Corporate democracy at the centre of definitional struggles and legitimacy conflicts

Anne Catherine Wagner^[1]

Work participation is charged with an ambivalent meaning. This polemical notion covers both the challenge, on the employer’s side, of mobilising the workforce more effectively and the demand, on the employee’s side, for worker control over the company (Béroud, 2013). In the 1960s, the political meaning of the Gaullist measures was explicit: participation in company profits was to counterbalance the ideology of class struggle (Hatzfeld, 2011). However, the possibilities of employee participation in the government of companies remain limited. The measures put in place to involve employees in decision-making, from the Auroux laws to the more recent innovations of liberated or agile companies, have two limitations. On the one hand, they remain confined to the framework set by those who provide the capital and are still the decision-makers: there is no real sharing of power (Ferreras, 2012). On the other hand, these systems are often reduced to a managerial tool intended to increase productivity and generate a profit that escapes the employees.

Cooperative and Participative Societies (Sociétés Coopératives et Participatives, SCOPs) seem to escape, by their status, from these two lines of criticism. These companies are owned by their employees, who have a right to participate in decisions and elect their directors and managers. They are also the main beneficiaries of the profits^[2]. SCOPs are thus privileged tools for observing ‘corporate democracy’.

How do employees appropriate these mechanisms? This question raises the issue of the effective conditions of ownership of the own enterprise and work. The cooperative members own their enterprise in the legal and economic sense; to what extent have they appropriated this ownership?

The concept of democracy, imported from the political register, prescriptive as much as descriptive, is not easily transposed to the world of work. The definition of this ‘industrial democracy’, which would be ‘socially legitimate, theoretically conceivable, and politically necessary’ (Cukier, 2017), is an issue of struggle between actors with divergent interests. Its effects are themselves ambivalent. To what extent does worker participation actually transform the organisation of work and the purposes of production? In other words, how do the social and technical divisions of labour fit together?

In order to answer these questions, a survey was carried out with several SCOPs that have interpreted the requirements of cooperative statute in contrasting ways. The first two, with around fifty employees, were taken over as cooperatives after being owned by large international groups: Scop-Ti^[3], a militant cooperative that produces teas and infusions, is the result of a long struggle by Fralib employees against the Unilever group, which wanted to close the factory near Marseille; Isolec, which produces insulators for electrical distribution in the Drôme region, was also taken over as a SCOP some fifteen years ago, but the unions have now disappeared. The third company surveyed is not an SME and has experienced a significant development of its activities outside its borders: Cablor, which manufactures cables, wires, and tubes, employs more than 1,000 employees, mainly factory workers, in its six factories located in the west of France, and almost as many in its foreign subsidiaries. The monographs on these three SCOPs were supplemented by interviews and questionnaires with other cooperative members, notably leaders or future leaders of SCOPs with a university education, often working in services, training or integration organisations, organic shops, consultancy firms, and public policy evaluation.

Returning to the participatory mechanisms put in place and the way in which employees use them, we will bring to light divergent conceptions of ‘democracy’, depending in particular on their place in the division of labour. Though the inequalities in employee involvement partly reproduce social and professional hierarchies, they are not reduced to them. Above all, these different implications may result from a disagreement on the definition of the member’s emancipation: there is no consensus on the extent of the areas over which employees have a right of control, on the places where this right should be exercised, on the type of emancipation that the SCOPs should make possible.

1. Participation in company decisions as an instrument of reproduction of social and professional hierarchies

The systems put in place in the SCOPs aim to ensure equality between members regardless of the amount of shares held, the social rank, and the professional status. According to the principle of ‘one person, one vote’, all have the same weight in determining collective choices. However, these companies are not closed worlds that miraculously make the external environment, the mechanisms of social domination, or the internalisation of feelings of incompetence disappear. Professional trajectories play a decisive role in how employees take up cooperative arrangements. The social selectivity of employee participation mechanisms is due to the restrictive conditions of access to membership, to the functioning of general assemblies, and to more diffuse obstacles to speaking out.

