator.” A tall, severely thin white man in his fifties with neatly cropped hair, he’s dressed in crisp khakis and a forest green button-down shirt embroidered with the bakery’s logo, a long earring dangling incongruously from one ear. When called on, he compliments the grocery on its innovations, but then quickly shifts into a critique of the conference. All the workshops on management, he asserts, are about participative self-management, a deeply democratic version of the team-based management style that seems to be all the rage in the corporate world at the turn of this new century (Appelbaum et al. 2000). Herbert’s voice gets harder when he says that’s all well and good for young people ready to practice skills developed in their college seminars, but it is not efficient or useful for workers at his bakery. “These are working-class people who want to come in, do their job, and get home to their families. They don’t want to sit through endless meetings.” He says the bakery’s managers—most of whom, I will later discover, were raised with little family wealth, little family or community experience of higher education, and a local culture commonly described as working-class (see, e.g., Bettie 1995; Bourdieu 1984; Halle 1984; Lareau 2002; Skeggs 2011; Willis 1977)—did not want to post a “no boss”-focused conference advertisement in the bakery because they were insulted by the insinuation that real cooperatives do not have managers. Herbert proclaims that if worker cooperatives are to truly address the material and cultural needs of working people “who have never even heard of democratic employee ownership,” the conference needs to include workshops on how to reconcile hierarchical management with worker ownership. That we need to accept the reality of management.

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I was unsettled by Herbert’s argument about class and worker control. Back in the Golden Valley region of Northern California, where the worker-owned cooperatives I call One World Natural Grocery and People’s Daily Bread Bakery are located,² I had been a customer of the cooperative grocery for many years and was friends with a few of its worker-owners. I had been highly impressed by what I saw as the grocery’s ability to combine individual autonomy, organizational democracy, and good, regular paychecks. The grocery appeared to give its workers flexibility but also protect the business. Workers could create their own weekly schedules or take time off work to care for family members or create art projects, but from the stories I heard, it seemed the grocery still fired shirking workers and required work groups to meet the needs of the store as a whole. Now I wondered if this balance of flexibility and financial stability was just another unfair advantage of being “elite,” something only available to members of a group who, using ethnoracial and class privilege, have an outsize opportunity to wield power. It seemed true that the earlier generation of 1970s worker-owned cooperatives were composed primarily of white, college-educated youth from economically privileged homes. And the whiteness and youth of participants at the Oregon conference was unrepresentative of the US workforce. I initially took their nonconformist clothes, tattoos, facial piercings, and multicolored and unkempt hair as the sartorial markers of labor market elites, workers with physically safe and economically advantaged and secure jobs who did not need a boss’s approval to guarantee an income. Herbert’s explicit class criticism made me look at this a different way: Were worker cooperatives simply creating a boutique labor market, fulfilling but only open to those who had the social skills of a privileged class? I decided to pursue my curiosity about the social class, democratic control, and worker ownership.

Members of the grocery themselves would later challenge this pessimistic assessment. I interviewed grocery members during the pilot phase of my project (see appendix A), but when I asked how they felt about the required levels of participation, only one person—herself from an economically and educationally privileged family background—agreed with Herbert’s assessment of people from culturally working-class backgrounds as only wanting to do routine tasks and improve their paychecks. Others, almost all of whom were raised with little economic privilege, rejected this claim and instead described the personal appeal of not having a boss and therefore having more control over their business. Jan Bridges, a white woman from an economically marginalized background with a high school diploma and a few years of college, said, “Everyone knows when they have a boss that their boss is an asshole who doesn’t know anything, and if the boss would just go away they could get the job done more efficiently. So that’s how it works in our work group. We just do it, get it done.” She offered an empirical counter to Herbert’s characterization of lower-class people being unskilled in business administration. Sweeping her arm out towards the numerous family-owned stores in the economically marginal neighborhood around us, she said, “All kinds of working-class people run their own businesses every day.… Every liquor store in every street corner is a small business owned by working-class people.” As she saw it, economically marginalized people did their best to exert entrepreneurial decision-making in small groups whenever they possibly could.

These, then, are two strikingly different views of what workers want, and two different ideas about democratic employee ownership and working-class options. On the one hand is Herbert’s claim regarding participatory democracy’s exclusion of people who have been called the working class: those who must labor most of their lives for a wage in order to purchase food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities for survival; who tend to live and play and create culture with others in similar economic relations; and whose opportunities—for work, education, material goods, and political power—are actively constrained for the benefit of the upper classes. In his eyes, the insistence of most worker cooperatives on participatory self-management reproduces an organizational structure that not only saps the energies of working people but also subtly transfers power to other members, those whose class culture develops in them the skills and training to manipulate organizational processes. On the other hand is Jan’s assertion that people Herbert would consider “working class” can and do run their own businesses quite well, and that top-down management hinders productivity and profitability. This book explores how working people manage these different ideas about democracy, organization, and economic life.

What Do Workers Want?

The worker-owned cooperative essentially poses the question, “What do workers want?” and attempts to address perceived worker needs and desires. As with organized labor, this answer has rarely focused on the entire spectrum of “workers’ interests.” Stable and economically supportive jobs have been at the forefront of all worker demands, yes, but less consistent have been those for respect and dignity, safety, workplace voice, the expression of human creativity, control over what is created and how it is made, or ethnoracial and gender equality. Indeed, the labor movement of the first half of the twentieth century primarily (but not uniformly) pursued only the first (Lipset, Trow, and Coleman 1956; Lipsitz 1994).

