Nadakkal Parameswaran Pillai, a worker at the Indian Coffee House (ICH) in Trichur, later recalled that the cooperative found its place in history through its “martyrdom” at the hands of Sanjay Gandhi during India’s Emergency (1975–1977). Before the state demolished its Connaught Place location in 1976, that flagship café in New Delhi became the largest and most visible expression of workers’ confidence. From selling coffee on the street, they collectively acquired prime urban property and created a central meeting place for ministers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. That ICH emerged as a site of resistance during the Emergency appears puzzling given its origins as a colonial Coffee Board enterprise. Yet its transformation into a workers’ cooperative reshaped both its clientele and its political significance, turning it by the 1970s into a space of oppositional sociability. The cooperative form itself was unexpected. In the decades before 1957, when ICH formally became a workers’ cooperative, Communist Party of India (CPI) leaders and union organizers had pursued nationalization as part of a broader vision of socialist development. After prolonged agitation, however, the CPI accepted the organization of newly unemployed Coffee Board workers into a cooperative rather than a state-owned enterprise—an outcome that disappointed many rank-and-file activists. Drawing on archival materials, memoirs, and oral histories from multiple continents, this article reconstructs the history of the ICH workers’ movement from the 1930s through the Emergency, explaining why workers first occupied and appropriated a colonial institution and ultimately compromised with the Nehruvian state.

The economic crisis experienced by many developed countries over the past decade saw the emergence of the phenomenon of so-called recovered firms (RFs), or employee buyouts of failed capitalist firms (CFs). While it is obvious that one of the objectives sought by these workers is to keep their jobs, the subsequent performance of these firms is unclear. Are RFs more likely to fail than other worker managed firms (WMFs) or than CFs? Do RF workers get higher incomes than their peers in other WMFs or in CFs? This analysis is based on a linked employer–employee panel data set from Uruguayan social security administrative records. The main findings are that RFs survive longer than other WMFs or than CFs. However, RF workers receive incomes lower than those of their peers at other WMFs or at CFs. This income differential is explained partly by a brain drain process and specific human capital losses.

The relationship between firms’ owners and managers is a quintessential example of costly principal–agent interaction. Optimal design of monetary incentives and supervision mechanisms are the two traditional ways of reducing agency costs in this relationship. In this paper, we show evidence which is consistent with a third mechanism: firms have managers whose economic preferences are aligned with owners' interests. We uncover differences in economic preferences between managers employed in firms controlled by two distinct classes of ‘patrons’: employee-owned firms (worker cooperatives) and conventional investor-owned firms. In a high-stakes lab-in-the-field experiment, we find that co-op managers are less risk-loving and more altruistic than their conventional counterparts. We do not observe differences between the two groups in terms of time preferences, reciprocity, and trust. Our findings are consistent with existing evidence on worker cooperatives, such as their tendency to self-select into less risky industries and their compressed compensation structures.