1.1. Restrictive conditions of access to membership

It is membership that gives the right to vote at the general meeting: the worker only acquires power as a member employee. In 2019, 68% of employees are members. The amount of the shares, the terms of payment, the information given to new employees are all factors that can extend or restrict applications. Access to cooperative status is socially selective: it reproduces class, gender, and age inequalities, as shown by Nathalie Magne’s calculations based on data on all SCOPs between 2000 and 2012 (Magne, 2016). Managers, older employees, and men are over-represented among the partners. They are both more often candidates and more often co-opted. Those who carry out management tasks in their daily work are more likely than operational employees to ask to be involved in the company’s strategic orientations.

The distinction between members and non-members thus reproduces relations of domination, which leads to the risk, regularly underlined, of a sort of iron law of SCOPs. Danièle Linhart (1981) analysed the mechanisms in her study of the Association des Ouvriers en Instruments de Précision (AOIP), the largest cooperative in Europe in the 1970s. The cooperative was founded in 1896 by eight skilled workers, all union members, who wanted to eliminate the parasitic organisation imposed by the employers and replace it with worker solidarity and the principles of egalitarianism: all workers had the same salary and the AOIP implemented an innovative social policy. Gradually, however, the militant vanguard became an oligarchy that blocked access to membership. At the time of Danièle Linhart’s investigation, a strong gap separated the elite members, qualified workers, and technicians, from the other employees, in particular semi-qualified and non-qualified workers, white collar workers, and women. Another historical cooperative, created in 1880 by Godin in Guise, experienced a similar evolution, as described by Michel Lallement (2019). The Association du Travail et du Capital generated new hierarchies among employees, with ‘associates’ at the top, who had lived in the familistère for more than five years, could read and write and had been admitted by vote to the general assembly; ‘‘societaries’ below them, who belonged to the management board; then ‘participants’, who had capital but did not participate in decision-making; and, at the very bottom of the ladder, ‘auxiliaries’, who were the first to be made redundant in the event of an economic downturn. As time went by, the group of associates became more inclined to restrict access. Eventually, membership became hereditary and, in the second half of the 20th century, the partners became an ‘aristocratic, ageing, and conservative elite’.

To limit this risk of oligarchic drift, the 1978 law facilitates access to the status of member and makes compulsory membership possible. Nevertheless, there are member selection mechanisms for selecting in all SCOPs. In SCOPs where activity is inseparable from a militant commitment (organic product trade, activist bookshops, services linked to the defence of the environment) or other ethical principles, the shared values (and social properties) of the founders explicitly condition access to membership because, as the director of an integration organisation explained to me, ‘our convictions are the DNA of the project’. When, as in the industrial SCOPs where I carried out surveys, all the employees are obliged to become members after a certain period of time, co-option takes a more indirect form: it is the employees who are self-elected by getting involved in the struggle to take over their company as a cooperative, or by agreeing to enter or remain in the SCOPs even though the status of member is imposed on them. The purchase of a share takes on various meanings; it is often perceived as a constraint which conditions employment in the cooperative (Wagner, 2019). Being a member is far from always implying participation in decisions concerning the enterprise.

1.2. Staged democracy

The SCOPs define the type of commitment they expect from their members in contrasting ways. Participation can be thought of primarily as a mark of belonging. Cablor is a large, highly successful company which, according to its CEO, is in many respects ‘a limited company like any other’ which ‘is first and foremost there to work, to produce, to satisfy the needs of its customers and to make a profit’^[4]. This company claims to adhere to the principles of market economy, while defending its independence from external shareholders and the priority of maintaining local jobs. At Cablor, the participation expected from employees is through financial commitment. ‘To be a member employee is to be a contributor of capital’, as the April 2016 ‘Letter to Shareholders’ reminds us. The obligation to obtain two shares every year should allow everyone to ‘renew their individual commitment while serving collective interests’. This obligation is coupled with an injunction to vote, as ‘not voting is not respecting one’s cooperative commitment’.

