The Universe of Worker-Recovered Companies in Argentina (2002-2008): Continuity and Changes Inside the Movement (original) (raw)
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The Universe of Worker-Recovered Companies in Argentina
2002
Argentina's movement of worker-recovered companies (WRC) gained significant public visibility during and in the years following the institutional crisis of December 2001. In light of company shutdowns and dramatic increases in unemployment rates, many workers promoted the reopening of workplaces abandoned by their owners, giving origin to a movement that still exists to this day. Collectively, the actions centred on workplace and job "recoveries" have made up the distinguishing feature-or the "identity"-of the movement. Even though today's conjuncture is somewhat different than Argentina at the turn of the millennium, the universe of WRCs continues to expand. Moreover, the movement's new actors inscribe the earlier experiences of older WRCs onto their newer recoveries via their reinterpretation of collective memory. The objective of this article is to describe and analyze the characteristics of the expansion of the universe of WRCs in Argentina and co...
Workers' Self-management, Recovered Companies and the Sociology of Work
Sociology 48 (5): 989-1006, 2014
We analyse how far Argentina’s worker-recovered companies (WRCs) have sustained themselves and their principles of equity and workers’ self-management since becoming widespread following the country’s 2001–2 economic crisis. Specialist Spanish-language sources, survey data and documents are analysed through four key sociological themes. We find that the number of WRCs has increased in Argentina, and that they represent a viable production model. Further, they have generally maintained their central principles and even flourished. This occurred despite the global economic crisis, legal and financial pressures to adopt capitalist practices and management structures, the risk of market absorption and state attempts to coopt, demobilise and depoliticise the movement. We argue that today they function as a much-needed international beacon of an alternative vision for labour and that integration of their experience has potential to revitalise the field.
Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises, 2010- 2013: A Synthesis of Recent Empirical Findings
Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, volume 4, issue 1, pp. 75-103, 2015
Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises, ERTs) are formerly investor- or privately-owned businesses in crisis ultimately taken over and re-opened by their employees, most commonly as worker cooperatives. Since 2002, the Programa Facultad Abierta (Open Faculty Program) of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires has carried out a series of national studies of Argentina’s ERTs. The aim of this article is to present the conclusions of the fourth survey of Argentina’s ERTs carried out by the Facultad Abierta. This survey focused on ERTs that emerged between March 2010 and December 2013, providing the most complete and up-to-date database of the characteristics of Argentina’s ERTs, and showing evidence of a wave of new worker-recuperated enterprises emerging in the postcrisis years, especially since 2010. The key findings presented in this article include: the political economic reasons for the emergence of ERTs; the characteristics of the growing ERT movement today as compared to earlier ERTs; the nature of the conflicts and issues leading to the creation of Argentina’s new ERTs; a critical analysis of new legal frameworks for ERT firms, comparing and contrasting them to older legal outlets for their formation; and the involvement of unions with Argentina’s ERTs.
recuperadasdoc.com.ar
This chapter examines this phenomenon of ERTs in Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on the case of Argentina. Based on our ongoing quantitative and qualitative political economic and ethnographic work over the past five years with over 70 ERTs across all economic sectors and regions, we highlight two particular characteristics that are often overlooked or downplayed by studies that examine worker-recovered enterprises in Argentina. First, workers’ initial actions involving the seizure of control of their deteriorating or failed companies from former owners, their occupation of them for weeks or months, and eventually their putting them into operation once again under autogestión (self-management), arise out of fear and anger rather than a preconceived predilection for workers’ control or working-class revolt. That is, most ERTs originate as direct responses to their worker-protagonists’ deep worries about becoming structurally unemployed. To begin to understand these two characteristics, we first briefly look to the historical and political conjunctures from which ERTs emerge and in which they find themselves. We then explore some of the distinguishing features of Argentina’s ERTs as workers’ co-operatives. To illustrate how these features play out in practice, we map out some of the innovations impelled by ERT workers’ desire to self-manage that they adopt in order to defend their jobs and workspaces, as well as several of the challenges faced by these experiments in self-management. Lastly, we examine some of the connections with the wider ERT phenomenon in South America. As we emphasize throughout, ERT’s innovations and challenges shape their very organizational structures and co-operative practices and in some ways distinguish them from other workers’ co-operatives in other conjunctures.
