ABSTRACT
The ideological support for the revival goes back to Lenin. Worker cooperatives have in recent years been encouraged particularly in consumer services, consumer goods, and light industry. A number of state-run firms have been converted to worker-run “lease firms.” The leasing idea seems to have a genesis independent of the historical cooperative movement, and it is the industrial analogue of the leasing of agricultural land to families. In a worker-owned firm, the traditional hiring relationship between capital and labor is reversed; labor hires capital. A form of team incentive contract was used successfully during the 1970s by the lawyer, agronomist, and First Secretary of the Stavropol region, Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1978, Gorbachev became the Central Committee’s Secretary of Agriculture in Moscow. In mid-March 1989, Gorbachev announced a sweeping new law finally giving a statutory basis for agricultural leasing.
