A new book, Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories by the lavaca collective, published for the first time in English by Haymarket Books, recounts in their own words the stories of workers in Argentina’s “recovered companies.” Here, LANCE SELFA and SARAH HINES discuss issues that the Argentine movement has raised for the Left and the workers’ movement in the rest of Latin America.

Right now, [workers] are seeing that participation and activism is profoundly important for the country, because only through us, the workers, can we truly build socialism for the 21st century. We should build on this revolution. That’s what we want. And we have to do it from the grass roots, because the grass roots are clear that this revolution has to consolidate itself, so that all families have the dignified life that we all deserve.
—Jorge Baretiz, worker at the worker-run Inveval, Venezuela¹

NEAR THE end of the nineteenth century, the Prussian minister for internal affairs observed, “In every strike there lurks the hydra of revolution.”² For someone like Herr von Puttkammer whose charge it was to suppress workers’ activism, the threat of revolution was sufficient justification to smash strikes over wages and conditions. Perhaps it isn’t too hard to imagine what worried the minister. The elements of a successful strike—solidarity across racial, ethnic, and gender lines; workers’ assertion of control over their circumstances; democracy in deciding the course of struggle; and militancy in the face of the boss—are in microcosm the essential building blocks for a future socialist society. What worried von Puttkammer goes doubly for the workers’ “recovery” of their workplace, as the stories from Argentina in this collection illustrate. The experiences related in Sin Patrón (Without Bosses)—of collective struggle and solidarity, of workers’ creativity, and shop floor democracy—have become an illustration in action of the global justice movement slogan, “Another world is possible.”³

The Argentina of 2001 was very much a society in a state of crisis, with a discredited ruling establishment and a populace that was unwilling to go on living in the same way. Out of that social reality emerged popular struggles and organizations that reintroduced the idea of workers’ control as a question for the movements of the twenty-first century. For years, the potential of workers to assert themselves, much less to exercise control in their workplaces, had retreated to the margins of a world dominated by neoliberalism. But the movement in Argentina, documented in this book, revitalized these traditions of workers’ struggle. Since the eruption of the movement of recovered workplaces in 2001–02, the concept of worker-run workplaces has moved beyond the borders of Argentina. To date, its greatest impact has been felt in other parts of Latin America, including in Venezuela, currently undergoing the experiment that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frias has dubbed “socialism for the twenty-first century.”

Factories working sin patrón

To date, the movement that is the subject of Sin Patrón encompasses around 180 enterprises and more than 10,000 workers.⁴ The recovered enterprises are a varied lot, spanning industry and services, including firms that cater to local and regional markets and even a few with a significant export business. Although the majority of them, like the majority of the Argentine population and workforce, concentrate around Greater Buenos Aires, they have penetrated the length and breadth of the country. About one-fifth of them were recovered in 2001 or earlier, signifying that the majority of them became worker-run in the wake of the “Argentinazo”—the popular uprising of December 2001 that got rid of four successive presidents. The typical recovered firm is a small or medium-size industrial firm operating for about forty years with a workforce of between 45 and 100 workers, that had, over the 1980s and 1990s shrunk to about one-third of its former size.⁵ By 2005, the vast majority of them (94–95 percent) operated as some type of cooperative, in which the workers act as “members” of the enterprise and make decisions regarding its direction in monthly or biweekly assemblies. In only a handful of cases have the workers achieved the historic demand of the socialist Left for nationalization of the workplace under workers’ control.⁶ The legal form of recovery remains a pragmatic decision on the part of each empresa (company) to take advantage of a loophole in Argentine bankruptcy law that allowed cooperatives of workers to take over bankrupt firms temporarily while courts determined whether to award permanent ownership to the cooperative, its former owner, or to the firm’s creditors. Within that cooperative framework, there is much variation in terms of the governance of the firm, workers’ pay, the employment of professional managers, and so on.
For most workers involved in the movement, taking over their workplace was an essential act of self-defense. Having been abandoned by their owners, workplaces lay idle. Workers—as many recount in Sin Patrón— were faced with a pragmatic decision of taking over their workplace to continue to put food on their families’ tables. They were not acting on any preconceived notion of workers’ control or ideological commitment to radical social change.
Perhaps for this reason, most people involved with the movement in Argentina describe its component parts as “recovered companies” (empresas recuperadas) rather than using more radical-sounding adjectives like “seized” or “occupied.” A survey of workers in the recovered firms indicates that 60 percent understood “recovered” as meaning “recovering” a source of employment. In contrast,

32 percent understood it as the workers’ assertion of their right to run the enterprise because their labor had built it.⁷ A study of Buenos Aires–area recovered workplaces concluded that only 40 percent of them were actually occupied or forcibly taken over by workers. Instead, in the majority of cases, bosses agreed to hand over the plants (in 35 percent of cases), abandoned them (about 12 percent), or delivered them over to the workers through some combination of negotiation and pressure.⁸ A more nationally representative study, conducted by researchers at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), raises to half the number of enterprises occupied, suggesting that the worker-run plants outside Greater Buenos Aires were more likely to be sites of sharp conflict between workers and bosses.⁹ In most cases, workers assumed control of their workplaces as bosses abandoned them.

