Workplace Cooperatives of Very Low Income and Immigrant Women in New York City: Meaning Making through Job Crafting and Collective Participation

Background/Purpose

Very low-income women comprise an essential but under-researched workforce in the U.S. and many other most developed economies. These workers are most often at a subsistence-level in their own economies, often living paycheck-to-paycheck, dependent upon “portfolios of the poor” to make sure they have cash flow to meet basic needs, under-banked or unbanked, living in marginal and unstable housing, dependent upon uncertain transportation, and other conditions that make their day-to-day lives uncertain and out of their own control.  A common assumption is that these women have low self-efficacy, a low internal locus of control, and are dispirited at work.

Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), a home health care provider, pioneered the use of the cooperative form of organization for low income and immigrant women in the service economy in NYC.  CHCA began in 1985 with 12 home health aides and today has over 2,000 workers, making it one of the main home health care providers in the NYC area. The pioneering work and success of CHCA has been an inspiration for other low-wage workers to form their own cooperatives in NYC. The purpose of this research is to figure out what mechanisms low income and immigrant women employ to gain more personal and institutional control in their circumstances by interviewing CHCA workers. This research looks at 1) the individual approaches very low wage workers employ to control and find meaning beyond subsistence in their work, and 2) collective organizational approaches to gain more control over workplace conditions and decision making. 

Method

The research, carried out over a two-year period, includes 18 semi-structured interviews of CHCA workers, managers, and supervisors; document reviews; and participant observation of NYC-NOWC meetings and events. The interviews of workers were theoretically coded by one researcher, thematically coded by another researcher, and then triangulated in a final analysis.

Results

The researchers found that the majority of interviewed workers found personal meaning in their work through such means as relating their work to personal experiences such as a relative who needed similar home health care assistance; viewing their work as drawing on professional-level skills and knowledge; understanding benefits of their work to their clients; and identifying resources and opportunities for their career development. The organizational behavior literature refers to such personal meaning making in low-skill/low wage jobs as job crafting (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2013). In addition, this research found that the cooperative management strategies of CHCA, such as job training, good supervision, and scholarship programs through a union, encouraged workers to find the meaning of their job and to develop their professional career plans.

Conclusions and Implications

The paper discusses how job crafting by the women workers promotes individual self-efficacy beyond the typical image of the work of low-wage workers. Additionally, the paper discusses the benefits of cooperatives for low-wage workers, and the conundrum that two competing forms of worker influence in the same organization, cooperatives and unions, may yield benefits but lower a sense of control or influence.