Position of Labor in US and Japanese Agrifood Cooperatives: A Class Analytic Perspective

Producer cooperatives emerged, in part, as a means of protecting the appropriation of surplus value from labor and often involved long struggles to institutionalize this economic form. Today, producer cooperatives constitute a significant component of the agricultural economies of most developed capitalist economies. Much work on cooperatives focuses on agent/principal problems or the tensions between producers and management in directing/controlling the cooperative.  Given the historical origins of producer cooperatives’ in the concerns of labor, surprisingly less attention has been paid to the role of the labor that ‘adds value’ to agricultural production in cooperative organizations. This paper raises theoretical questions concerning the class position of various actors in cooperative enterprises. We consider this issue in terms of farmer (production and marketing) cooperatives as well as (food) consumer cooperatives. We ask what possible forms of organization might be introduced to cooperatives to make cooperative ‘labor’ more equal members of cooperative enterprises? We briefly examine these questions with respect to the historical development and current condition of cooperatives in the U.S. and Japan and call for a need to examine this question more systematically and comparatively from a larger international sample.