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Article
Publication date: 25 July 2023

Carmen Marcuello

The aim of this paper is to describe the main characteristics of het two most recognised models in Spain: worker cooperatives and worker-owned companies (Sociedades Laborales).

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this paper is to describe the main characteristics of het two most recognised models in Spain: worker cooperatives and worker-owned companies (Sociedades Laborales).

Design/methodology/approach

To this end, a review will be carried out of the main factors from the regulatory and financial framework and the support structures of these organisations model.

Findings

The main findings are the constant decrease in the number of SSLL over the past ten years and a certain decrease in the number of worker cooperatives. Some of the reasons put forward for this decline are the lack of effective favourable tax treatment; the establishment of more favourable measures for capitalist companies; the change of the single payment of unemployment benefits; the lack of knowledge and training professionals and politicians.

Originality/value

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a recent analysis of the regulatory changes and developments in the field of worker cooperatives and worker-owned companies in Spain.

Details

Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, vol. 6 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-7641

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 9 December 2013

Daphne P. Berry

This paper examines job satisfaction and participation in decision making in three home health aide facilities with different organizational structures (worker-owned for-profit…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper examines job satisfaction and participation in decision making in three home health aide facilities with different organizational structures (worker-owned for-profit, for-profit with no participation or ownership by workers, and nonprofit).

Design/methodology/approach

More than 600 surveys were completed by home health aides across the three facilities. The author also engaged in participant observation during training sessions and other meetings and conducted a small number of interviews with caregivers and agency management.

Findings

Home health aides at the worker-owned, participative decision making organization were significantly more satisfied with their jobs than those at the other agencies. Results for the other agencies were not significantly distinguishable from one another.

Research limitations/implications

This study involved respondents from one of each type of business. A study across several of each type of organization would allow more focus on the effects of the structural characteristics of the organizations.

Practical implications

In the United States, the work that home health aides perform provides a valuable service to society. On behalf of caregivers and those for whom they provide care, conditions of the work need improvement. If participative democratic workplaces provide better outcomes, they should receive more attention from lawmakers, the business community, and researchers.

Social implications

This research highlights the working conditions of the people (primarily women) who perform this work. The poor compensation received is a reminder of inequality in opportunity for some workers and of the value placed on this type of caring labor.

Originality/value

This research is unique in its focus on work environment and outcomes in home health care across nonprofit, for-profit, and worker-owned for-profit organizations. The findings of different job satisfaction outcomes from the others in the worker-owned organization and similar outcomes in the nonprofit and conventional for-profit organizations are also unique.

Details

Sharing Ownership, Profits, and Decision-Making in the 21st Century
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-750-4

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 11 April 2005

Joan S.M. Meyers

Previous studies of worker-owned firms claimed that participatory democracy only thrives in small, homogeneous groups. This article focuses on a successful 30-year-old worker-owned

Abstract

Previous studies of worker-owned firms claimed that participatory democracy only thrives in small, homogeneous groups. This article focuses on a successful 30-year-old worker-owned company with more than 200 employees to explain how broad and deep democratic control, a large workforce, and member diversity are brought together. Drawing attention to its combination of training, infrastructure, compensation for management functions, and workplace culture, I argue that an equitable distribution of power and resources does not require hierarchical management, friendship relations, size limits, or member homogeneity. The article highlights the need for greater scholarly attention to worker ownership possibilities for the current multiracial and multicultural working population.

Details

Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-202-3

Book part
Publication date: 25 November 2010

Roger A. McCain

We envision an enterprise owned by an association of its employees. The enterprise may employ nonmember as well as member labor. All are paid the same wage, but member-employees…

Abstract

We envision an enterprise owned by an association of its employees. The enterprise may employ nonmember as well as member labor. All are paid the same wage, but member-employees also accrue credit toward a pension as a benefit of their employment. Nonmember employees do not receive this benefit. Nonmember employees may be allowed to “buy in” as members for a share value that does not dilute the retirement fund, but only at the discretion of the existing members. As a consequence, the workers’ association is not strictly a cooperative, since membership is not “open.” One of the purposes of this inquiry, however, will be to determine under what circumstances the workers’ association will recruit new members.

Details

Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-454-3

Article
Publication date: 21 April 2023

Sarah Reibstein and Laura Hanson Schlachter

Worker cooperative practitioners and developers often claim that democratic worker ownership advances egalitarianism within and beyond the workplace, but most of the empirical…

Abstract

Purpose

Worker cooperative practitioners and developers often claim that democratic worker ownership advances egalitarianism within and beyond the workplace, but most of the empirical evidence in the USA is based on ethnographic case studies or small-scale surveys. This study aims to leverage the first national survey about individuals' experiences in these unique firms to test for the presence of inequalities by gender, race and immigration status in the broader sector.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses a 2017 survey comprising a sample of 1,147 workers from 82 firms. This study focuses on measures of workplace benefits that capture material and psychological ownership, wealth accumulation, wages, workplace autonomy and participation in governance. This study uses ordinary least squares regression models with fixed effects alongside pooled models to determine the effects of gender, race, immigration status and the intersection of gender and race on these outcomes, both within and between firms.

Findings

This study finds no evidence of wage gaps by gender, race or immigration status within worker cooperatives, with job type, tenure and worker ownership status instead explaining within-firm variation in pay. Still, this study documents sector-wide disparities in material and non-material outcomes by gender, race and immigration status, reflecting differences in individual-level human capital and job characteristics as well as widespread occupational segregation and homophily.

Originality/value

The paper offers a novel contribution to the literature on workplace empowerment and inequality in participatory firms by analyzing race, gender and immigration status in the most robust dataset that has been collected on worker cooperatives in the USA.