Yet workers have made claims on far more than jobs and pay. The postwar period has seen increasing demands in and out of unions for more “say/influence/representation/participation/voice (call it what you will)” (Freeman and Rogers 2006, 32), even if top-down management and a lack of shared ownership are accepted as givens (Appelbaum et al. 2000; Blauner 1966). Furthermore, although most people will opt for choices that seem in the realm of the possible—for instance, the voice rights of what organizational theorist Catherine Turco (2016) describes as the “conversational firm” rather than the resource rights of worker ownership—a strain of labor organizing dating back to the turn of the last century has repeatedly proposed the “unimaginable”: shorter workweeks and compensation for domestic labor (Federici 1975; Roediger and Foner 1989; Weeks 2011). Some union traditions have insisted on ethnoracial or gender egalitarianism (Milkman 2007; Roediger 1999). Some clearly labor-focused, if not strictly union, organizing has demanded democratic worker associations to determine labor and production (Comisso 1979; Fung and Wright 2001; Gordon Nembhard 2014; Pateman 1970; Polletta 2002). And, either as revolutionary social movements (Brenner, Brenner, and Winslow 2010; Lenin 2012; Shafer 2005; Taylor 2010) or as the “recovery” of formerly investor-owned factories (Larrabure, Vieta, and Schugurensky 2011; Vieta 2009), one strain of worker demand has long focused on worker ownership.

A Tale of Two Worker Cooperatives

Understanding the difference between what the workers of One World Natural Grocery and People’s Daily Bread Bakery wanted was, it turned out, much more complicated than identifying class differences or acknowledging managers’ inefficiency. Indeed, through interviews, observation that was both intensive and intermittent, and a review of financial and historical records between the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2005 (see appendix A), I discovered that almost all of the members of both cooperatives shared similar levels of personal and family education, family wealth and occupational prestige, and “class culture,” as I discuss in this chapter. At both sites the people I met had almost all stopped their education at high school, had little to no family wealth as a fallback, and were working in the kinds of manual production or service jobs that are usually considered low-skill and low-pay. They were what some might call working-class people doing working-class jobs. While there was a great deal of variation between how the bakery and grocery workers “got it done”—that is, in how day-to-day working conditions were structured through managerial authority at the bakery and through democratic processes at the grocery—there was also a great deal of overlap in how these authority structures were codified, documented, and formally implemented. Indeed, although I initially saw myself as studying the difference between bureaucratic and antibureaucratic organizations, over time I came to see each as embodying a distinct but nonetheless equally bureaucratic form. There were, however, areas of divergence. While the grocery had preserved its gender balance, bakery women were a small minority, and power and authority mapped onto race/ethnicity at the bakery in a way not found at the grocery.

I began to wonder about how a shared vision of social and economic justice had produced such different levels of opportunity by race/ethnicity and gender. I strongly suspected that organizational practices were an important part of this story of divergence, but did not yet understand how or why these practices mattered. Although the worker cooperative community was not yet talking about “scale” in a way it does now (Abell 2014), it seemed likely to me that worker cooperatives would be like other small businesses: likely to fail unless they grew. I therefore focused my original pilot interviews on members of cooperatives with at least one hundred workers, eventually settling on the grocery and the bakery. As I spent more time with members of the two cooperatives—shadowing the daily activities of more than thirty bakery and grocery cooperative members in their workplaces, interviewing members in their homes or in cafés and bars, sitting in on large and small meetings, and attending a variety of social events—I came to better understand what was at stake and how practices shaped (and were shaped by) the way each organization interpreted its workers’ interests.

Most of the countercultural cooperatives evaporated before the mid-1980s. This was due in part to the ebb of their customers’ sociopolitical commitments. And in part the expectations and needs of the typically college-educated collective members grew: as they discovered other, more profitable, job opportunities, their withdrawal often left their organizations strapped for cash and expertise. Yet by the time I arrived to study these companies in 2001, both One World Natural Grocery and People’s Daily Bread Bakery had not merely survived but had transformed demographically, economically, and organizationally.

Both companies were still owned by a majority of their workers, but these workers were different from the founders. As table 1.1 shows, both were ethnoracially diverse, particularly compared to noncooperative bakeries and retail stores. Further, most members described family backgrounds with little disposable income or wealth, and little education for themselves or their parents beyond high school. As Dutch Henry, a white seven-year veteran of the sales and delivery work group who described himself as working-class, observed, “There’s not many silver-spoon people there.” Both companies had grown: the bakery’s varied line of organic baked goods was available fresh and frozen in mainstream supermarket chains throughout North America; the grocery had made a series of expansion moves until it settled into a former car showroom covering almost half a city block. In 2003 the bakery had over a hundred employees and net revenues of $17.5 million, and the grocery over two hundred employees and net revenues just shy of $25 million.³ Both companies were in the process of expanding their spaces and workforces. Both provided employees with generous health, education, and vacation benefits, and both paid well above nonunion and union wages for food production and retail work in the region (see table 1.2). In short,...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Worker Cooperatives
• 2. “By Deed Instead of by Argument”
• 3. Metamorphoses
• 4. People’s Daily Bread Bakery
• 5. One World Natural Grocery
• 6. Managerial and Participatory Bureaucracies
• 7. Worker Identities
• 8. Bureaucracies, Democracies, and Economies
• Appendix A: A Discussion of Methods
• Appendix B: Interview Schedule
• Appendix C: Observation Questions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index