Narratives of cooperation, resilience and resistance: workers' self-recovery in times of crisis
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2019
Purpose-Worker-recuperated enterprises have appeared in Europe with increasing frequency since 2008, following the Great Recession that hit the western economies. The purpose of this paper is to depict the phenomenon of worker-recuperated enterprises in Italy, focusing on two different types of business recovery, that of workers buyouts and that of recovered social spaces. The paper compares these on the basis of four analytical dimensions: resilience/resistance, relationship with the market, relationship with the territory and workplace democracy. Design/methodology/approach-The corpus of the research is based on the cross-sectional analysis of workers' narratives. These were collected, within a small sample of theoretically relevant cases, in order to retrace and analyse the path from the crisis of the former companies to establishment of the workers' cooperatives and their social and economic features. Findings-The collected narratives allowed for a multi-level comparison between different types of worker-recuperated enterprises, providing some insights on their emergence, their features in terms of resilience and resistance, their relationship with the market economy and their outcomes in terms of workplace democracy and support to employment. Originality/value-Worker buyouts are gaining ground in Europe as an effective mechanism to oppose the fall of the employment rate in consequence of economic crises. This research intends to offer some data and arguments to the current international debate on the effectiveness of these mechanisms in coping with economic shocks and opening up to a sustainable and cooperative work-driven economy.
Campinas 2014: Social and Solidarity Economy: Towards Inclusive and Sustainable Development: A Reader. Turin, Italy: International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ILO)., 2014
This article first introduces Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises (ERTs) via political economic and sociological frameworks. It then assesses their place in the expansion of the social and solidarity economy in the country. Since their emergence in the late 1990s and early 2000, these firms have proven to be intensely transformative for their workers, faced as they are with having to quickly learn how to self-manage their new worker cooperatives that were the formerly crisis-riddled investor-owned firms or sole proprietorships that had previously employed them. More broadly, Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises show how the creation of new worker-run firms has many positive externalities for the revitalization and wellbeing of surrounding communities.
Social Sciences Research Network, 2018
This paper analyzes the case of workers' buyout, which has emerged with increasing evidence in Italy over the last ten years, in order to reflect on sustainable alternatives to the capitalist mode of production. Worker-recuperated bankrupted companies, generally defined as recovered factories, have been linked to the Argentinean movement of empresas recuperadas, which produced in the early 2000s a strong social upheaval and a proliferation of companies occupied and restarted for production by the workers themselves. Italian and European recovered factories are, however, mostly the result of a workers' buyout, an institutional process which allows the employees of a company in crisis to acquire the same by converting their own mobility allowances in share capital. The thesis that we intend to support here is that workers' buyout provides an excellent example of the resilient capacity of individuals to react to crisis, partly counteracting the decline in employment levels and preserving their livelihoods, as well as a prospective alternative to the capitalist mode of production.
Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina
Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina, 2020
The topic of recovered enterprise has gained recent attention internationally, especially after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 threatened small and medium businesses across the planet. This makes Argentina's extensive history of recovered enterprises [which in Argentina are referred to as Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadoras (ERTs)] all the more relevant for contemporary policymakers, scholars and workers. Marcelo Vieta's recent Workers' Self-Management in Argentina is the first comprehensive English-language review of "the largest movement in the world of worker-led conversions of capitalist businesses into cooperatives" (p. xv). Vieta's book will hopefully serve to expose a broader audience to ERTs, by expositing in a structured and exhaustive way their origins, context and contributions to the Argentine political economy. The book is organized into nine chapters, roughly evenly divided between theoretical and empirical foci. The book is a welcome contribution to the study of the phenomenon of workplace democracy that should interest a wide range of readers. In fact, it is actually quite unfair to call this book Workers' Self-Management in Argentina, as its scope is far broader than reviewing this concept in the context of Argentina. In fact, Marcelo Vieta has written two books with this entry: firstly, an analysis of Marxist and other socialist theories on worker-self management, and secondly, an application of this theoretical lens to the Argentine case, with a social history of Argentina thrown in for good measure. There is ultimately something for everyone in this book. Driven by the slogan 'occupar, resistir, producir!', Argentina's countercultural ERTs 'have defied their numerical weight and have stepped up to the task of saving companies from closure, addressing under-and unemployment, stabilising local economies, and securing the social well-being of surrounding communities' (p. xv). This has given much clout and endorsement from communities across Argentina, as Vieta points out with countless examples from numerous case studies. Moreover, the more than 400 firms have a survival rate of 'almost 90 percent' (p. 115), putting lie to the notion that entrepreneurship requires the presence of risk-taking investors. Indeed, Vieta's greater purpose with the book is to point to this fact and the resulting opportunities for new 'imaginaries'.