Worker Ownership in Russia

It was raining when we pulled up in front of a low, nondescript factory in Tver, two hours’ drive northeast of Moscow. The Tveris glass plant, built as a state enterprise, was celebrating its first anniversary of employee ownership.

Tveris Glass is one of some hundred firms that, by the time of our visit in July 1991, had opted out of the command economy through direct worker ownership. What “direct worker ownership” means varies from enterprise to enterprise, but the concept of worker ownership is an attractive alternative both to state ownership and to such other forms of privatization as sale to managers and government
officials (the “propertization of the nomenklatura”); sale at auction to the Russians with the most rubles, the so-called black market mafia; or sale to foreign investors. “Employee ownership is the most socially acceptable form of privatization,” economist Jacob N. Keremetsky told an audience of Soviet managers of employee-owned and -leased businesses in July, “because it avoids the class conflict inevitable in all the other types of privatization.”

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