‘It’s not only what we say but what we do’: Pay inequalities and gendered workplace democracy in Argentinian worker coops

Introduction

In my 2006 study of five mixed-sex, worker-led cooperatives in Buenos Aires, in each of the coops all the women and men were paid the same: there were no pay differences between any of the workers, a fact of which they were all demonstratively proud (Oseen, 2008). By 2011, however, only the hotel and the clothing factory, both dominated by female workers, were even close to maintaining equal pay ¹ for every worker. The other three worker coops, a glass factory, a balloon factory and a print shop, all dominated by male workers, and all with even fewer female workers than in 2006, had instituted hierarchical pay scales, paying formerly equally paid workers unequally. What was particularly interesting was that this increase in pay inequality paralleled a decrease in workplace democracy, most clearly evidenced in the glass factory. The fundamental difference which divides worker coops from our usual hierarchical top-down ways of organizing – democratic decisions made in regular general assemblies of one worker one vote – had either seriously declined or disappeared altogether in these three coops, so decisions formerly made by workers had devolved to boards and to non-elected managers. The two issues, an increase in pay inequality and a decrease in worker democracy, went together. The male-dominated worker cooperatives had a much wider range of pay, and opportunities for democratic decision-making by workers were far fewer; the female-dominated cooperatives had a much narrower range of pay, and opportunities for democratic decision-making were much greater.

In terms of these two different outcomes, how did this intertwining of pay and worker democracy happen in these five cooperatives? More specifically, how was this process gendered? And in particular, why does this intertwining of pay and worker democracy matter? In his study of worker-led cooperatives in the Pacific Northwest more than three decades ago, Greenberg (1980) observed that without workplace democracy you can’t ask about what and why others are getting what they are getting. That bald statement is the crux of the matter: it links pay equality to worker democracy, and constitutes part of a larger debate which affects us all, that widening economic inequities pose a threat to democracy as a political system. ² Greenberg’s (1980) observation was echoed almost exactly by one of the workers in a print shop interview in 2011, who told me that ‘if we know what the others are getting, and we’re working as hard as they are, why would we vote to pay them more money than us?’ ³ That was the reason Greenberg (1980) identified workplace democracy as so important: he linked worker ownership and democratic participation in decision-making by the workers as crucial to a narrower range in pay. ⁴ Greenberg (1980), and others writing more recently on worker participation (cf. Blasi and Kruse, 2003; Cotton, 1993; Erdal, 2008; Oakeshott, 2000; Rooney, 1988; Semler, 1993; Wilkinson A et al., 2010) all agreed: it is not worker ownership alone, or worker participation alone, but the two together that results in a narrower range in pay. In other words, they argue, without worker democracy a hierarchical pay scale is inevitable, with all its ramifications.

In their analyses of democratic decision-making and its links to a narrower range of pay among and between all workers, however, what Greenberg (1980) and these other theorists did not address, and which is more specific to my analysis, was the role of gender – or ‘sexual difference’, the Irigarayan term I prefer. To expand very briefly on what ‘sexual difference’ means and why it is central to my argument: for the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, ⁵ the possibility of a contiguous relationship of ‘sexual difference’ next to ‘sexual difference’ which acknowledges and represents both women and men in our symbolic structures (or the words, languages, myths, philosophies, stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world) is either erased or repressed in favour of the myth of ‘sexual indifference’, or the disembodied individual, asexual or sexually indifferent, who, in a subtle re-establishment of the male norm, is capable of representing both women and men in the workplace. This ‘one’ or ‘the same’ or ‘the neutral’ (‘sexually indifferent’ but in reality male) leaves ‘sexual difference’ either unrepresented – absent or erased – or represented only in unacknowledged but male-defined terms in our symbolic structures: woman occupying the symbolic place of ‘the body’, but not her own body, man occupying the place of ‘the mind’, but not only his mind. ⁶ The result is the hierarchical reign of ‘the same’ over the absent or repressed other or ‘the different’, and like all tyrannies, constantly reconfirmed in subtle and omnipresent ways. There is no place for the (sexually) different next to the (sexually) different in our symbolic structures, no place for the representation of difference – however we define difference – as contiguous. In the absence of contiguous relationships among and between the (sexually) different, hierarchy is constantly reaffirmed, including in all organizational relationships. And by extension, then, there is no way of critiquing how opportunities for workplace democracy and the achievement of pay equality between men and women are linked, other than by subtly reconfirming the position of ‘the same’ over ‘the different’, defining women and what they do in the workplace and how they achieve that only in terms of male projections and male representations.

