Shifting Perspectives: Visibility and Voice of Women in Worker Cooperatives

Introduction

The WE-COOP project shifts our traditional androcentric perspective on workplace democracy by investigating the labour experiences of women in worker cooperatives. Studied for their high potential in the democratization of labour relations, worker cooperatives have been systematically considered as a site for class struggle only. WE-COOP excavates how and why worker cooperatives are also a locus where yet unexplored sets of representations, practices, and justifications pertaining to women’s emancipation and gender equality at work are produced.

Research Questions

Opening a whole new field of enquiry crisscrossing the topics of gender, labour, and democracy, the project addresses two series of questions that cover, respectively, women’s visibility and voice:

1. To what extent and how does the democratic apparatus of worker cooperatives allow women to:

   • Reconfigure labour according to their needs and problems
   • Re-evaluate the traditional separation between the public and private sphere
   • Redefine political imaginaries pertaining to their emancipation at work?

2. Are there gender-differentiated scripts of cooperative labour and if so, how can they expand our understanding of workplace democracy towards more inclusive analytical frameworks?

Methodology

Focusing on the case study of France, the project is based on a multi-layered survey of worker cooperatives as well as rare forms of all-women cooperative experiments. It combines quantitative and qualitative methods with an innovative Participatory Research in four incremental steps, allowing for the appropriation by women workers of their narratives and struggles.

Contributions

By unfolding the visibility and voice of women workers, WE-COOP will contribute to the ongoing research on participatory methodologies, produce an unprecedented digital narrative archive on cooperative labour fuelling further research, expand our knowledge on gender-differentiated scripts of workplace democracy, while opening a new field of inquiry on feminist utopias at work.