Preliminary Programme

Study of class formation in the Swedish producer cooperative meatpacking industry. This industry's close connection to the rural sphere and the rural location of some plants had special effects on the class relations within the industry. This kind of ownership was also more successful than the private owned meatpacking plants which had problems raising capital for their enterprise, while the producer-cooperative plants could exploit both the capital and the labour of the small farmers that were their formal owners. The growth of a national producer- cooperative meatpacking industry from the 1930s was promoted by support from the Swedish state governed by a coalition between the Socialdemocratic Party and the Farmers Party. The alliance between the farmers movement and the labour movement radically changed the conditions for the class formation in the rural sphere of Sweden. Earlier antagonistic relations changed to a climate of cooperation as both famers and farm workers were organized. (Show less)

Do current managerial strategies (like indirect control, teamwork and economic targeting) render wage labour more “autonomous”? This question is widely debated in Germany since Voss and Pongratz have identified the “entrepreneurial worker” (Arbeitskraftunternehmer) as a prototype of future employees. Internet companies are often perceived as a perfect habitat for this late 20th century species of wage earners. After all, “network organisations” are supposed to replace traditio-nal company bureaucracies in this part of the labour market, thus enabling an increasing number of high-skill employees to organise their work more independently. There is in fact some evidence that web workers’ jobs were characterised by flat hierarchies, individual time schedules, and high wages as long as the “internet hype” lasted. It will be argued in this paper, however, that these new and less authoritative varieties of company organisation did not imply a long-term tendency towards “autonomous labour”: (a) Even in “start-ups”, the differential of power between employers and employees was rather obscured than abolished during the period of expansion. Although long working hours and high productivity were due to personal commitment rather than to superiors’ direct pressure, the latter still interpreted changing market requirements and decided whether staff was recruited or dismissed. (b) If wage earners were in fact allowed to organise their work more autonomously, this was not only a logical consequence of their challenging and creative tasks. Instead, workers with internet skills were urgently needed in the late 1990s, and the shortage of experts improved their bargaining position to an extent which may remind historians of earlier “Golden Ages of Wage Labour”, e.g. after the Black Death or the Second World War. After the “internet bubble” had burst in 2000, however, the organisation of labour was severely restructured in many of the remaining companies, strikingly reducing wage earners’ capacities to work independently. Drawing upon interviews conducted in a current research project (2002-05), this paper will reconstruct the rise and fall of “autonomous labour” in different types of internet companies. It is argued that neither the necessity to grant web workers more independence nor their willingness to accept this responsibility have been sufficient to turn capitalist internet enterprises into a vanguard of a more egalitarian “knowledge society”. (Show less)

What are the implications of the similar financial success of two originally small, "hippie" worker-owned cooperatives that developed dramatically different organizational structures to deal with growth, diversification, and "business" pressures over their twenty-five year histories? What different goals and outcomes are concealed by the label "worker control"? How do worker-owners make claims to power within legitimated workplace discourses? This research project examines two cooperative businesses, each having a large (100+) workforce that has grown to include similar racial/ethnic, gender and sexuality diversity, both in the same region of the United States. While both businesses are located within similar webs of national and transnational migration and accompanying cultural shifts in the region, the two cooperatives deploy very different "workplace identities"— their discursive constructions of what it is to "be a worker." By comparing these businesses with similar member demographics (by class, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality), the paper helps to elucidate how each cooperative’s construction of its workplace identity as well as its different organizational structure mediate worker-owners’ access to and control of power in the workplace by class, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. (Show less)