However, unlike the hierarchical and dualistic relationship of ‘the same’/‘the different’ (or sex/gender, male/female, mind/body, public/private) as an analytical category which formulates and maintains the unacknowledged reign of the masculine neutral of our present symbolic structures, to Irigaray the analytical category of (sexual) difference in contiguous relationship to (sexual) difference provides us a way to confront and rethink our present symbolic structures so we can evade the positioning of women as inevitably lesser than the same; it provides us a way to both acknowledge and then to rethink ‘the different’ as next to ‘the different’, including in our organizations. Thus the analytical category of (sexual) difference as contiguous is a form of theorizing which can provide a way to understand women, men and the links between workplace participation and pay (in)equality in ways that are not defined by these hierarchical dualisms of ‘the same’/‘the different’, those which inevitably reconfirm whatever women do in the workplace as lesser than whatever men do.

In terms of categories of analysis, it is this same lack of attention, whether to women, to gender, or to sexual difference that characterizes organizational literature. ⁷ Women in the workplace, including in worker cooperatives, are simply subsumed under the all-encompassing sexually indifferent ‘worker’ category, theoretically neutral but in reality male. Or when women workers do appear, they are confined either within gender as a variable superimposed on a ‘sexless’ or ‘sexually indifferent’ individual, the ‘neutral’ who remains male, or as male-defined projections within unexamined hierarchies, most particularly within the family. In both overt and covert ways, women are constructed and reconstructed as ‘the other’ or as ‘the different’ as lesser than the (masculine) same or the (masculine) neutral. This construction and reconstruction of women as the different or the lesser works concurrently to reaffirm our present hierarchical symbolic structures in which we live, work and act, where men in the guise of the (masculine) neutral create and maintain their dominance over women in the words, languages, stories, myths and philosophies we have available to us. Within these symbolic structures, the hierarchical relationship of sexual indifference to sexual difference reigns. Or to put it more precisely in organizational terms, buttressed within these hierarchical and sexually indifferent symbolic structures, male governance of women in the workplace becomes unremarked, unremarkable, unexplainable and therefore unexplained. But this erasure of women, and the relations of women and men in the workplace, remain a political paradox, considering the ostensible commitment of worker coops to equal pay or at least to more equal pay, and to democratic participation by all for all.

Most recently, and most pertinently for this article, Molyneux (2002) and Miller (2011a, 2011b) attempt to remedy that lack of attention to women, to patriarchy as it circulates in the processes of organizing and to how women might be liberated from male control. Part of a relatively scarce literature on women’s democratic participation in the workplace and its implications (cf. Ramsay and Scholarios, 2005 ⁸ ), Molyneux’s (2002) research on worker cooperatives in Argentina, as well as Miller’s (2011a, 2011b) survey of worker coops in the US, makes much the same point as Greenberg (1980) and those more recent researchers, but with a clearly different focus. Molyneux (2002) argues specifically that without workplace democracy linked to the commitment to equal pay, there is no way to contest a state that is using – as it has historically – women’s unpaid or poorly paid labour to start and maintain cooperatives. Put simply, the state has no interest in ensuring that women are liberated from male control because it does not ensure through regulation or laws that women are paid equally in order that they might live autonomously from men, ‘to pay their own rent’, to evoke her argument. Similarly, Miller (2011a, 2011b) points out that women workers are segregated into the least advantageous, most poorly paid jobs with few opportunities for decision-making, despite women’s comparable skills, and despite worker cooperatives’ emphasis on democracy and egalitarianism.

