by Laura Hanson Schlachter

The United States is experiencing an explosion of interest in worker cooperatives: firms owned and democratically governed by workers according to the principle of one worker, one vote.  According to a forthcoming report by the Democracy at Work Institute, two-thirds of American worker co-ops formed after 2000 and the sector has grown 8.5 percent since 2013.

Although some of the energy is coming from longtime employee ownership advocates, a surprising number of unions are also wading into the worker co-op development game.

Union interest was catalyzed, in part, by a 2009 agreement to promote union co-ops between the United Steelworkers (USW) and the Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain.  The agreement marked a turning point in the debate about whether unions and worker co-ops are stronger together.  It also helped inspire a new generation of start-up efforts explicitly emulating the USW-Mondragon model.

Democratic worker ownership can offer employment stability, solidarity, wealth accumulation, and other benefits to workers.  Yet scaling up worker co-ops is no easy task.  Low formation rates, cultural individualism, lack of financing, and unwieldy governance structures are major constraints.

Can directly engaging unions in the worker cooperative formation process help make democratic worker ownership more widely available to workers?

In a recent study, I identify six possibilities and dilemmas of union involvement in worker cooperative development through a case study of the Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative.  This nonprofit incubator has launched three union co-ops since 2011 and become a hub for efforts to implement the USW-Mondragon model across the country.

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by Laura Doering and Sarah Thébaud

Sociologists have long argued that we don’t just gender-stereotype individual men and women. We gender-stereotype jobs as well. For instance, we tend to think of firefighters as masculine and preschool teachers as feminine.

This kind of stereotyping has important implications for all kinds of labor market outcomes. It shapes applicant pools, hiring decisions, pay, and performance evaluations, among other things.

But how quickly do jobs get gender stereotyped in the first place? And to what extent do such stereotypes affect the authority that men and women experience? Our research reveals that when we attach gender stereotypes to jobs, both women and men can experience disadvantage.

In our recently published study, we looked at how clients responded to managers in a job that was not already gender-stereotyped because it was relatively new and gender-balanced in its composition: a commercial microfinance loan manager.

Since this job had no clear gender association, we reasoned that clients would treat the role as masculine or feminine based on the first person with whom they interacted. That is, if a client was first paired with a male manager, that client would come to treat the role as if it were a “man’s job.” And if a client was first paired with a woman, he or she would treat the role as if it were a “woman’s job.”

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by Alexandra Killewald and Ian Lundberg

On average, in the United States, men earn more per hour when married than when single, even after adjusting for differences such as age and education. However, despite the suggestive evidence that marriage may exert a causal effect on men’s wages, we argue that closer inspection reveals little evidence of such a link.

Why might marriage increase men’s wages?

A prominent theory, originally advanced by Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker argues that couples tend to divide labor, with husbands specializing in paid work and wives in housework and child care. According to this theory, husbands can invest more time and effort in paid employment because they are freed from housework, thereby becoming more productive and earning higher wages. Prior tests of this theory by Hersch and Stratton and Pollmann-Schult, however, suggest that the division of labor within the household is not a satisfactory explanation. For one thing, men’s wages do not suddenly improve following marriage: men’s rapid wage growth begins before the marriage date and before the couple is living together, when it is implausible that men are already benefiting from a household division of labor.

Nevertheless, marriage might lead to wage growth for men for other reasons. One possibility is that it exerts a “settling down” effect on men that pays dividends at work. Marriage might also motivate men to seek higher-wage jobs in order to provide financially for their new family. While marriage licenses are signed on a specific day, relationships culminating in marriage typically develop over several years. If marital relationships induce men to behave in ways that increase their wages, unusually rapid increases in men’s wages prior to marriage may indicate that men begin to adjust their behavior in anticipation of marriage.

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