Working Democratically in a Despotic Market: Qualitative Exploration of Tiredness in Worker Cooperatives
Author: Mateusz Bełz
Abstract:
This thesis aims to examine how the unique structure and position of worker cooperatives interact with alienation and precarity. Despite workplace democracy being a subject of political debate, the available scientific literature lacks qualitative examinations of worker well-being in democratically controlled businesses. In order to address this gap, transcripts of eight semi-structured, online interviews with members of democratically run worker cooperatives in the UK and Poland were analysed thematically. The results suggest that worker cooperatives struggle with a variety of different tensions, between their activist nature and the need to operate as a market-oriented business, between the increased agency of worker-members in the enterprise and the need to operate within a larger structure, and between different types of precarity. The presence of these tensions shows that, while worker cooperatives do better when it comes to commonly used, quantitative measures of well-being, tiredness can emerge, caused by worker cooperatives operating within a larger capitalist framework.
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