This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

In this inside look at worker cooperatives, Joan Meyers challenges long-held views and beliefs. From the outside, worker cooperatives all seem to offer alternatives to bad jobs and unequal treatment by giving workers democratic control and equitable ownership of their workplaces. Some contend, however, that such egalitarianism and self-management come at the cost of efficiency and stability, and are impractical in the long run. Working Democracies focuses on two worker cooperatives in business since the 1970s that transformed from small countercultural collectives into thriving multiracial and largely working-class firms. She shows how democratic worker ownership can provide stability and effective business management, but also shows that broad equality is not an inevitable outcome despite the best intentions of cooperative members. Working Democracies explores the interconnections between organizational structure and organizational culture under conditions of worker control, revealing not only the different effects of managerialism and "participatory bureaucracy," but also how each bureaucratic variation is facilitated by how workers are defined by at each cooperative. Both bureaucratic variation and worker meanings are, she shows, are consequential for the reduction or reproduction of class, gender, and ethnoracial inequalities. Offering a behind the scenes comparative look at an often invisible type of workplace, Working Democracies serves as a guidebook for the future of worker cooperatives.

Employee Ownership Through ESOPs: Implications for the Public Corporation summarizes the large body of literature on employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and the phenomenon of employee ownership. The author has discovered and reviewed over 700 articles on the subject in academic and professional journals of business, labor, law, and social science since 1973. The study is divided into four parts. The first part examines law, public policy, and regulation; the status of ESOPs in the publicly held corporation; corporate uses and labor-management roles; the impact of the ESOP on labor-management cooperation and the economic performance of firms; and the future of employee ownership. The second part presents selected case studies which illustrate the range of corporate uses and benefits to workers and the difficult issues these raise. The third part presents abstracts of articles or books that are central to understanding the major findings and implications of employee ownership and gaining an ordered introduction to the field. The fourth part includes references to these abstracted materials and to the subjects discussed in the first and second sections. This study emphasizes the significance of employee ownership to corporate officers, middle managers, union officials, and/or local labor representatives and employee leaders who are associated with a publicly held company.

No detailed description available for "Understanding Employee Ownership".