Very importantly, this is not to argue that women are less skilled, only that their skills are evaluated as lesser using criteria that are geared to recognize that what men work at is deemed skilled, but what women do is deemed innate and therefore not skilled, and not paid for (see Acker, 1989; see also Armstrong and Armstrong, 1993; Guy and Killingsworth, 2007; Guy and Newman, 2004). This is a common finding in the feminist organizational literature devoted to an examination of how criteria based on the unacknowledged male norm are used to keep women in low paid, low status jobs (see Acker, 1989; Amsden, 1980; Armstrong and Armstrong, 1993; Babcock and Laschever, 2003; Benschop et al., 2001; Guy and Killingsworth, 2007; Guy and Newman, 2004; Rowe, 1995), and replicates the literature focused on pay systems and equality between women and men. Only piece rates, or strict attention to numbers, resulted in women being paid for their work in a comparable way to men (Jirjahn and Gesine, 2004). All other pay systems resulted in discrepancies that could not be explained (Arup and Stroh, 2001; Dwyer et al., 2003; Elvira and Graham, 2002; Geddes and Heywood, 2003, Onge, 2000; Rynes and Gerhart, 2004; Terpstra and Honoree, 2003; Werner and Ward, 2004).

Both Molyneux (2002) and Miller (2011a, 2011b) as well as the earlier feminist literature on worker coops they reflect (cf. Gerritsma, 1986; Wajcman, 1983) emphasize the links between worker democracy and equal pay which operate as an intertwined mechanism for removing male control of women. That focus provides me as well with a way to address how an increase in pay inequities combined with a decrease in worker democracy happened and how that process was gendered. However, although both Molyneux (2002) and Miller (2011a, 2011b) address women, coops and patriarchal organizing, neither author addresses the construction and reconstruction of sexual difference as lesser. Nor does their work allow me to address how the former contiguous or side-by-side relationship of women and men in the worker coops was abandoned in favour of a pay hierarchy that privileged the same (or the unacknowledged masculine neutral) over the different, rather than the (sexually) different next to the (sexually) different, sexual difference next to sexual difference, exemplified in one member, one vote and equal pay to every member, male and female. Unlike Molyneux (2002) and Miller (2011a, 2011b), therefore, I will focus much more specifically on how sexual difference is constructed in the language used by the workers in the group interviews, in order to ascertain how workplace democracy, pay equality and sexual difference next to sexual difference intertwine.

Thus, keeping in mind this focus, in the first section of the article I discuss the female-dominated hotel and the clothing factory coops, and in the second section, the male-dominated glass factory coop (with brief references to the print shop and the balloon factory coops). To further analyse these coops, I use three areas the workers themselves focused on. These inevitably intertwined areas or preoccupations are what the workers talked to me about, and what they returned to again and again; it is what they wanted to explain to me, to emphasize so that I got it, so that I clearly understood what it was that they wanted to say (cf. Gatenby and Humphries, 2000; Jackson, 2006; Lennie, 1999; Wilkinson, 1998). ⁹ They would reassert the value or humanity of the worker in the face of alienating capitalism, and combine this with an explanation of how workers became collective owners, or how they became ‘more than workers, less than bosses’ (Raimbeau, 2005: 11): it was a process they emphasized which was crucial to the success of the cooperative. At the same time they would also emphasize to me their commitment to continued employment of the workers despite the vagaries of the economy, or more stable employment but less stable wages, which they acknowledged caused conflict among them – ‘that is when we would fight’. ¹⁰ In addition, they told me of their struggle to figure out how to define and then to pay for additional responsibility and expertise and how difficult that was, given their professed commitment to pay equality for all the workers.

