Job quality in worker cooperatives: Beyond degeneration and intrinsic rewards

While there are normally positive expectations con-cerning job quality in cooperatives, many studies havedescribed a more complex picture. The extant liter-ature has, however, found it difficult to deal withevidence of poor working conditions in these organisa-tions.Somecontributionsdownplaytherelevanceofthisissue, arguing that poor extrinsic aspects of job qualityare compensated by intrinsic rewards, as confirmed byhigher levels of job satisfaction. Others focus on externalmarket pressure and interpret bad labour conditions asa form of degeneration of originally good employmentpractices. Through a qualitative analysis of job qualityin cooperatives in three sectors of the Italian economy(social services, hotel cleaning and meat processing), weadvance a different argument: we contend that employ-ment practices associated with poor job quality are notthe result of difficult market conditions but are ratherthe key explanation for the quantitative expansion ofthis form of economic organisation, which has movedfrom being an instrument for promoting good employ-ment to a way of ensuring lower labour costs and higherflexibility within outsourcing relationships.