‘We’re messing up capitalism through collaboration’: transformative labour agency in German worker-led companies
From a labour geography perspective, workers are capable of (re)shaping economic spaces, commonly understood as ‘labour agency’. This article conceptualises and discusses German worker-led companies (WLCs) as sites of ‘transformative labour agency’. It demonstrate how workers consciously alter work and production structures through collective ownership and decision-making. In concert with post-growth research, empirical findings show how workers in German WLCs intentionally align their work structures with socioeconomic transformations beyond economic growth. Examples for transformative labour agency are reductions in working time, definitions of work that include unpaid labour and social reproduction as well as limitations on private profit generation. The article explores how far collectively managing decision-making and ownership can be understood as a way of ‘commoning labour’. It further analyses how German WLCs prefigure post-capitalist work practices in a capitalist present despite institutional constraints.
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