Interestingly enough, however, although all the coops were mixed-sex, these conversations seldom focused specifically on relations between women and men in the workplace: in that, they were similar to the literature on worker cooperatives and the specific literature on worker cooperatives in Argentina. ¹¹ Gender, or my preferred term, sexual difference, was not directly addressed, let alone analysed as created and recreated as lesser than the same in an unacknowledged but male-dominated symbolic structure that requires the subordination of women to maintain its coherence. In other words, in the female-dominated coops they did not talk about the differences between women and men, or differences between the women. But as Derrida has pointed out, the repressed always returns, and references to the head of the household, the family, maternity, genealogy all surfaced in their conversations about alienating capitalism, their commitment to jobs, to stable employment if not stable wages, and their commitment to pay equality. It was as if they knew that they should not talk about women and men since they were all the same, all workers, but they could not help it – whatever they had to say to me, the relations between women and men were always an identifiable subtext. All I had to do was listen.

In the same sense that the repressed always returns, the conversations were similar in the glass factory, which was even more male-dominated in 2011 than in 2006. The men there did not talk at all about the women, but the women did talk – a lot – about the men, and about the women who had once worked on the factory floor, but who did so no longer. Sexual difference, and the symbolic structures in which we live, act and define what we have done, or are about to do, was a constant presence even in its absence. This absence was the most identifiable in the glass factory discussions by the women still working there in administrative jobs, who kept returning to what had happened to the women workers on the factory floor, those who once had made ‘the men tremble’ when they walked in as a group to the general assembly. The relations between women and men remained, even if by 2011 the women were either gone completely, as on the factory floor, or segregated into administrative jobs, where there were no men.

The hotel and the clothing factory cooperatives

Glass factory cooperative: ‘We don’t have many assemblies now’

In this second part of the article I focus on the glass factory, since of the three male-dominated cooperatives, this had the most transparent link between the increase in the range of pay and the decrease in the number of general assemblies where workers could vote on major decisions. The factory, abandoned by the original owner, and where the original ‘recoverers’ had spent six months chipping out the glass from the oven, where the women from the original group told me that they were ‘like ants together’, where they had begged in the street for food in order to keep going, but the men had not, too proud to beg: the glass factory is now overwhelmingly male.

The glass factory was also the most interesting of the coops I had researched five years previously because it had been the most innovative in terms of flattening the hierarchies between coordinators and workers, ²³ where women simply ‘changed the rules’ to suit their needs. These women were quite focused on figuring out how to combine their work and caring responsibilities, in spite of barriers, like the lack of tax supported child or elder care, or ‘structured social arrangements’ (Wajcman, 1983: 5) which have a particular and invidious impact on women. Unlike their male compatriots, the women workers, then about 10% of the workforce on the factory floor, had dispensed completely with the coordinator function; they talked among themselves what to do and how to do it and when, using cell-phones to keep in touch, and it all seemed to work. It was the exemplification of what coordination could mean, erasing the last vestiges of any form of supervision, or the authority system which Pateman (1988, 1989) has analysed as a covert form of patriarchal control of women, or the governance of women by men.

However, five years later, every one of the group of around 20 women I had interviewed in 2006 had gone, with various – and unclear – reasons provided to me. By 2009, the same year the glass oven ‘collapsed’, which necessitated a brand new oven and resulted in a tremendous amount of economic stress, those women had all left. This was explained to me in my 2011 interview as ‘the women were more straightforward than the men, but that caused conflict, so the women left’, and that the women ‘complained’ too much. That was not entirely surprising to me, since that same group of women had told me in 2006 that ‘when they walked into the general assembly, the men trembled’. I was also told in 2011 that ‘the men didn’t want to work with the women’, which seems the flip side of the same coin, and exemplifies what both Miller (2011a, 2011b) and Molyneux (2002) found, that men pushed back when they felt that women were trespassing on their territory, when they were moving too far from what the men considered to be their acceptable position in the workplace. ²⁴ These women weren’t deferential enough, if at all, and they had taken too seriously their presumed solidarity from when they all chipped out the glass in the early years, when they all worked, undifferentiated, ‘like ants’, with the men.

