Worker cooperatives can be broadly defined as firms characterized by workers’ control, whose necessary and sufficient condition is the allocation of decision making rights to workers, with two consequent elements, that are profit sharing and workers having financial stake in the firm. Their ownership structure implies choices that are different from investor-owned firms. We argue that a crucial one is employment and income protection. This means that they are enterprises that have a safety purpose that comes before profit maximising.

Italian worker cooperatives display a high proportion of profits reinvested into reserves that merge with the firm’s patrimony, that are therefore indivisible and non-appropriable by members (locked assets). Worker-members of Italian worker cooperatives don’t internalize the flow of earnings generated by the firm they are owners of. I argue that this high collective and indivisible accumulation plays an important role in the employment insurance mechanism triggered by the cooperative.

The main point of this paper is to investigate the possibility that the insurance function of the cooperative is “embedded” into the collective dynamics of the firm. Why is this instrument different from an individual purchase of insurance on the market? Is this insurance arrangement a substitute for “missing markets”? We claim that seeking for insurance alone and seeking for insurance with colleague-members reveals different motivations, that is to say that not only outcomes matter in individuals’ choices on actions, but also “how” and “with whom” actions are carried on. This is suggested by the historical evolution of the cooperative enterprise within the workers’ social movement; today this may be captured by the pattern of interpersonal relationships and the feeling of belonging to the cooperative, that –we argue- play a role in the choice of collective accumulation and of insurance through risk-pooling. This questions the idea of a complete separability between “rational” self-interested motivations and “cultural” collectivist ones.