Abstract: Economic growth in capitalism is structurally tied to the organization of labour as wage work. In capitalism an employee produces surplus for an employer to fulfill the economic anticipation invested in the firm. This 'growth imperative' is built inside the form of wage work. In the contemporary era of permanent economic and ecological crisis, the capitalistic growth has to be questioned radically. The cooperative mode of labor is an alternative to wage work. In a cooperative workers control their own work. In this presentation I go through the theoretical critique against the wage work as well as the critique against the worker cooperative movement. I study the social conditions in which the worker control may mean disconnecting from capitalistic growth.