Details

Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, vol. 6 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-7641

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 October 2021

Thibault Mirabel

Various theories predict that firm buyouts survive longer than newly created firms. The study aims to know whether it is the case for worker-owned firms (WOFs), i.e. firms owned…

Abstract

Purpose

Various theories predict that firm buyouts survive longer than newly created firms. The study aims to know whether it is the case for worker-owned firms (WOFs), i.e. firms owned and controlled mostly by their workers.

Design/methodology/approach

The author conducted a comparative survival analysis of French WOFs distinguished by their entry mode (i.e. newly created, worker buyouts (WBOs) of sound conventional firms, WBOs of conventional firms in difficulty or WBOs of non-profit organizations).

Findings

The hazard of exit is 32% lower for WBOs of sound conventional firms than newly created WOFs, 18% for WBOs of conventional firms in difficulty and 64% for WBOs of non-profit organizations. The current study confirms that WBOs, even of conventional firms in difficulty, have on average a survival advantage over newly created WOFs. Surprisingly, the author also shows that this survival advantage is similar across sectors with different knowledge intensity but is lower in high capital-intensive sectors than in low capital-intensive ones.

Research limitations/implications

Endogeneity issues limit the scope of the results and should be tackled in future research. Overall, these findings show that WOFs are composed of groups with different survival likelihoods that are obscured if one only looks at the aggregate population.

Practical implications

With caution, support agencies could foster WBOs of firms in difficulty and of non-profit organizations as viable forms of entrepreneurship.

Originality/value

The current study offers the first survival analysis distinguishing four modes of entry among WOFs.

Details

Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, vol. 4 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-7641

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 8 May 2018

Aitziber Arregi Uzuriaga, Fred Freundlich and Monica Gago

To examine perceptions of organizational atmosphere and joint ownership in a firm in which capital ownership is broadly shared among members of its work force.A questionnaire was…

Abstract

To examine perceptions of organizational atmosphere and joint ownership in a firm in which capital ownership is broadly shared among members of its work force.

A questionnaire was administered with a sample of 123 people from a Mondragon cooperative firm, ULMA Architectural Solutions, and responses were analyzed using principal components’ analysis and regression techniques.

Two factors are found to play especially important roles in explaining perceptions: (1) work and management/supervisory practices, especially those relating to communication and participation in decisions in respondents’ immediate work area, and (2) job type (blue collar vs. white collar).

The study confirms earlier research on the broad centrality of participation and related practices to perceptions of work and the organization in employee ownership settings, while findings focus on the immediate work environment and relationships with immediate managers for blue-collar workers.

These are closely related to the research implications, underlining the importance to worker-owners, in manufacturing contexts, of communication and involvement in decisions in their immediate work environment.

Widespread concerns about inequality, poor working conditions, and competitiveness suggest the importance of investigating enterprises with broadly shared capital ownership, enterprises that tend to address these concerns.

The chapter reinforces the fundamental roles of information-sharing and participation in enterprises with shared ownership, while making key distinctions between shopfloor and office workers experiences and perceptions.

Details

Employee Ownership and Employee Involvement at Work: Case Studies
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-520-7

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 11 April 2005

Joel Schoening

Existing research on businesses that are both owned and managed by their workers suggests that these firms have one of two kinds of effects for their participants. They either…

Abstract

Existing research on businesses that are both owned and managed by their workers suggests that these firms have one of two kinds of effects for their participants. They either learn to be better citizens of democratic society through daily democratic practice, or they become better capitalists through the daily practice of business ownership. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews and participant observation, I argue that cooperative participants learn both things. Furthermore, participants in cooperatives develop a spirit of Cooperative Entrepreneurialism that allows them to engage in free enterprise, while also adhering to the cooperative values of equality and democracy.

Details

Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-202-3

Book part
Publication date: 11 April 2005

George Cheney

This essay treats both democracy and the market. The essay assesses the condition of modern workplace democracy and reconsiders the potential for genuine and thoroughgoing…

Abstract

This essay treats both democracy and the market. The essay assesses the condition of modern workplace democracy and reconsiders the potential for genuine and thoroughgoing democratic practices within corporations that find themselves “globalizing” and responding to market forces. To ground my analysis, I draw upon the case of the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque Country, Spain, a system of worker-owned-and-managed cooperatives that began to engage the European and global markets in the years immediately preceding European Union unification in 1992. I wish to update and widen the scholarly discussions of Mondragón while also using the case to identify some of the most important contours of the intersection of democracy and the market today.

Details

Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-202-3

Book part
Publication date: 24 March 2021

James M. Mandiberg and Seon Mi Kim

We explore a case example of hybridity between a large worker-owned cooperative and a union through three lenses: organizational forms, multiple institutional logics, and…

Abstract

We explore a case example of hybridity between a large worker-owned cooperative and a union through three lenses: organizational forms, multiple institutional logics, and organizational identity. We delineate three types of organizational hybridity: (1) stretching an existing organizational form; (2) creating a new organizational form; and (3) and retaining multiple discrete organizational forms in a common venture. The cooperative–union hybrid shares members from the two contributing organizations, and so can be classified as a matrix sub-form of multi-organizational hybridity. This study describes how the coop-union hybrid manages the multiple logics and identities retained from both contributing organizations. It considers the hazards of combining these logics and identities, and offers some suggestions on how to avoid potential difficulties. Finally, given the complexity and inefficiencies of the matrix form, we explore whether matrix hybridity is a transitional or permanent form in this particular instance of a cooperative–union venture.

Details

Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-989-7

Keywords

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