The annual general assembly has long been a highlight in the collective life of Cablor. It brings together several hundred employees, who are joined by their families for the cocktail party or festive event that follows the meeting. The associates remain loyal to this event, as shown by the participation rates: 86% of associate employees took part in the vote in 2018. Managers attach great importance to the participation rate at the general assembly. It is a key element of the company’s symbolic capital. General assemblies participate in the collective construction of ‘democracy’ as a distinctive mark of the company (Hély and Moulevrier, 2013).

However, the general assembly is not a space for debate. The management team is on a podium; the room is dark to allow the projection of figures and graphs on the screen behind the podium. The 700-800 associates present are sitting in chairs in a row, listening passively. Respondents regularly complain about the length of the presentations. The company’s work to disseminate information on the accounts before the assembly leaves this operator doubtful:

Every year in June they give us a big book like this [spreading her arms]. But because you don’t know anything about it. That’s why we say it’s a smoke screen. Yes, we have the accounts, that’s for sure! But anyone who isn’t an accountant can’t read them. (Operator, union member, 19 May 2017)

In addition to the feeling of not being competent to evaluate the technical aspects of the balance sheet, the workers are confronted with a system that makes it almost impossible to express disagreement: standing up in front of several hundred people –including one’s superiors– to give one’s opinion, especially if it is not that of management, presupposes a social self-assurance and eloquence which even the most virulent do not have: most of the ‘opponents’ thus choose to vote by proxy in order to avoid being present in person.

The informative sessions regularly organised apart from the general assembly do not seem to be places for discussion either. An operator, elected by the CGT, analyses the difficulties workers have to follow meetings, which he compares to courses, because they rely on a capacity to listen and concentrate (and a passivity) associated with the silence of the school world:

People are not used to it either. They’re at work and suddenly they’re told there’s a meeting. When you’re in school, the teacher dictates to you, you take notes, this and that. Whereas here, you are in your workplace, in a noisy environment, you are not concentrated because you are used to doing a task. And they ask you to listen. And these people don’t have the necessary listening skills. I know that when I first joined the union, at the beginning, in order to listen, I could stand two hours, then I heard nothing. Because I wasn’t used to it. When you’re just working, you don’t listen at all. By doing this, these people are turned crazy; they become dizzy. (operator, CGT elected representative, Cablor, 20/04/2018)

Participation in Cablor is first and foremost financial, which is interpreted as a manifestation of a sense of belonging to the cooperative. The votes at the general assembly are conceived as manifestations of adherence to the cooperative principles and to the company’s policy. The idea that the operators or technicians could take part in decisions regarding the major orientations of the enterprise is not envisaged either by members of management or by trade unionists.

1.3. Selective speaking out

General assemblies are once again becoming places of exchange in smaller SCOPs, where the social gaps between members are less marked. In a cooperative that embodies the militant model, such as Scop-Ti —born out of a three-year struggle by Fralib employees against the multinational Unilever, which wanted to close the factory—, the exchanges are based on long-standing collective work built up in the union and during the struggle. These militant meetings are far removed from the shareholders’ meetings. Organised every month in the factory’s refectory, they are thought of as the democratic lung of the SCOP. The elected leaders, themselves former workers who have taken over the management functions, are keen to involve all the employees in the decisions. As the former union delegate explains to film director Nicolas Joxe, who films an assembly where the workers are immersed in the accounts:

Before, this kind of review was reserved for a small elite. We had someone present on the board, in this case me, and we didn’t have the opportunity to express ourselves, and when we asked questions we didn’t get the answers. Now it’s just us, it’s not the same. […] We would like to make sure that the ‘one man, one vote’ principle is not just written on the statutes, that everyone can speak, express itself, participate in decisions. We’re aware that we’re still in our infancy, we’re only beginning. Some people have taken the plunge, even on aspects that they didn’t necessarily master before, such as financial aspects. Some are not there yet, they are still learning. (Joxe, 2017)

Employees often admit to being at a loss when faced with the technical nature of the decisions to be taken. It is no coincidence that it is the former trade union representatives, who already have experience in these bodies, though in a dominated position, who feel most at ease. They are also the ones who are most prepared to manage disagreements or conflict situations. One respondent explained her reluctance to speak in public by fear of conflict:

Respondent: We’re all more or less… We have different opinions. So it’s true that when there’s a meeting like that, you have to say what’s on your mind. But there are some who don’t like to speak. I don’t like to speak in front of others. When I want to say something, I prefer to go and see the person and tell them. And that’s stupid because when we have differences, it’s good to talk about them in the meeting too, to put things straight, it’s true.

