Nick Cohen
SURF Final Research Summary
Sentence Summary
I am interested in researching the history of Workers’ Cooperatives, particularly in the United
States throughout the 20th century.
Abstract
The focus of my summer project was primary source research on the American Self-Help
Cooperative movement during the Great Depression. The goal of my research was to achieve a
thorough historical understanding of significant American cooperative movements, so that I may
illustrate their effect on the lived experience of participating workers in my senior honors thesis.
To this end, I analyzed multiple articles from ten different mainstream and alternative
newspapers. Additionally, I consulted government and other publications from the time period
dealing with the Self-Help movement. Through my research, I learned that large numbers of
people unemployed by the Great Depression organized into cooperatives out of practical need to
acquire certain goods and services through barter and without the use of money. Furthermore, I
learned that these cooperatives were eventually endorsed and funded by the Federal Emergency
Relief Administration, given that Self-Help was viewed as a cost-saving relief measure. I was
able to conclude that cooperation was a way for unemployed people from all socio-economic
backgrounds to improve their immediate situation, motivated primarily by practicality, and less
so by ideology.
Report
When I began my project, I intended to study American worker cooperatives in the
1930’s and 1970’s. I chose those two eras because my preliminary research indicated that highest
amounts of worker cooperation correlate with times of economic recession.1 I sought to compare
the motives, strategies, and outcomes of both eras’ cooperative movements in order to gain
insight into the effectiveness of alternative models of economic organization. I set out with four
main research questions. Firstly, I wanted to examine how exactly workers were motivated to
organize. I wanted to see if cooperative organization arose out of just general poor economic
conditions, or if workers felt particularly exploited and organized in reaction to the actions of
their employers. I had read about cooperatives being started purely out of ideological motives
and also by workers who simply deemed it the most practical choice and I hoped to see what
results both of those situations have led to. Second, I wanted to examine how exactly workplace
democratization was achieved. I had read about many cooperatives following models set by other
successful cooperatives, and I wanted to see if that was always the case or if there were instances
of workers inventing their own ways to spread power in the workplace. Third, I wanted to see
how exactly certain cooperatives achieved successes. I wanted to see if cooperatives were
actually able to improve income distribution or raise the average workers income. Also, I wanted
to look for primary evidence that workers felt the work experience bettered by democratic
practices in the workplace. Lastly, I wanted to examine the factors that lead to the demise of
certain cooperatives. Specifically, I wanted to look at competition with traditional firms as a
possible source of problems for cooperatively owned enterprises.
I spent the majority of my time researching dealing with the University’s collection of
primary sources. The primary sources I looked into the most were newspapers and periodicals;
given that the University has a rather extensive collection of digitized and microfilmed historical
newspapers courtesy of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library. I began my research by
Arie Shirom, “The Industrial Relations Systems of Industrial Cooperatives in the United States, 1880-1935,”
Labor History 4 (1972): 535.
1
going through both the Alternative Press Collection and the Underground Press Collection with
the hopes that I would be able to find publications from both eras that gave attention to Worker
Cooperatives not otherwise found through mainstream sources. I was initially disappointed to
find that while these collections were rather extensive, they mainly consisted of publications
from the later 20th century. I began my research by combing through the microfilms of all the
labor-oriented publications in these collections, unfortunately finding and saving only a handful
of articles relevant to my research questions. After deciding that the Alternative and
Underground Press Collections would not be as fruitful as I had hoped, I refocused the direction
of my research by combing the footnotes of some of the secondary sources I had been previously
consulting. This was immediately more productive. One of the first sources I came across was a
series of five articles written in The San Francisco Chronicle in early 1933 documenting the
Unemployed Exchange Association (UXA) in Oakland. The UXA was one of the largest and
most successful cooperatives of the Self-Help Cooperative movement during the Great
Depression. After seeing a Self-Help Cooperative being documented in a mainstream newspaper,
I searched the L.A. Times for any mention of the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Association
(UCRA), another large Self-Help group founded in Compton in 1932.2 I was surprised to five
nine different articles published in the early thirties discussing both the UCRA and the national
Self-Help movement. I began searching other large newspapers as well as consulting additional
secondary sources dealing with Self-Help Cooperatives and found that the Self-Help movement
and its individual local cooperatives were documented in nearly all of the large mainstream
newspapers I had access too including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The
Washington Post. At this point I decided to devote the rest of my research time to the Self-Help
Laura Renata Martin, “’California’s unemployed feed themselves’: Conservative intervention in the Los Angeles
Cooperative Movement, 1931-1934,” Pacific Historical Review 1 (2013): 34.