By 2011 there were only two women working on the factory floor, shy and nearly silent young women with none of the brashness of the previous group, and only a handful of other women working either as administrators or as consultants. I interviewed three of the administrators and the two young women on the factory floor because I was primarily interested in why there were so few women left, and how that was related to the increase in pay inequity and to the decline in the number of general assemblies. ‘We don’t have many assemblies now’, the three female administrators told me. One aspect that may have lead to the rapid decline in the number of women was that extra money had been spent on mechanization, but it had been directed to where the men were working, not where the women were. The women ‘complained’ about their sore backs, but the front-end loaders went to the men – an outcome very similar to the literature which underlines the way that technological advancements work to benefit the men (cf. Miller, 2011a, 2011b; Molyneux, 2002; Sundin, 1998). To all intents and purposes, by 2009 the factory floor had been cleared of women, and shortly after, the number of general assemblies declined.

The glass factory was also the only coop to hire MBAs from the University of Buenos Aires, and the only one of the cooperatives to institute a hierarchical pay scale of five levels, based on the level of risk and skill, notoriously hard to define, ²⁵ and much more complicated than the hierarchical pay scales of the print shop and the balloon factory. Each of these five levels was further evaluated from A through D on the basis of being a good compañero, which the three administrators explained to me was hard to define; having solidarity, equally hard to define; and arriving to work on time, harder to define than I would have thought, since even quantifying lateness seemed fraught. This was a classification system linked to a pay system which was imposed by the board and by management on the workers; I was told emphatically by the three women administrators that it was not voted on by the general assembly, and that, furthermore, the workers had not wanted it. They also emphasized to me that the evaluations were carried out by coordinators who were no longer voted into their positions by the general assembly; because of charges of favouritism, some of the coordinators were chosen solely by the board, but that did not seem to ensure that the evaluations were done fairly. These evaluations resulted in work bonuses on top of workers’ basic pay of 2850 pesos per month. The top level of the five pay scales, all on the factory floor where only two women remained, paid 4000 pesos a month for machine work. There was an 8% premium for coordinators, none of whom were women. Of the original 80 founders only 20, all men, remained, each receiving an extra 300 pesos, or nearly 10% on the basic amount per month. It was just as Molyneux (2002) had pointed out: the women were crucial to the beginning of the coop, but they were not kept on.

When I asked the three administrative staff, two young women and an older woman, what they remembered from when the coop decided to pay different levels rather than paying everyone the same as it had initially, the three women together made two key points. They emphasized first the decline in democratic decision-making, and secondly, they emphasized that there were immediate difficulties in conducting fair evaluations for pay based on the five levels and the A–D range by the elected and non-elected coordinators. They told me that ‘the people felt really bad; they didn’t want to pay differently. [But] there was a meeting among the coordinators who said: “scale system” ’, stressing to me that there was a link between the imposed scale or differential pay system and that ‘we don’t have too many assemblies now’. The three women emphasized to me to make sure I understood that if the workers had had their way, there wouldn’t be a scale system, but that without the democracy of the general assemblies, the workers were forced to accede to management. In their minds the workers would not have done that if they had been able to vote (cf. Greenberg, 1980; Miller, 2011a, 2011b). It was then left up to the coordinators, they told me, not all of whom had been elected, to ‘explain to the people and tell them about the classifications’, and how these evaluations resulted in about 15 ‘with low marks [who] complained [of a total of 130] and who talked to the board to argue for higher classification’.