A. C.: It’s hard to speak in front of everyone….

E: The problem is that we don’t know how people can take it… (Employee, Scop-Ti, 26/01/2017)

The relationship to speaking out partly reproduces class and gender inequalities, even in the most militant workers’ SCOPs. This testimony also highlights the situations that the operational employees would like to talk about, without always daring to do so: it is a question of work relations and daily life in the workshops, rather than of the major strategic orientations of the company. As Maxime Quijoux (2018) shows, who speaks of the ‘unionisation of the cooperative project’, for some the cooperative appears exclusively as a new wage opportunity.

It is necessary to study other SCOPS, where the employees are mostly managers and graduates, to find general assemblies that are places for deliberation on company policy. The mechanisms set up by SCOPs to ensure employee control are various: supervisory boards, extended executive committees, rotating management, etc. A survey carried out in a 450-employee firm that makes expert reports for works councils describes general assemblies that are instances of collective effervescence. All the staff travels for a few days to a place rented for the occasion: ‘It’s three days in which you talk Cescop, you eat Cescop, you breathe Cescop, you sleep Cescop’ (Dubois, 2017). This work of unification involves the internalisation of specific ways of speaking and debating, often forged by socialisation in leftist organisations marked by verbal violence. The virulence of debates in meetings can then generate other forms of self-censorship. If militant experience goes hand in hand with a willingness to accept conflict situations, cooperative members (and especially female members) who are not endowed with militant capital speak out less, and when they do, they are paid less attention. These norms of interaction guarantee the maintenance of domination by certain associates –more often consultants, men, older, with an activist past– over others –more often administrative staff, women, and younger.

According to the manager of a militant SCOP in the field of insertion, essentially comprising graduates, becoming a partner is one of the limits of obligation:

Being an associate means coming to meetings. And for some it is a burden, they would prefer to be only employees. That’s because the meetings are outside working hours, but also because there are tensions. It’s those with more power, the strongest characters who will speak up and give their opinion. And others do not speak up, but are then critical of the decisions taken. (Manager of an integration company, 31/01/2019)

SCOPs do not eliminate inequalities in public speaking, which requires, in addition to confidence, mastery of the established rules of speaking (Cardon et al., 1995). Nevertheless, the idea of the passivity of working-class employees in decision-making bodies must be qualified. Not all cooperative members share the democratic illusion. Many of them, especially in production, consider the consultations organised by the cooperative bodies to be useless or illusory. Because of their professional position, they are not inclined to delve into financial or strategic questions and are not interested in problems that seem abstract and cut off from their daily reality. This is not a mere dispossession. Indeed, these different relationships to deliberative bodies can be interpreted as adherence to a form of division of the labour of participating. While managers, activists, and elected representatives are more adjusted to verbal exchanges on company strategy, which are part of the continuity of their professional or activist activities, it is in the workplace and in the field of work and employment that some workers wish to express themselves and be heard.

2. Controversial emancipation at work

The cooperative movement has only exceptionally challenged the hierarchical organisation of work (Coutrot, 2018). The statute of the SCOP does not explicitly provide for participation in the frame of work activity. In fact, practices are disparate. Two models can be schematically opposed: a managerial SCOP, such as Cablor, interprets the double status of employee-members as a dissociation of the two bodies —the SCOP and the company— according to a double funnel model. At the top of the first funnel, the SCOP, the assembly of members elects the board of directors, which chooses the CEO. The CEO is at the head of the second, inverted funnel, the company: he has authority over the management committee, which itself is above the middle management dominating the employees at the base. The associate exercises power in the SCOP; but as an employee, he is subject to the hierarchy in the company. This is the dominant conception of company democracy within the SCOP movement. Hence, while the associate’s sovereignty, which is exercised annually in the general assembly, remains abstract, hierarchy in the workshops is felt more directly in the daily work^[5].

