Over the past decade Argentina has witnessed the struggle of grassroots social justice groups against the encroachment of neoliberalism on everyday life. One of the most talked about groups has been the movement of worker-recovered enterprises (movimiento de empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores, or ERT). Emerging out of Argentina’s recent socio-economic and -political turmoil, the ERT movement, which began tentatively circa 1998, surged in the months that followed the country’s monetary, political, and economic crisis of Dec. 19/20 2001. In early 2006, it is still continuing to craft promising alternatives for the working lives of thousands of Argentines.
Argentine labour expert Héctor Palomino writes that the political and economic impacts of the ERT movement are more “related to its symbolic dimension” than the strength of its size since, to date, the movement involves roughly 170 to 180 mostly small- and medium-sized enterprises and between 8,000 and 12,000 workers (less than one percent of officially active participants in the urban-based economy). While this reflects only a fraction of the potential economic output of the country, the ERTs have inspired “new expectations for social change” in Argentina, showing innovative and viable alternatives to chronic unemployment and underemployment that move beyond the stagnant solutions offered by traditional state institutions and unions.
The impetus for workspace recuperations in Argentina has its political roots in the social mobilizations that began around 1996 with the movement of unemployed workers (movimiento de trabajadores desocupados, or MTD) – popularly known as the piqueteros. By the mid-1990s, the radical liberalization of the national economy saw hundreds of multinationals take over Argentina’s industrial base. Together with the chronic export deficit that ensued due to an overvalued peso, the government’s extreme neoliberal policies relegated millions of workers to the ranks of the unemployed and the impoverished. But as Toni Negri observes, responses such as the MTD movement bore witness to a new “energy of universal conviction and of egalitarian social recomposition.” Common to these early mobilizations by the growing and increasingly militant population of the unemployed was a renewed sense of collective purpose against a callous, exploitative, and socially alienating capitalist system, and a growing ethos of democracy from below. Since then, as Maristella Svampa and Sebastían Pereyra assert in a recent book on the experiences of the newest social movements in Argentina, the country has seen a considerable “reactivation” of “communitarian social experience” that grew out of the calamitous socio-economic situation of the country throughout the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s.
SELF-MANAGEMENT
For many workers in Argentina, participation in direct action to recover their workspaces, driven by dire necessity and modelled after the new social transformations taking shape around them, seemed the only alternative. Gradually, through workers’ struggles to recover workspaces and their subsequent practices of autogestión (self-management), ERT protagonists began to discover that it is possible to change their own circumstances despite a political system that remains unresponsive to their needs.
In workspaces spanning sectors as varied as education, printing and publishing, shipbuilding, oil refining, metallurgy, and tourism, workers’ stories reveal similar struggles: after years of suffering under economic hardship, broken institutional promises, threat of or outright closure of firms due to legal or illegal bankruptcies, and the ineptitude and greed of business owners, workers were pushed into risky workspace takeovers, leading to long periods of round-the-clock occupation and resistance. Hence, the slogan adopted by the National Movement of Recovered Enterprises (Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas, or MNER), the autonomist ERT collective of roughly one-third of worker-recovered firms: “occupy, resist, produce.” This slogan also captures the three distinctive stages of struggle that many ERTs must go through on their way towards autogestión.
“OCCUPY…”
As business owners contemplate abandoning their firms, workers realize the possibility that machinery and inventory – and, thus, their jobs – will disappear, and that they will most likely never see wages, salaries, and benefits they are owed. Often with the help of supportive neighbours, sometimes by themselves, workers mobilize; they seize and occupy their workspaces to prevent the often illegal vaciamento, “emptying,” of the firm by returning owners, court trustees, or owner-hired thugs, using their own bodies as living blockades against the repression from police or thugs that could follow.
Next, militant workers begin the arduous task of lobbying local politicians and judges for formal recognition as worker-controlled cooperatives. At the same time, they begin production runs or offer services as quickly as possible so they can start earning a living once again. During these early days of militancy, ERT protagonists might even take their struggle to the streets or occupy local legislatures and courts as pressure tactics while their cases are being deliberated. MNER calls these tactics of occupation and protest “the war of bodies.”
