Abstract

"Cooperative Businesses, Model Employers or Labor’s Foes? The Case of Wisconsin in the 1930s"

Alexia Blin, Sorbonne Nouvelle (alexia.blin@gmail.com)

The 1930s were the peak of cooperative businesses in the United States, for farmers as well as consumers. Most of them were located in the Midwest, and Wisconsin was a prominent cooperative state. Cooperatives have a dual nature: they are both bona fide businesses, operating on a competitive market, and alternatives to traditional corporations, often born in a context of antimonopolist struggle.
What part has labor played in the cooperators’ claim to build more democratic businesses? This paper argues that the 1930s, in the context of the Great Depression and increasing workers’ protections offered by New Deal legislation, are a great vantage point to unpack the cooperative model’s ambiguities toward labor. With the rare exception of the worker coops, cooperative members did not define the place held by labor in the model they sought to create. They were shaping a business working for its members, and that did not imply thinking through their role as bosses, despite claims by some of the most committed cooperators to be model employers.
Relying on 1930s academic and public studies, cooperative business records, cooperative press, as well as elements of oral history, this paper aims to assess the role of Wisconsin cooperators as employers in the 1930s. Business as well as labor historians have very rarely studied cooperatives in the United States, while cooperative activists have tended to write a heroic history of their movement. This paper argues that cooperators actually contributed in contradictory ways to the history of labor in the 1930s. While they offered employment to otherwise marginalized individuals in a context of crisis, their businesses were also ripe with workplace conflicts. Besides, part of Wisconsin cooperators happened to be at the forefront of antilabor lobbying in 1939, in a movement that anticipated the postwar backlash against the Wagner Act.