On the other hand, a small number of self-managing SCOPs defend the principle of permanent worker control over all decisions, even in daily work. Scop-Ti has developed a circular ‘functional organisation chart’ to mark the refusal of pyramidal relations. This representation is adjusted to the idea of employee versatility and the egalitarian principles of the SCOPs. As explained by one of the managers, a former mechanic and secretary of the works council:

Boss is a swear word for us. We consider that we are all responsible, and that there is no need to have a boss or a jailer. Why are you going to put someone behind you to force you to work? I fought for 30 years and more against bastards who were busting my balls. I’m not going to be a jailer, no way. I won’t be a boss, I refuse to do that. (Member of the Scop-Ti management team, 24/01/17)

These two models, opposing the managerial and activist SCOPs^[6] are above all prescriptive. The reality most often shows a hybridisation between these conceptions. SCOPs, even the most egalitarian ones, do not eliminate hierarchical relations in the workplace; and conversely, even in very hierarchical SCOPs, the status of member influences the relationship of employees to their work.

2.1. A blurring of the boundary between decision and execution?

When asked about their experience with SCOPs, the workers rarely mention their status as partners in the capital or in decision-making. They talk more spontaneously about their daily work in the workshops. Some of them have the feeling that they are no longer considered only as executors. A young employee of Isolec, an SME manufacturing insulation, is particularly enthusiastic about this new consideration. After various jobs in other companies, he joined this SCOP at the age of 22, where he has been a multi-skilled operator for a year.

You’ve probably noticed that it’s badly organised in terms of storage, it’s a bit of a mess! In my old company, I had a 5Rs training course, I don’t know if you know it, to reorganise the workstations in five steps. I hate working in a mess, and when I saw that, I went to see my boss. I told him that I couldn’t work in such a mess. I told him: I have the necessary training, if you allow me, I’ll put everything back in order. And so we are reorganising everything […]. In any other company, if I had told my boss what I told you, that everything’s a mess, he would have told me: if you’re not happy, you can leave. Here he said no problem, I listen to what you tell me, go ahead, I’ll follow you. I was a temp. Listening to a temp like that is rare. You feel really listened to! (Operator, Isolec, 22/03/2017)

Without being explicitly provided for in the statutes, this SCOP, with its relatively egalitarian operation (all managers come from the workshops), makes it possible for the operators to reappropriate their work. This consideration is not only symbolic. The workers are often reticent about experiments that increase their responsibilities and enrich their work without providing for social and salary recognition (Coutrot, op. cit., p 213). According to this young employee, his SCOP is characterised by a system of merit-based pay that rewards those who put in the most effort.

It works on merit. Someone who is dedicated to work, who does the 5 Rs, will be paid more than someone less dedicated. A person who isn’t dedicated will not get a raise. I like this concept. The more you invest, the more you get paid. In my old company, no matter how much I put in, no matter how hard I worked, they would say ‘Very good’, but they never gave me a raise.

The views on the content of the cooperative spirit vary according to the positions. For this employee, it is synonymous with meritocracy and is opposed to the lack of consideration for workers in traditional companies. A little later in the day, I exchanged views with older operators in the same workshop who, on the contrary, mocked the ‘excitement’ of this newcomer, railed against the young people’s claim to know everything, and felt that the cooperative spirit was lost with the respect of the old. The promotion of this young operator was not the result of a consensus in the workshop but, in the end, in a rather classic way, of an endorsement from his superior.

