Shifting Perspectives: Visibility and Voice of Women in Worker Cooperatives

Descrizione del progetto

La democrazia sul posto di lavoro e la sua intersezione con l’uguaglianza di genere

Nell’ambito della democrazia sul posto di lavoro, una prospettiva androcentrica ha a lungo dominato le discussioni, ponendo l’attenzione prevalentemente sulla lotta di classe all’interno delle cooperative di lavoratori. Questa attenzione limitata ha inavvertitamente oscurato le esperienze e i contributi unici delle donne in questi contesti. In quest’ottica, il progetto WE-COOP, finanziato dal CER, studierà se le cooperative di lavoratori possano o meno conferire potere alle donne, ridefinire le dinamiche del lavoro e favorire il progresso dell’uguaglianza di genere e della democrazia sul posto di lavoro. Concentrandosi sulla Francia, il progetto utilizzerà un approccio su più livelli, combinando metodi quantitativi e qualitativi con una ricerca partecipativa innovativa. Amplificando le voci e la visibilità delle lavoratrici, WE-COOP darà vita a nuove indagini sulle utopie femministe al lavoro. Si prenderà in considerazione anche l’organizzazione capitalistica del lavoro attraverso lo studio di alternative democratiche radicali (cooperative di lavoratori).

Obiettivo

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.