Precarious work, intersectionality, and worker cooperatives: rethinking work and life balance

We study how precarious workers – particularly immigrant, Hispanic, and female worker-owners – experience and manage work – life balance (WLB) within NYC-based worker cooperatives in the United States. Using grounded theory, we conducted and analyzed 25 in-depth interviews, documenting how WLB experiences are shaped by intersectional social positions – including gender, immigration status, race/ethnicity, English proficiency, and caregiving roles – which create compounding structural barriers to balance. Participants redefined WLB not as managing time, but as achieving stability and dignity through decent work. Worker cooperatives helped address WLB challenges by formalizing informal labor, enabling flexible scheduling with autonomy, offering training, improving job quality, and linking members to external support organizations. We develop the Intersectional Work-Life Ecosystem (IWLE) framework, which theorizes how intersecting social positions and ecosystem-level institutions influence workers’ needs and their access to WLB resources. This study contributes to WLB and labor scholarship by extending theoretical models beyond the individual and organizational level, highlighting collective and structural supports that enable marginalized workers to pursue more equitable work – life integration.