These ambivalences can be seen in a large company like Cablor, where a whole series of measures have been put in place to institutionalise the integration of employee initiatives. Although not intending to question the hierarchical relations in the workshops, the company seeks, according to its CEO, to ‘transform the employees into co-entrepreneurs’: ‘Our objective is to make them understand that they are not there to undergo their work. If you want to invest, go ahead. We believe in the talent of people, in their desire. The company belongs to all those who want to take it over.’^[7] Employees are invited to propose innovations and improvements to the functioning of their sector, during numerous internal training sessions or in reflection groups dedicated to improving quality and safety. This concern to promote initiatives is reflected in the multiplication of hierarchical levels: local managers, production managers and superiors allow the most committed employees to reach intermediate responsibilities. This is what, from the point of view of the managers, defines Cablor’s very specific ‘self-management’ model:

Everything is horizontal here. The production managers are self-proclaimed leaders. They manage themselves. It is the employees who decide the priorities on the shop floor. They have a job to do, but they organise it with their leader. The leaders are there to improve their workstation, the environment, the product. They are in working groups; they participate in the life of the company. (Former manager, retired, 27/11/2018)

This system of promoting the most committed employees produces new hierarchies between employees. The CEO classifies them into three groups: ‘You have the real co-entrepreneurs, who give it all, who adhere to the line, to the company’s plan. Then you have the passive ones: this is the majority of employees. Finally, we also have some refractory ones’^[8]. This framed and hierarchical vision of ‘self-management’ is not without its complaints. For some of the refractory members I met, the system is designed to promote the most docile and to silence opposition. The boundary between the cooperative spirit, as defined by the management, and docility towards the hierarchy is porous: ‘The SCOP is used as a propaganda model, it is propagandistic. It’s a management model. You are in a SCOP, so you have to get involved’ (Operator, CGT, 27/11/2018). An operator for more than 20 years at Cablor, this employee who is a CGT union member tells me at length about his bitterness at the indifference to all his proposals for improving the production process. The whole interview is an account of his attempts to have his commitment to the factory recognised. His ideas for improving production or work organisation were successively ignored or appropriated by a superior: ‘The idea will be good when a technician takes it up’. He attributes this failure to his ‘character’: he likes to stand up to the hierarchy.

In a subsidiary, I went to modify some machines that the technicians were unable to start. When we came back, the technicians got a promotion and I got nothing. I was told to shut the fuck up!

A C: Because you were CGT?

No, because I was overshadowing the technician, I was correcting his bullshit. The guy had made a plan, and there you could see that it wouldn’t work. I arrived and said: ‘Who’s the idiot who made the plans?’ He replies: ‘It’s me’. I tell him: ‘We’ll modify the thing’. We take the welding machine, we cut, it was good. But here, if you’re good, you have to hide it, otherwise you’re overshadowing someone else.

He unsuccessfully applied for a technician position and he was reminded of his class position with some violence.

I was told that I had some technique, but that it was a worker’s technique. I asked if he could elaborate a little bit, because I was a bit of an idiot, being a worker, so I didn’t know what it was. At the time, it was… It’s in the past now.

Accumulating a large amount of self-taught knowledge, he likes to evoke some symbolic revenge. In the workshops, when he modifies machines to improve their operation, he engraves his initials, granting himself the recognition he is denied:

I know how to do it because my father was a boilermaker, so when I was a kid I used to tinker. Right now I’m having fun making tools that solve problems they can’t solve.

A. C.: But you have no recognition…

No. I’m still a low-grade worker. But I put my initials on my machines. The head of the workshop came to see me and said, ‘Do you want to register a patent?’ With my workman’s technique!

This ‘refractory’ point of view on the SCOPs testifies to the importance of social and professional hierarchies. Commitment to work and the transgression of the boundaries between executors and decision-makers are encouraged as long as they do not challenge hierarchical relations and the authority of superiors. This testimony also attests to the resistance of employees to these barriers. The SCOPs are the site of a permanent and latent struggle over the definition of the relevant framework for employee intervention. A manager in charge of purchasing underlines the tendency of operational employees to challenge decisions, to give their opinion on the production process.

