Worker Cooperatives: Strategies and Tactics for Interstitial Transformation

The number of worker cooperatives in the United States has grown substantially in recent decades, as has a robust cooperative movement dedicated to advancing worker-ownership. Many of these individual cooperatives, as well as the movement that incubates and supports them, critique capitalist workplace relations and aim to disrupt them. This dissertation addresses the claim that worker cooperatives, workplaces owned and operated by their employees, prefigure post-capitalist workplace arrangements and ultimately, a post-capitalist economy. While there is substantial literature that outlines the role of worker cooperatives as a strategy to disrupt exploitative and alienating capitalist labor relations, very little attention has been paid in the academic literature to the resources and strategies necessary to start a cooperative as well as the complex ways in which workplace democracy unfolds in practice. Additionally, this research evaluates the claim that worker cooperatives are a means to democratize wealth on a large scale. Erik Olin Wrights (2010) concept of interstitial transformation is used to understand the process by which small changes to the political economy can accumulate to large-scale systemic shifts. This research is based on a case study of cooperatives in Baltimore from 2014-2021 and identifies three structural conditions necessary for the growth of cooperatives: access to non-extractive capital and high-touch technical support, building a culture of worker ownership, and political advocacy/legislation that supports both worker ownership and wealth redistribution. This dissertation outlines the ways in which cooperatives have already realized their potential for interstitial transformation and the challenges that lay ahead.