I asked the three women what they had thought about the evaluation, and they answered with analyses of how difficult it was to evaluate fairly, that ‘It depends too much on the coordinator, and some made mistakes’, especially, they told me, in terms of who was late and who was not. Since lateness should have been one of the easiest to determine, and the least prone to error, that by itself calls into question the credibility of the other evaluations. They did not dispute how the categories were defined, but they did tell me that the content of the categories caused problems. When I asked how that had happened, they linked that to the coordinators, telling me that, ‘The people here agree … [that] the problem is with the coordinator, and they need to share with everyone and use evidence; they need more evidence: dedication, on time, commitment, knowledge, companionship, solidarity.’ They acknowledged together that there was ‘lots of subjectivity’. When I asked ‘who evaluates well, and why or why not?’, they emphasized that: ‘A good coordinator helps, covers for others, we know each other’s jobs, we started from scratch with each other, but now we specialize.’ It was an acknowledgement that detailed knowledge of the job itself is key, but that there were also problems with friends evaluating friends. I asked who had decided on the categories of analysis, and they told me: ‘The general coordinators, the administration, and the new guys who were hired [from the government, with MBAs]. They wanted to make a difference to reward those who worked hard, but not only about knowledge. They wanted to reward people who were on time.’ As Miller (2011a, 2011b) pointed out in her survey, and as Wajcman (1983) and my own previous research has indicated, women changed the rules to accommodate their other responsibilities, so being on time would likely be a harsher imposition on those who had additional responsibilities than on those who did not.

I also asked how the workers were paid by category. They told me that ‘Jobs which are riskier are paid more, as well as those with knowledge like mechanics, engineers are level 1. Level 4: not risky, not knowledgeable.’ Furthermore, ‘each category is split from A [good] – D [poor]’. Whatever men were doing, which by the criteria chosen was both risky and knowledgeable, was rewarded in the classification system, but the only area women worked in, in administration, wasn’t – it was defined as neither risky nor knowledgeable. ²⁶ Furthermore, evaluations based on being a good compañero and having solidarity would not have resulted in an A for the women who did work on the factory floor, who were deemed too ‘straightforward’, who ‘complained too much’ about the allocation of resources, or who caused too much ‘conflict’ over who got what, all statements made to me about the previous group of women who had worked on the factory floor and why they had left. These are all very similar to Acker’s (1989) and Guy and Newman’s (2004) arguments regarding the organizational and gendered politics underlying job classification (cf. Guy and Killingsworth, 2007), and certainly evident in much of the work done on pay as inextricably gendered ²⁷ – the outcome obvious even in a cursory statistical overview. The five levels, and the categories within the five levels, were recipes for silence about male–female relations at work, and all the fraught politics within, as Martin noted in her classic article on the suppression of male–female conflict (cf. Martin, 1990), or the conflict between the male and female workers on the factory floor these three women told me about, which was blamed on the women for being too ‘straightforward’ – or not deferential enough, to put it another way. I asked whether these problems with evaluation and categorization were discussed in the general assembly, but they told me that: ‘No, we don’t talk about it, we talk about it in the coordinators’ meeting. In the General Assembly we were asked for more commitment, people said “yeah yeah” but complained in corridors [about each other].’

At this point in the interview, the older woman, who had spoken very little, interrupted the two younger ones. She was more radical than her much younger colleagues; they had told me that women caused ‘too much conflict’ and that therefore they didn’t like women, telling me quite explicitly: ‘two of us are against women’. ²⁸ The older woman didn’t directly contradict her two younger co-workers, but she stressed that the problems were not because of the women on the factory floor, but because of the decline in involvement by the workers in the coop itself, as democratic owners. She emphasized to me that a lack of democratic involvement produced pay inequities and by extension excluded women from the more lucrative factory floor, explaining that ‘there are some guys who have a problem recognizing women’s capabilities’.

