New Imaginaries of Organising Work and Governing Work Relations : Lessons From Worker Cooperatives for a Progressive Labour Law Research Agenda

The article explores the ideational framework underlying worker cooperatives, and it argues that it offers guidance for setting a progressive labour law research agenda that would reconfigure capitalist forms of work and work relations. The article thus intervenes in discussions on new imaginaries of labour and work relations, and the contribution it makes to these debates is threefold. It first argues that the worker cooperative model challenges the subordination of labour to capital innate to capitalist work relations, further normalised through the contractual legal form (both the employment contract and various contracts for services). Second, the article outlines the values common for worker cooperatives and cooperativism, in order to demonstrate in what ways these offer an alternative to mainstream capitalist work relations. Third, based on the common values and principles of worker cooperatives as well as the study of concrete examples, the article analyses the effects of the cooperative model on the horizontal and democratic internal organisation of work relations and the more egalitarian distribution of benefits among members. It argues that the latter offer guidance for rethinking central concepts of labour law, leading towards more progressive governance of work and work relations, and overall emancipation of working people