It’s very different from the company I used to be in. Here, people are very involved, very concerned, they always have a say. Whereas in a more traditional company, they work and that’s it. Here, they are always ready to question things, to say: ‘it’s going to cost us more, we shouldn’t do it like that’. (Technical manager, Cablor, 28/11/2018)

This involvement has its drawbacks, from the point of view of the hierarchical superiors. Not all employees adhere to the principle that the partner decides once a year and the employee executes every day, as expressed by an exasperated technical manager from a large car manufacturing company.

For me, a SCOP is a classic company, with a classic pyramid system, a management that establishes a strategy, a balance sheet, projects and applies its policy. There is a management and it goes all the way down. And once a year, we can express ourselves and if we think that things are not going well, we can send a strong signal by not electing a board of directors. But here many people think that being a partner means that you can say every day: ‘No, this is not going in the right direction; I don’t agree with that!’ Let’s say that the separation between employees and partners is not clear-cut for many. They feel authorised to… The problem is when people give their opinion on something they ignore. For me, the exchange between management and the bottom is important. But at some point you have to say: ‘OK, I’ve heard you, but now this is what’s been decided and we’re all going towards it.’

C.: Are people less disciplined here [than in your former company]?

Much less! (Technical executive, 20 April 2018)

It is clear that the question of the place occupied and the relationship with the hierarchy crystallises the tensions. In the workshops, there is not necessarily a consensus or even ‘deliberation’ on the initiatives of certain operators to change the organisation of work. The commitment of certain employees is recognised on condition that it is legitimised by their hierarchical superiors, who are themselves legitimised by their ‘skills’. However, even in the most hierarchical SCOPs, some of the employees question and continually seek to erode the boundary between decision-makers and executors.

2.2. Working without pressure

In the companies surveyed, the most salient theme in the interviews with the production employees is that of time constraints in the workshops. The workers first measure the fact of working in a SCOP by the relative freedom they enjoy in managing their working time. This relaxation of constraints is particularly marked in the workers’ SCOPs, at Scop-Ti and Isolec, where the former managers have left and where the middle management has not always been reconstituted. The content of the work has changed little in these factories with high capital intensity (‘I do the same thing. We can vote all we want. In the workshop, it’s the same machines, and what we have to do doesn’t change!’, jokes a Scop-Ti operator). What does change is not the content of the work in the workshop, but the reduced pressure from the hierarchy.

This is a principle claimed at Scop-Ti, where the former trade unionists refuse to become ‘jailers. It is also a reality at Isolec, where the manager is a former technician who has remained close to the workshops. The flexibility of the working hours, the fact of being able to take time off work to take a child to the doctor, to go to a funeral, or to do some administrative work are all part of the ‘joys’ of the SCOPs, according to this Isolec operator.

This is great for me. Normally the hours are 4:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Yesterday, unfortunately, I had to go to a funeral. I told P. [the managing director] and I was able to work from four to noon. In other companies, it’s impossible to do that, to change your hours the day before. So, the day before, I put my alarm clock forward by half an hour and I came; for me, that’s where real happiness lies! (Operator, Isolec, 22/03/2017)

The control of time has been one of the major modes of domestication of the working class. Industrial capitalism imposed a discipline based on compulsory schedules, with ever more regular, accelerated and synchronised rhythms, measured by ever more precise clocks and watches. The working class has long resisted the new temporal norms, assimilating them without ever fully adapting to them (Thompson, 2004). Even today, to a large extent, autonomy in the management of working time is what distinguishes upper class employees from those in the working class (Chenu, 2002). For workers, the cooperative spirit is defined first and foremost by the right to a certain degree of autonomy in the organisation of their working time, which brings both a relaxation of constraints and a symbolic gratification.

However, this relative freedom is also a source of tension. The same respondents who emphasise its advantages often complain about those who abuse it, arrive late, extend breaks, are absent too often, and generally put little effort into their work^[9]. At Isolec, these denunciations are omnipresent: the absence of supervision in the workshops and the benevolence of the manager are thus sources of both satisfaction and frustration. The same Isolec operator who spoke of the happiness of being able to change his hours goes on to talk about the sadness of others’ abuses. In his opinion, the cooperative members, who continue to define themselves as workers facing a boss, still retain many ‘mind barriers’, to the point of adopting the same braking strategies as in capitalist companies.

