Dispute Resolution in a Worker Cooperative: Formal Procedures and Procedural Justice

While must research on workplace grievance resolution focuses on hierarchical settings, this study examines grievance resolution in a worker cooperative, a workplace mutually owned and democratically managed. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews and observations, this research explores how workers' perceptions of procedural justice influence their anticipated grievance strategies. Despite working side by side in the same organization, both men and women had very different experiences regarding procedural justice and dispute resolution. For men, working at a cooperative meant informal dispute resolution strategies, while the women cited the cooperative identity as empowering them to use formal grievance procedures. In contrast to much extant research on grievance resolution that examines hierarchical settings, this study focuses on a worker cooperative, a cooperatively owned and democratically managed workplace. In addition to collectively sharing ownership, worker cooperatives embrace egalitarian ideologies and utilize flattened workplace hierarchies with few levels of formal supervision. Thus, in both concept and form, worker cooperatives offer a contrast to the more commonly studied conventional, hierarchical workplace and provide an excellent opportunity to investigate dispute resolution in an arena that challenges many assumptions about workplace power (Cornforth et al. 1988; Linehan & Tucker 1983). The differences within workplaces' formal power structures often influence the grievance resolution strategies that workers anticipate using (Kleinman 1996; Tucker 1999). Therefore, one might expect that dispute resolution strategies in a worker cooperative would differ from those found in conventional businesses. In particular, the gender differences documented in various studies of grievance resolution (e.g., Bumiller 1988; Calhoun & Smith 1999; Fletcher 1999; Gwartney-Gibbs & Lach 1992, 1994a; Iannello 1992; Lind, Huo, & Tyler 1994; Miller 1992) could be transformed in a workplace that flattens formal hierarchies of power. The hurdles women face in successfully raising grievances in hierarchical organizations may be absent in worker cooperatives, resulting in women's anticipated use of formal grievance procedures being similar to their male co-workers. Or informal power and other societal inequalities may sufficiently permeate cooperative workplaces and perpetuate the difficulties women contend with in formal grievance resolution. As a study of people's conceptualizations, this article explores differences in access to informal and formal grievance resolution options. Using ethnographic methods of interview and observation, this study investigates perceptions of justice among members of a worker cooperative and examines men's and women's strategies for grievance resolution. This article focuses on one business: Coop Cab, a taxicab company that is owned and operated by its employees. This study found that these men and women anticipated using different means to seek justice. Men foresaw themselves resolving grievances informally, hesitating to embrace the formality of the grievance procedures. In addition, they were reluctant to risk damaging their relationships with their male supervisors by using the formal grievance procedures. By contrast, women more often anticipated using the formal process, seeing this as their only option for addressing their grievances. The women voiced no ideological opposition to resolving grievances informally but simply lacked access to the networks necessary to accomplish informal resolution. Thus, men and women each were left with only one dispute resolution strategy. I begin this article by presenting a discussion of procedural justice, worker cooperatives, and dispute resolution. Then I explain the data collection methods and describe this study's research setting: a worker cooperative. Next, I present differences in workers' grievance strategies, found along gender lines, and develop a qualitative analysis of these data, focused on issues of worker access and perceptions of justice. …