In the early 1970s employee ownership was on the fringes of public consciousness. Within the last few years, in various forms, employee ownership has emerged as a growing trend demanding attention from Congress, management, and union and community leaders. Over this same period the reaction of union leaders has shifted from indifference mingled with skepticism or hostility to growing interest balanced by ambivalence. The first step toward union policy development is a review of past experience and an examination of current trends.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
1. Howard Aldrich and Robert Stern, “Incentive Systems, Resource Mobilization, and the Creation of U.S. Producers' Cooperatives, 1835-1935,” in Producer Cooperatives in Thirteen Countries, ed. J. Blasi, W. F. Whyte, and C. Rosen (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, forthcoming).
2.
2. Arie Shirom, “The Industrial Relations Systems of Industrial Cooperatives in the United States,”Labor History, 13:533-551 (Fall 1972); Derek Jones, “The Economic and Industrial Relations of Producer Cooperatives in the U.S., 1791-1939,”Economic Analysis and Workers Management, 11:295-317 (1977); idem, “U.S. Producer Cooperatives: The Record to Date,”Industrial Relations, 8(2):342-356 (1979).
3.
3. Aldrich and Stern, “Incentive Systems.”
4.
Derek Jones and Donald J. Schneider, “Self-Help Production Cooperatives: A Case Study of Government Administered Production Cooperatives” (Paper, Hamilton College, Department of Economics, 1980).
5.
5. Katrina Berman, Worker-Owned Plywood Companies: An Economic Analysis (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1967); Carl Bellas, Industrial Democracy and the Worker-Owned Firm: A Study of Twenty-one Plywood Companies in the Pacific Northwest (New York: Praeger, 1972).
6.
6. David Ellerman, “On the Legal Structure of Workers' Cooperatives,” in Workplace Democracy and Social Change, ed. Frank Lindenfeld and Joyce Rothschild-Whitt (Boston: Porter-Sargent, 1982).
7.
7. Joyce Rothschild-Whitt, “Worker Ownership in Relation to Control: A Typology of Work Reform,” in The International Yearbook of Organizational Democracy for the Study of Participation, Cooperation, and Power, ed. Colin Crouch and Frank Heller (Sussex, England: John Wiley, 1983), 1:398.
8.
8. Joseph Blasi, Perry Mehrling, and William Foote Whyte, “The Politics of Worker Ownership in the United States,” in International Yearbook, ed. Crouch and Heller, vol. 1.
9.
9. For more information on the Rath study, see Susan Sklar, “An Experiment in Worker Ownership,”Dissent (Winter 1982).
10.
10. Gail Sokoloff, “The Creation of an Employee Owned Firm: A Case Study of Hyatt-Clark Industries,” Worker Ownership Study Group, monograph no. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Project for Kibbutz Studies, 1982).
11.
11. Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise, “O and O: Open for Business,”PACE Newsletter, p. 1 (Winter 1983).
12.
12. Staughton Lynd, “The View from Steel Country,”Democracy, 3(3):21-33 (Summer 1983).
13.
13. See William F. Whyte and Joseph Blasi, “Recent Developments in Worker Ownership and the Unions” (Discussion paper based on a U.S. Department of Labor seminar, 3 Dec. 1981).
14.
14. Robert Stern and R. A. O'Brien, “National Unions and Employee Ownership” (Paper, Cornell University, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Department of Organizational Behavior, 1977).
15.
15. Erik Asard, “American Unions and Industrial Democracy: The `Business Unionism' Thesis Re-examined” (Cambridge, MA: Project for Kibbutz Studies, Harvard University, 1980).
16.
16. Bill Schweke, “Plant Closings and Strategy Packet” (Washington, DC: Conference on Alternative State and Local Politics, 1980).
17.
17. Derek Jones and Jan Svejnar, Participatory and Self-Managed Firms (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1982).
18.
18. Karl Frieden, Workplace Democracy and Productivity (Washington, DC: National Center for Economic Alternatives, 1980); Michael Conte and Arnold Tannenbaum, “Employee Ownership: A Report” (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, 1978).
19.
19. Keith Bradley and Alan Gelb, Worker Capitalism: The New Industrial Relations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 51-53.