When I asked her why this had happened, she replied that for her, not only was there a decline in worker democracy which resulted in a much more hierarchical pay scale which also paralleled the exclusion of women from the well-paid factory floor job, but that it was firmly rooted in the workers not knowing how to be ‘more than workers, less than bosses’. She told me that ‘In my opinion people still act like employees and they still don’t recognize that this belongs to everyone, so we are still setting up courses to teach cooperatives, compulsory courses maybe during work time. In the past maybe 20 [of 130] showed up.’ I asked why, if people had started this coop together, if women and men had ‘worked like ants together’, if the women had begged in the streets, why do the workers not feel that this belongs to them? She replied, ‘They still feel like employees, and almost everyone has left; only 20 from the original 100 are still here [and none of the women I talked to five years previously]. These 20 are very committed, but even they still “take orders” rather than decide together.’ She deliberately used the word ‘employees’ rather than ‘workers’ to make the point that they still did not feel like workers and therefore equals, but as subservient employees, waiting to be told what to do. She continued, stating, ‘Lots left, and when things picked up, they applied again to work, but they didn’t know how to be cooperative.’ Solidarity had declined, and the workers could not seem to figure out a way to teach how to think of oneself as ‘more than a worker, less than a boss’. They were not able to make that leap that the hotel coop and the clothing factory workers had, who had figured out a way to create a collective rather than an individual consciousness – managing to go from ‘I to we’, in the words of the woman in the hotel coop. They were not able to represent each in relationship with the other, the contiguity of we, the next to the next, expressing by necessity a contiguous relationship between or among those who are ‘we’ which is not contained in the phrase ‘you and me’. Instead, what the glass factory workers had managed to do was expel those ‘uppity’ women, the different from the same, reinstating pay hierarchies and ending solidarity among and between workers, the collective ‘we’, essential to the ongoing involvement of the workers in their own governance through one member one vote.

I asked the older woman what to her were the important principles of being cooperative, and she told me that ‘First [there needs to be] a lot of information about what this place was like and what we did. It belongs to us, and it’s very important to act like that.’ That is not precisely what one of the younger woman wanted me to understand. To her working in the cooperative is about conveying information, not learning how to be cooperative. Hers was a technocratic approach, summed up as don’t break anything. As she told me, ‘when I do interviews, I give them a summary of how we were, and how we are all in this together – so don’t be careless’. To her it was no longer about being involved, whereas the older woman’s emphasis was on worker involvement as the crucial basis for solidarity.

It is this lack of solidarity exemplified in the exclusion of the women from relatively well-paid jobs on the glass factory floor that may explain both the decline in the number of general assemblies – ‘we hardly have any anymore’ – and the move to unequal pay. Without solidarity among and between workers, without women being able to retain their place on the factory floor, the workers complained, said ‘yeah, yeah’ at the assemblies, but did not link worker involvement in assemblies to equal pay – and lost that sense of owning the factory, of being more than a worker, less than a boss. They lost the ‘we’, the next to the next, (sexual) difference next to (sexual) difference; they resumed a relationship of sexual hierarchy, where men dominated women, and ‘the different’ was once again lesser than ‘the same’. The workers were not able to maintain equal pay, and the expulsion of ‘the different’ ensured it. It was not only that the women went into the general assemblies and made the men ‘tremble’, although given the patriarchal culture of Argentina (cf. Diaz, 2007; Molyneux, 1986, 2002), that was part of it. Without a democratic mechanism to resolve conflict, especially between women and men, there was no way to articulate and reconcile differing views, no way of surfacing conflict between women and men in a patriarchal society, where it is safer and easier for some women to pretend this conflict is those other women’s fault, and certainly easier for men, who then do not have to analyse or justify their dominance, dominance which reveals the contradictions in an ostensibly egalitarian worker cooperative. ²⁹