“… RESIST…”
After the turmoil of the occupation, the resistance stage sets in as workers squat their reclaimed workspace for periods ranging from weeks to well over a year. During the early days of this period, when the risk of eviction is greatest, workers usually receive no income because they are not producing. They rely on families and neighbours to bring them bedding, food, and clothing. Workers may begin small production runs during the later stages of occupation, sometimes using the help of supportive neighbours to bring their products to market. More often, though, substantial production runs must wait until regional legislatures decide to grant the workers the right to operate as a cooperative and declare the ley de expropiación (expropriation law) on their behalf.
The expropriation law is vitally important to the movement because it prevents the auctioning off of the company’s assets or further repression while giving the workers’ cooperative control of the plant for up to 20 years. Eventually, but not always, the workers are allowed to legally use the machines under the auspices of a “temporary” law of expropriation that usually lasts two to five years while their request for the more permanent law is heard in regional legislatures. During the first months of operation, most ERTs continue to struggle under burdensome court-ordered conditions. In some unfortunate cases the workers are ordered to take on the debt of the previous owner or to rent back the firm’s assets from former owners or the state.
The seemingly straightforward goal of recovering jobs in Argentina, forged initially by necessity, is thus hampered by continuous material, legal, and political hardships for the ERT movement.
“…PRODUCE”
If all goes well with the occupation, the early months of production under selfmanagement, and the first year or so of temporary control, then the process of worker recovery culminates in the workspace becoming an official, worker-run cooperative, fully controlled by its workers. The University of Buenos Aires’ ERT Documentation Centre reveals that most ERTs decide to become cooperatives, with over one-half practising pay equity under the democratic auspices of workers’ assemblies and councils. Other ERTs practise slightly more hierarchical forms of remuneration tied to specific skill sets, seniority, or whether or not workers were present during the initial moments of occupation.
According to Palomino, although the “egalitarian income structure prevails” with most ERTs, the issue of pay equity is the topic of continued discussion within individual ERTs and across the movement as a whole. While not all ERT firms practice egalitarian salary schemes, the strong tendency amongst ERTs is to practise far more egalitarian forms of remuneration than when they were under the control of proprietors. Struggle, cooperation, and workers’ own sense of the communal value of their living and collective labour, not exploitative power hierarchies, tend to dictate the measure of worker compensation and reward in the ERT movement.
Additionally, most ERT cooperatives attempt to engage in production practices that aspire to minimize capitalist forms of surplus value and wealth accumulation. Where possible, ERT cooperatives try to distribute the major part of their revenues equally between workers’ salaries, the material needs of workers, and pensions for retired members of the cooperative. Most prefer to redirect any remaining revenue into the needs of production and the maintenance of the firm after these individual workers’ needs are met. Since ERTs tend to privilege workers’ necessities over capitalist accumulation and the profit motive, these practices of remuneration and revenue allocation can be seen as experiments in forms of work that move beyond some of the exploitative practices inherent in capital-labour social relations.
CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
Because ERTs must compete within the greater capitalist economic form, they are constantly affected by the tensions that inevitably arise between the quotidian needs of workers and the production and marketing challenges of the firm. While each ERT’s daily struggles are different, the most commonly shared challenges are underproduction, difficulties in reaching new markets, and the continued precarious life conditions of workers. Many ERT cooperatives operate with the constant awareness that revenues might not be sufficient to pay salaries, pushing them to begin to engage in less cooperativist, more capitalistic forms of management and production preoccupied with the maximization of revenue. These tensions tempt some ERTs to engage in practices of selfexploitation and self-bureaucratization, illustrating one of the contradictions implicit in self-management within a greater capitalist system: when staying afloat becomes the primary focus of a worker-run cooperative, workers risk losing sight of the collective spirit and democratic ideals that drove them to become a workers’ cooperative in the first place.
When one considers ERTs’ long periods of struggle for self-management, the technical and productive limitations they face due to the paucity of official outlets for loans or subsidies available to them, and the general lack of governmental and union support for the movement, it is not surprising that most ERTs produce at between 30 percent and 60 percent of their original output capacity. compared to production runs under owner management. As of the summer of 2005, only 12 percent of all ERTs operating for over three years under worker management were producing at more than 60 percent of capacity.