Nevertheless, researchers have demonstrated a clear link between the means by which enterprises were “taken” and the extent of concessions workers were able to wrest from the bosses and the state: “Conflict is traumatic and wasteful, but in general, it is an effective way to pressure legislators to approve expropriations. What’s more, many workplaces that weren’t occupied benefited from earlier experiences of those who were.”¹⁰
Another contrast between Greater Buenos Aires and the provincial recovered enterprises emerges in the sources of support for the workers. In both cases, the workers’ chief supporters were workers at other worker-run plants. But while Rebón’s study of the Buenos Aires metropolitan recovered enterprises challenges a common conception that other social movements—particularly that of the piqueteros (a movement of un- or underemployed Argentine workers)—inspired the factory-based movement, the UBA study cites the unemployed workers and neighborhood assemblies as the chief supporters of the movement beyond workers in other worker-run plants.¹¹ This may again point to the preponderance of the piqueteros and other social movements in the outlying industrial towns that bore the brunt of the economic collapse in the late 1990s.

While these observations suggest that workers involved in the recovered enterprises weren’t acting on ideological commitment, this doesn’t mean that we should consider the movement “apolitical” or “hostile” to politics. At the very least, workers involved in the movement stood quite a bit to the political left of the average Argentine. In the 2003 election, about twice as many workers in the recovered enterprises supported Néstor Kirchner for president, (who campaigned as a reformist) than in the electorate as a whole (52 percent to 24 percent); and four times as many workers in the firms supported the socialist candidate Patricia Walsh than in the electorate as a whole (9.6 percent to 2.5 percent). The candidates most perceived to be devotees of the free-market nostrums of the 1990s (Carlos Menem and Ricardo Lopéz Murphy) received far less support from the workers than from other Argentines. What of the political behavior of workers outside the voting booth? Most workers participating in the recovered firms had no experience with political activism other than voting or union membership. However, those workers who did have activist backgrounds had a high level of experience in the trade-union movement, social movement organizations (many sponsored by the Catholic church), and radical political parties.¹² In other words, workers with a high level of political experience played a disproportionate role in organizing their coworkers to take over enterprises and to make them work. And it’s quite clear that workers at recovered enterprises are more likely to become activists, particularly in defense of their movement, after they gain experience working in a cooperative setting.

The Argentine example spreads

The Argentine experience has not only had an impact on the workers in Argentina, but it is shaping an emerging movement in the rest of Latin America. One estimate puts at 30,000 the number of workers on the continent who are working in firms that operate under some form of worker management.¹³ In Brazil, about a dozen important industrial firms operate under a management agreement with the United Workers Central (CUT). In Uruguay, the PIT-CNT, the main trade-union federation, is also the main promoter of worker management that extends to eighteen factories employing about a thousand workers. While the experiences of both of these countries reach back decades, a newer, and potentially more far-reaching movement has emerged in Venezuela.¹⁴

In Venezuela, the main impetus for workers’ control grew out of the working-class struggle against successive attempts to overthrow the popular Chávez government. It is no exaggeration to say that the working class defeated the U.S.-sponsored coup against Chávez in April 2002. From the semi-employed urban poor to individual trade-union members, ordinary people in Caracas and other major cities came onto the streets to protest Chávez’s overthrow and to defend their rights. Two subsequent bosses’ strikes—one in October 2002 and another in December–February 2002–03—provided a stage for the awakening of a more politically conscious working-class movement. For sixty-three days at the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, as the national oil company (PDVSA) managers and technicians attempted to sabotage production, rank-and-file workers seized PDVSA refineries and transportation facilities, assuring that oil production—the country’s economic lifeline—did not shut down.

Once again, workers’ action had saved the Chávez government and opened up a new chapter in Venezuelan working-class organization. On the one hand, this was expressed in a growing demand and movement for a new labor organization, the National Union of Workers (UNT), launched in 2003, to replace the corrupt Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), whose top leaders had discredited themselves by working alongside the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (FEDECAMARAS) to support the attempts to overthrow Chávez. On the other hand, the experience of workers defeating an attempted coup and two bosses’ strikes occasioned a deeper debate in the working-class movement about the role of the working class in the new Venezuela. As Orlando Chirino, one of the main UNT leaders, reflecting on the workers’ role in defeating the bosses’ strike at PDVSA, put it:

Imperialism and the coup-plotters didn’t just hand over control of PDVSA and basic industry to us. We took it from them! We aren’t talking about getting a 10 percent wage hike from the bosses. No! We’re clearly saying that, in a certain sense, we expropriated these enterprises…. If that isn’t a revolution, then some expert in revolutions is going to have to tell me what happened between December 2002 and January 2003.