Shifting Perspectives: Visibility and Voice of Women in Worker Cooperatives

Description du projet

La démocratie sur le lieu de travail et son intersection avec l’égalité des genres

Dans le domaine de la démocratie sur le lieu de travail, une perspective androcentrique a longtemps dominé les discussions, se concentrant principalement sur la lutte des classes au sein des coopératives de travailleurs. Cette focalisation étroite a involontairement occulté les expériences et les contributions uniques des femmes dans ces contextes. Dans cette optique, le projet WE-COOP, financé par le CER, étudiera si les coopératives de travailleurs peuvent ou non renforcer l’autonomie des femmes, redéfinir la dynamique du travail et faire progresser l’égalité des genres et la démocratie sur le lieu de travail. Axé sur la France, le projet utilisera une approche à plusieurs niveaux, combinant des méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives avec une recherche participative innovante. En amplifiant les voix et la visibilité des travailleuses, WE-COOP suscitera de nouvelles enquêtes sur les utopies féministes au travail. Il examinera également l’organisation capitaliste du travail à travers l’étude d’alternatives démocratiques radicales (coopératives de travailleurs).

Objectif

The WE-COOP project shifts our traditional androcentric perspective on workplace democracy by investigating the labour experiences of women in worker cooperatives. Studied for their high potential in the democratization of labour relations, worker cooperatives have been systematically considered as a site for class struggle only. WE-COOP excavates how and why worker cooperatives are also a locus where yet unexplored sets of representations, practices and justifications pertaining to women’s emancipation and gender equality at work are produced.
Opening a whole new field of enquiry crisscrossing the topics of gender, labour, and democracy, the project addresses two series of questions that cover, respectively, women’s visibility and voice. First, to what extent and how does the democratic apparatus of worker cooperatives allow women to reconfigure labour according to their needs and problems, to re-evaluate the traditional separation between the public and private sphere and to redefine political imaginaries pertaining to their emancipation at work? Second, are there gender-differentiated scripts of cooperative labour and if so, how can they expand our understanding of workplace democracy towards more inclusive analytical frameworks?
Focusing on the case-study of France, the project is based on a multi-layered survey of worker cooperatives as well as rare forms of all-women cooperative experiments. It combines quantitative and qualitative methods with an innovative Participatory Research in four incremental steps, allowing for the appropriation by women workers of their narratives and struggles.
By unfolding the visibility and voice of women workers, WE-COOP will contribute to the ongoing research on participatory methodologies, produce an unprecedented digital narrative archive on cooperative labour fuelling further research, expand our knowledge on gender-differentiated scripts of workplace democracy while opening a new field of inquiry on feminist utopias at work.