The Universe of Worker-Recovered Companies in Argentina (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
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 analyse the characteristics of the expansion of the universe of WRCs in Argentina and compare the limits and potential...
Dostopno na spletnem naslovu: www. …, 2008
The Argentine worker-recuperated enterprises (empresas recuperdas por sus trabajadores, or ERT) are direct, diverse, and mostly non-union aligned responses by roughly 10,000 urban-based workers to recent socio-economic crises. Over ten years since the first workplace occupations and their recoveries as self-managed workers' cooperatives, this latest wave of workers’ struggle in Argentina has shown promising alternatives to capital-labour relations and the neoliberal enclosures of life. But why were almost 200 failing, closed, or bankrupted small- and medium-sized businesses spanning the entire urban economic base subsequently occupied and reopened as self-managed workplaces by former employees in Argentina since at least 1997? Why do most ERTs decide to reorganize themselves as workers’ cooperatives? Why do many of them also decide to open up the shop floor to the diverse communities surrounding them, symbolically and practically tearing down factory walls by sharing their workplaces with community centres and dining halls, free clinics, popular education programmes, alternative radio and media centres, and art studios? Finally, why Argentina? To begin to answer these questions, I first explore some of Argentina’s key socio-economic and historical conjunctures motivating workspace occupations and the formation of self-managed workers’ cooperatives. Second, I begin to theorize the concept of autogestión (self-management) as it tends to be practiced by Argentina’s ERTs. Third, I sketch out some of the ERTs’ most common micro-economic and organizational successes and challenges, exploring how the struggle to reconstitute a once capitalist workplace as a self-managed workers’ coop interplays with an ERT’s reconstituted labour processes. I conclude by appraising the future possibilities of ERTs for social transformation in Argentina by mapping out four “social innovations” being spearheaded by the phenomenon.
The phenomenon of ERTs (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores) in Argentina has gained popularity since the financial crisis of 2001-2002. The resulting drastic drop in gross national product, the high inflation rates, and the increased rates of unemployment and poverty reflected serious weaknesses and limitations of neoliberal institutions in Argentina. This phenomenon was also determined by specific historical patterns, such as state interventionism, a long tradition of trade unionism and workers’ struggles, as well as a long and deep-rooted tradition of cooperativism. According to the latest survey (Ruggeri, 2014b), there are more than 300 ERTs in Argentina, employing over 13,000 workers. Data show that 95 per cent of ERTs are self-organized under the organizational and legal framework of worker cooperatives. This paper aims at providing a political, economic and social overview of the emergence and establishment of ERTs in Argentina over the past two decades. Moreover, the legal and institutional preconditions that significantly encourage, limit, and determine the scope of worker cooperatives, will be analyzed. In this analysis we will rely on the results of research on ERTs that has been done over the last 10 years, as well as on a historical analysis of the legal and institutional framework.
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.
Argentina’s recuperated factory movement – worker-run cooperatives formed out of previously bankrupted or abandoned businesses – was a reaction to the 2001 crisis following the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. As a radically transformed workplace, expressing the values of cooperation and democracy, recuperated enterprises challenge linear and stagist accounts of development in which the “advanced capitalist societies” of Europe and the United States are at the forefront. Drawing on Marx, particularly his dialectic and multilinear conceptions of social change, I argue that cooperative labour in Argentina’s recuperated enterprises shows that the seeds of post-capitalist future are inherent in capital’s present.
Workers' Control and Social Economy in Argentina's Recuperated Enterprise Movement
2007
In Argentina, over 170 bankrupt or troubled businesses have become worker-controlled cooperatives, mostly since the economic crisis of 2001-2002. This thesis assesses the possibilities presented by this so-called "recuperated enterprise" movement as a model for expanding workers' control. Spanning economic and political concerns, the primary focus is on the level of the shop floor and its relation to the surrounding community. A review of the history of class struggle in Argentina reaching back to the early 20 th century helps put the movement in context and explains how it emerged. Site visits and oral history interviews conducted at eleven recuperated enterprises illuminate the extent and nature of workers' control gained by the movement, while practices of social and solidarity economy are examined as a strategy to partially overcome the obstacles that face worker cooperatives and to build power at the national and global levels.
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.
Revisiting Argentina’s Recuperated Factories - Reflections on Over a Decade of Workers’ Control
Desafíos, 2015
More than a decade after Argentina’s socio-economic, political and financial collapse in the period 2001-2002, over two hundred recuperated factories currently operate under the direct control of workers. In many cases the recuperations were a direct response to the growing number of bankruptcies and plant closures in the face of deteriorating economic circumstances. The article revisits the workers’ struggle and examines the specific socio-historical context that facilitated the emergence of Argentina’s recuperated workplaces during the 1990s and in the aftermath of the country’s crisis. It further analyzes the post-crisis policies of stabilization and outlines the movements’ present situation. Finally, the document concludes by drawing on Gramsci’s observations on factory occupations in post-war Italy and his reflections about the relationship between economic crisis, ideological struggle and social transformation.