Worker Cooperatives as incubators of democratic people
Worker-owner cooperatives may very well be incubators of democratic people, a place where people shaped and conditioned to a large degree to fit into a top/down social system can recondition themselves to become relatively autonomous (that is, self-empowering) and cooperative. By cooperative I mean people who are consciously developing themselves to relate as partners, to function in power-with relationships rather than power-over ones. If this is true, then it is a genuinely transformative institution. This is the process I am sensing that takes place in the cooperative business. When someone chooses to become a worker-owner, they are making a profound, against-the-grain life decision that is as deeply political and economic as it is personal. So their motivation to do well here won't be so much for becoming able to move on and up to greener pastures (dollar and career-wise, not ecology-wise). The choice is more along the lines of joining a self-selected family or community of adults, of forming a deep and long partnership with a significant number of people.
I think democracy is a way of life before it is a political system, and that that way of life requires people who can empower themselves and cooperate. As a society we have not figured out how to develop such people, so we don't have the democratic culture that could produce a democratic politics.
So, to a certain degree, they are stuck with their choice as one is when one marries. Worker-owners seem to be saying to each other that we here for the long haul so we need to make this work, to do what is necessary to bond not just to get along, to figure out how we can care for each other and not just put up with the ways each of us can be a pain in the ass. And each of us needs to take full responsibility for making this business work. We are going to have to think together as well as work together, solve problems together not just point them out. There's no body "up there" or "out there" that is going to make things work. It's us: you, me, and the others, together. And we are going to have to learn how to do this learning because we didn't get much of that kind of training growing-up.
This is what I think Dewey means by saying "democracy is a way of life." And the business element seems crucial. Once someone knows that they can, in Janelle's terms, "occupy their economic being" rather than more or less just fill a job opening, then they tend to get "hooked." And that desire enables them to see that they have to make the business work well enough for everyone involved, and that requires they become leaders among leaders. And the business becomes a relentless source of feedback. If the information systems and the communication among the members are strong, then they keep hearing and finding out what is wrong, what needs to be changed—personally, collectively, and professionally. To the extent that they learn to use this critical information is the extent that they keep empowering themselves as business people, as workers, as mates, as democratic people.
If my impression is correct, then worker owner cooperatives definitely have one kind of a transformative institution for developing a deeply democratic culture.