The SCOP for me had an anarchic side, which I liked a lot. Anarchy in the noble sense of the word, we agree: not chaos, but the fact that there is no power. That’s what I saw. And I’m disappointed. It’s a great sadness for me. I realise today that if you are not behind people to make them work, they don’t work. It’s a great disappointment for me.

A. C.: Although it is their own company?

Yes. Most of them still talk about management. Whereas for me, P. is not a director but has the function of a director. There are these divisions as soon as there’s a problem, it’s like ‘Oh, the workers are a pain in the ass. Ah, the management…’. That’s disappointing to me. And I can see that most of the people here won’t dedicate more than 20 minutes to finish a piece, even though it’s for them. They may say outside: ‘We’re all bosses, blah, blah, blah’, but they don’t act like that. For example, we are asked to make 40 pieces. If I’m at 40 at 11 o’clock, well, I’ll do 44 or 46, that’s good! That’s 10% more. When we know that on the market we are 5% more expensive, so if at my level I do 10% more, that’s good! Most of them, if at 11 o’clock they have done their 40 pieces, they stop. That’s what disappoints me. These are people who haven’t understood that we work for ourselves. They haven’t understood that we are no longer in the era of M. (the multinational). I was criticised for doing too much! I got into trouble! So that’s a speech I’d expect to hear if we were M., because I’m not interested in making shareholders rich! […] Now we all arrive when we want. It’s alright, it’s a SCOP. But that’s not the point. We’re supposed to be at 7 a.m. in front of our machines, yet people arrive at the workshop door at 7:10 a.m., says hello to all their mates and start at a quarter to 8! It’s too much. ‘How are you doing? Yesterday’s match? How’s that?’ That’s how the day starts. It’s great fun! No stress here! There’s a word that doesn’t exist here, stress. But there’s not much performance either. (Operator, Isolec, 22/03/2017)

The SCOP does not transform certain entrenched dimensions of the relationship with work and class relations. This respondent, the son of small shopkeepers who worked for a time in his parents’ business, can all the more consider that he ‘works for himself’ because this conviction is the result of family socialisation. Class differences do not disappear with the change of company. Separated geographically by a large courtyard, the employees in the offices and those in the workshops are also separated by their social properties: in the administrative building, the employees and managers are more often women, graduates, and newer in the SCOP; in the workshops, there are only men, few have a degree and, in some cases, they are very senior in the company. The former have a vision of the cooperative spirit that supposes an intensification of the work of the latter; the latter, on the contrary, denounce the increasing ‘pressure’ which is exerted on them today and which deviates from the cooperative spirit as they conceive it.

This is how we should understand the tensions surrounding time availability. Managers and executives frequently deplore the fact that workers are less involved and reluctant to come to work or to attend a meeting outside their regular time. If the interest in selflessness is more marked among members of the dominant classes, who receive more symbolic dividends from being in a cooperative, the workers have other symbolic gratifications to defend, including in particular autonomy in the management of their working time: a form of emancipation in relation to time discipline, but also to the arbitrariness of bosses.

Class positions and positions in the division of labour are central to understanding conceptions of legitimate employee participation. For managers and graduates, it is participation in decision-making bodies that is important, defined in terms of its economic dimension in entrepreneurial SCOPs (buying shares, voting at general meetings), and in terms of its cultural dimension in militant SCOPs (expressing oneself and defending one’s opinion in meetings). For workers and technicians, it is in the workplace that democracy must be embodied, in terms of the right to intervene in the production process or in terms of freedom in the organisation of one’s work and protection against arbitrary decisions. These are all socially differentiated ways of conceiving democracy in SCOPs, which are far from always converging. Though they are sources of tension within companies, they also define a plurality of possible contributions to the collective project.

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