Most ERT cooperatives have had to resort to the individual and collective ingenuity and determination of its workers to ensure the ongoing operation of the firm. Worker-operators repair their own machines and mediate structural barriers to production by engaging in just-in-time or small-batch production practices, or requesting that customers pay for raw materials. ERT workers have also had to learn and share accounting and marketing skills and tasks. Many ERT workers are constantly developing new skills and capacities that remained untapped under owner control, showing not only alternative ways that labourers can re-skill and self-actualize themselves, but also pointing to ways of improving Argentina’s national productivity and perhaps even cooperatively reconstituting labour processes in general.
Another response to these structural difficulties is the inter-ERT networks of solidarity and mutual assistance that are beginning to form. These alternative, social economic models include practices of inter-ERT support during workspace occupations and legal battles and, at times, sharing of customers, orders, prime materials, technological know-how, administrative duties, legal assistance, and even machinery and labour processes between ERTs. While these social economic networks remain underdeveloped, they show promise for assisting newer ERTs that are just starting to produce under self-management and for those firms that belong to more precarious economic sectors. They also begin to problematize the competitive business practices of capitalism.
WORK TO COMMUNITY SPACES
Jobs, machinery, and labour processes are not the only things recovered by ERTs; some ERTs engrain themselves in the communities and neighbourhoods that surround them; doubling as cultural and educational centres, community dining rooms and free medical clinics run by workers, neighbours, or volunteers. Worker-recovered print house Artes Gráficas Chilavert has a vibrant community centre called Chilavert Recupera (Chilavert Recovers), hosting plays, music concerts, and community events every Saturday night. Chilavert also converts its main shop floor into an art workshop on weekends. During one of my visits to the print shop over the summer of 2005, volunteers from the community were giving a class on the dying Buenos Aires signage art called fileto, while workers and visitors from the community played pingpong in the cultural centre. IMPA, a midsized metallurgic cooperative located in Buenos Aires’s western neighbourhood of Cabal-lito, dedicates space to an art school, silkscreen shop and theatre. Artes Gráficas Patricios, in the economically depressed southern Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Barracas, houses a primary school and a medical clinic that is run by local community volunteers. Cefomar, a publishing cooperative in the historical neighbourhood of Monserrat, runs an early childhood education centre on its premises.
Hosting cultural and community spaces is not just a way of giving back to the neighbourhood out of self-interest or corporate “goodwill.” Instead, the cultural spaces within the worker-recovered enterprises are continuations of the neighbourhoods’ needs. With many ERTs, workspace walls do not demarcate enclosures that protect the work inside from the community outside. Rather, recovered workspaces are deeply rooted in the needs of the local community since work life is an integral part of the economic and social life of the community. Argentina’s ERT protagonists are recovering more than jobs, they are also returning workspaces to the neighbourhoods and communities that surround them by creating inventive ways of destroying the walls that divide work from the rest of life.
TOWARDS A NEW FUTURE?
For ERT protagonists, the politicization and reconstitution of their subjectivities from employees to self-managed workers and activists emerge slowly within their conjunctures of economic and political crisis. Their hope grows from creative and collective responses to their difficulties rather than from an enlightened vanguard; from below and within their moments of struggle. Cándido González, ERT activist and long-time Chilavert worker, eloquently articulates his own change in subjectivity:
“Now I know, looking back on our struggle three years on…where the change in me started, because it begins during your struggles. First, you fight for not being left out on the street with nothing. And then, suddenly, you see that you’ve formed a cooperative and you start getting involved in the struggle of other enterprises.”
Out of socio-economic and -political crisis, Argentine workers in the ERT movement are beginning to show new and promising roads out of situations of exploitation, alienation, and immiseration not only for themselves but perhaps also for Argentina as a whole. Rather than fall prey to chronic situations of unemployment, poverty and despair, they are, through their emergent practices of selfmanagement, deciding instead to reorganize their world around more humane, more socially aware, and more democratic forms of work and life.
Marcelo Vieta is a Ph.D candidate in Social and Political Thought at Y ork University in Toronto. Vieta spent five weeks in Buenos Aires in the summer of 2005 interning with the worker-recovered printing house, Artes Gráficas Chilavert.