Thus, it was the challenge to a culture of machismo that the too ‘straightforward’ women who caused too much conflict and who complained too much posed, intertwined with a lack of solidarity, of working collectively in the glass factory cooperative. Instead of everyone, women and men, learning how to be ‘more than a worker, less than a boss’, of learning how to move from ‘I’ to ‘we’, of learning how to articulate and reconcile dissent, the coop resorted to expulsion because the ‘women caused too much conflict’ and the men did not want to work with them anymore. The exclusion of the women from the factory floor – or the expulsion of the different, to use Irigaray’s term (1985, 2000, 2004) – embodied a dysfunctional general assembly at the same time as it heralded a decline in the number of general assemblies. This expulsion of the different and the decline in worker democracy led inexorably to the rise of a quite complicated and highly hierarchical pay scale, aided and abetted by the MBAs from the University of Buenos Aires. In the long run, it was not because someone was late, or lacked solidarity, or was not a good compañero. Without a process to create and recreate the conditions for solidarity among and between all the workers, female and male, how to work together in a collective, how to think as ‘more than a worker’, how to take mutual responsibility for the success of the endeavour, how to make decisions together which did not exclude women (or any one who was identifiably different) from those decisions, and ultimately how to resolve conflict arising from the making of those decisions, ³⁰ cooperatives cannot succeed. They would remain only workers, never getting to ‘more than workers, less than bosses’, truly collective and cooperative, in solidarity with each other, as the hotel cooperative workers took such pains to emphasize.

Conclusion

My question, ‘How did this intertwining of pay and worker democracy happen in these five cooperatives, and more specifically, how was this process gendered?’ cannot be answered without focusing on women and men and how they work together in what were the initially contiguous conditions of the worker-led cooperatives. That question cannot be answered without recognizing that workplace democracy and sexual difference next to sexual difference intertwine, and that hierarchical pay scales, however they are justified, keep women at the bottom and keep worker democracy at bay. Only the two female-dominated cooperatives were able to figure out a way that neither compromised the democratic principles of one worker one vote nor compromised the relatively egalitarian pay scale in the hotel, and the completely egalitarian pay scale in the clothing factory. Nor were the men, a minority in both the hotel and in the clothing factory, pushed out; the workers’ commitment to egalitarian treatment in terms of pay scales extended to their solidarity with each other. It did not, as we have read, in the glass factory. Tough times – the near bankruptcy of the glass factory – followed the expulsion of the women. The creativity that both the hotel and the clothing factory coop counted on in order to learn all the jobs that needed to be done – one woman, for example, stating that she had begun as a housewife, and now she was negotiating with the government – was not possible when there was a hierarchy that must be respected, that hierarchy between men and women. As Molyneux (2002) pointed out, the state does not ensure that women are treated fairly, so there was no way to protest when the technology benefited men, not women, nor when the women were excluded from the factory floor; no way to protest effectively when a hierarchical pay scale was instituted because there was no longer a fully functioning general assembly where all major decisions were made on the basis of one member one vote.

The two cooperatives that seem so far like they will survive, the hotel and the clothing factory, have managed to intertwine democratic accountability through general assemblies where all the important decisions continue to be made, especially about ‘how much we take home’, with a refusal to either expel the different or to initiate highly differentiated pay scales. The glass factory does not seem to embody any of the ways of working that ensure that it can continue to be defined as a worker-led cooperative: there are ‘hardly any general assemblies’, the coordinators or managers are no longer elected by the general assembly, and there is a highly differentiated pay scale, unlikely to increase productivity anyway, if we follow the arguments of the economists specializing in cooperatives. In particular, worker-led cooperatives which expel the different, as the glass factory did, but which the hotel and clothing factory cooperatives did not, likely undercut what makes it possible to work together in solidarity – the ability to deal with difference as contiguous rather than as a barrier to equality (cf. Atwood and Beaulieu, 1998; Richler, 2006; Welsh, 2004). Equality, and difference understood as contiguous, (sexual) difference next to (sexual) difference, to underscore Irigaray, is fundamental to the success of worker-led cooperatives. Hierarchies among and between workers, however they are justified – whether they are part of the myth of ‘sexual indifference’, or the disembodied individual, asexual or sexually indifferent, who is capable of representing both women and men in the workplace; or combined with the differential pay scales inherent in competitive capitalism which the workers so eloquently criticized – can only harm worker cooperatives, which depend on all forms of equality for their success. Thus, in the absence of workplace democracy and a commitment to equal pay, as Molyneux (2002) argues and as this study supports, women are further embedded in male-defined roles which preclude an analysis of gendered power relations, and which perpetuate patriarchal control of women’s work for men’s own ends.