Inequalities in democratic worker-owned firms by gender, race and immigration status: evidence from the first national survey of the sector
Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership
ISSN: 2514-7641
Article publication date: 21 April 2023
Issue publication date: 6 June 2023
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.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Melissa Hoover, Tim Palmer, Ana Martina Rivas, and colleagues at the Democracy at Work Institute and U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives for the opportunity to collaborate on data collection for this project. The authors thank Joan Meyers, Joseph Blasi, Edward Carberry, Adria Scharf, Douglas Kruse and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this paper and Kristinn Már for being a thoughtful sounding board for analytical questions. Data collection was funded by the Democracy at Work Institute. Sarah Reibstein is currently funded by a fellowship from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, which has also previously funded Laura Hanson Schlachter as a fellow.
Citation
Reibstein, S. and Hanson Schlachter, L. (2023), "Inequalities in democratic worker-owned firms by gender, race and immigration status: evidence from the first national survey of the sector", Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 6-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPEO-10-2022-0016
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited