"No One Washes a Rental Car”: Parsing Contested Narratives of Worker Ownership in the Massachusetts Cooperative Economy

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the structural deficiencies of a capitalist system in which short-term profits and shareholder value are prioritized over human well-being and economic stability. With the search for a more humane and resilient economic model urgent now more than ever, a groundswell of interest in worker cooperatives — firms that are collectively owned and democratically managed by their employees — has recently emerged. For many, worker cooperatives (co-ops) represent a means to raise wages, improve working conditions, mitigate precarity, and build resilience for workers and communities. But worker co-ops have also been envisaged as vehicles for more radical economic change. Indeed, prominent scholars of worker co-ops have framed the burgeoning cooperative movement as a transformative political project striving to build alternative economic institutions to challenge and replace capitalism altogether. Compelling though this vision may be, this thesis explores what is largely missed by such top-down characterizations of the cooperative model’s transformative potential: the perspectives of actual worker-owners. Animated by this gap in the discourse on worker ownership, this thesis addresses a critical question raised by the absence of workers’ voices: to what extent do the actors ostensibly charged with leading such a transformative movement (i.e., worker-owners) think of their businesses as viable alternatives to capitalism and themselves as harbingers of a new economic paradigm?

Drawing from semi-structured interviews with ten worker-owners in worker co-ops based in Massachusetts, this research reveals how worker-owners hold complex, multifaceted understandings of worker ownership and its potential to transform our economy. I find that worker-owners embrace narratives emphasizing how worker ownership can improve the lives and livelihoods of working people within capitalism, while also positioning worker co-ops as stepping stones toward a new economy built around a fundamentally different set of productive arrangements and economic relations. Ultimately, I argue that these multivalent dispositions reflect a hybrid politics of worker ownership rooted in the real-life experiences of worker-owners caught between the intellectual vanguard of the cooperative movement and the working-class polity of which they are a part, with implications for the future of the cooperative movement.