Scientific Output

Distorted vulnerability: the paradox between the discourse and the reality of women’s work within an industrial worker cooperative

Ada Reichhart

Travail, genre et sociétés, vol. 50, no. 2, 2023, pp. 117-134

Summary: Worker cooperatives (Scop in France) present themselves as a democratic alternative to the unequal organization of labor. However, this study of an industrial worker cooperative shows how the relegation of women to positions defined by their “smallness” has been justified in the long run by essentializing women’s vulnerability, which is understood to mean that they have frail bodies. However, as all employees paradoxically admitted, the positions occupied by women are actually among the most exacting. This process of invisibilization of women’s laborious work has contributed to distorting the notion of vulnerability, whose disconnection from lived experience has been a source of tension. The result is a contradiction between the social representation of vulnerability and the reality of the use and exposure of bodies within a company where this dimension is nevertheless essential, thus calling into question the underlying democratic promise of worker cooperatives.

https://www.cairn.info/revue-travail-genre-et-societes-2023-2-page-117.htm