2
movement, given that sources I had found both piqued my interest in the movement and gave me
an almost overwhelming amount of information relevant to my research questions. Aside from
scanning mainstream newspapers from the early 1930’s, I also searched several historical black
publications, such as The Pittsburgh Courier and The Atlanta Daily World newspapers in search
of an alternative counterpoint to the mainstream sources. Through these periodicals I was able to
find several articles documenting a black Self-Help Cooperative project in Alabama sponsored
by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and Tuskegee University.
Aside from historical newspapers, I was also able to acquire several other primary and
secondary sources through the university library’s resources. Some primary sources of interest
include a series of articles in the federal government publication Monthly Labor Review as well
as two annual reports from the California State Relief Administration. Both of these sources
provided valuable statistical information on Self-Help Cooperatives for valuable context to
interpret the newspaper sources. Another interesting primary source I came across Upton Sinclair
EPIC Plan for California, a series of pamphlets Sinclair published in support of his run for
Governor of California, in which he celebrates the Self-Help movement and discusses it as a
potential sustainable cooperative model in a more economically just society. Secondary Sources
were also very helpful in directing my research this summer. I was especially fortunate to have
access to the University’s inter-library loan services, through which I acquired two seminal
studies on the Self-Help movement written in the 1930’s.
Overall, my research this summer was very productive in helping my answer my research
questions in regards to the Self-Help Cooperative Movement. My first question dealt with how
worker cooperatives were motivated to organize. I learned that severe unemployment and
significant deviation from economic normalcy motivated workers to create new models of work
that allowed them to provide for themselves without money. Through the evidence I examined, I
was able to conclude that cooperation as a relief method came naturally as the best way for these
unemployed people to barter for the goods they needed was to pool their resources and skills
together. My second question dealt with how workplace democratization was practiced in
cooperatives. The sources I looked at made little mention of previous cooperative models being
used as a theoretical foundation, especially given that the size and extent of some of the SelfHelp cooperative barter and production operations were unprecedented. However, I suspect that
the Self-Help movement had to take some influence from 19th century cooperative models, and
this is an idea that I will be investigating in more detail as I progress with my thesis research
over the next year. I also learned that as the Self-Help movement grew and cooperatives began
to receive funding from the federal government that the method of governance transitioned from
town hall-esque meetings of worker members to a city-manager model with elected managers
and a hierarchal chain of decision making. As I continue with my research, I will look at the
ways in which these two different styles of governance affected worker experience. My third
research questions what kind of successes cooperatives have achieved. The Self-Help
Cooperatives I studied were interesting in that their expresses goal and biggest success was
bringing relief to the unemployed. The articles I read almost universally celebrated the Self-Help
movement for its ability to save the government money in relief funds, given that unemployed
people were helping themselves and not dependent on direct aid from government sources. The
Self-Help Cooperatives were not so much focused on raising the average worker as they were on
making sure the heterogeneous masses of unemployed could have the things they needed to
survive. My last research question was concerning what types of factors lead to the demise of
worker cooperatives. The Self-Help Cooperative movement slowly died off in the second half of
the 1930’s as its members were able to find steady wage work with the Works Progress
Administration. Beginning my research, I suspected that competition with traditional firms
would be the biggest source of problems for worker cooperatives, but my research showed me
that competition can also come from government agencies like the WPA.
This project was made all the more exciting given that I will be able to continue my
research on this topic as I continue forward with my senior honors thesis. I was able to come to
significant conclusions in regards to my research questions with respect to the Self-Help
Cooperative movement. However, as I alluded to above, there are still several details left for me
to investigate in order to form more complete answers to my questions. While I originally
planned to study cooperative movements from several global examples in order make my thesis a
comparative study, I may instead continue to study the Self-Help movement as to make my
thesis a comprehensive case study. As I learned throughout my summer research, the Self-Help
cooperative movement was rather unique in that it garnered much mainstream attention and
eventually even government support. I have seen that these conditions provide valuable insight
into the capability of worker cooperatives to provide an effective response to negative
ramifications of the business cycle. Therefore, I have concluded that I will be able to craft a
rather comprehensive thesis on the effectiveness of worker cooperatives by focusing primarily on
the Self-Help movement. I still plan to place the Self-Help movement in the context of a larger
international cooperative movement, but my thesis will be more of a case study and less of a
comparative work. Overall, one of the most important things I learned from the dynamic
trajectory of my research this summer is that when undertaking a project like this, there is much
more to learn than you might expect.