Factories without bosses

lavaca collective
Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories
Haymarket Books, 2007
243 pages $16

Review by SARAH HINES

IN ARGENTINA’S worker-run companies, workers work without bosses, or sin patrón, and share the profits of their work among themselves and with their communities. Workers’ struggles to gain control over their workplaces are the subject of Sin Patrón, and it is the workers themselves who tell their stories.

Written and originally published by the lavaca collective, an Argentine editorial and activist collective, this edition is translated into English and features a forward by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, the makers of the film The Take, about Argentina’s reclaimed factories.

The economic collapse that forced workers to take matters into their own hands had its roots in the imposition of neoliberal economic policies that began under the military dictatorship of the 1970s and continued under the democratic governments of the 1980s and 1990s. What the Argentine writer Rudolfo Walsh called “planned misery”—massive wage cuts, dismantling of social welfare programs, destruction of labor rights, privatization, and liberalization of the economy—resulted in a “Robin Hood state” that took from the poor to give to the rich. The numerical and organizational strength of the industrial proletariat greatly diminished in the process.

In President Carlos Menem’s Argentina, planned destruction of a business was often more profitable than successful production. So wealthy businessmen would buy up companies, often with government loans and complicity, only to then deliberately bankrupt them.

But the feeding frenzy could not and did not last forever. In December 2001, the house of cards came crashing down, and the worst losers were those on the bottom. A popular revolt that came to be called the Argentinazo ensued and overthrew five presidents within a few months.

It was in the wake of the economic collapse that the movement of recovered factories took shape, as workers took action to save their jobs. Sin Patrón tells the stories of ten recovered companies, from a metal works to a newspaper, through interviews with workers and movement leaders.

The story of the Buenos Aires print shop Chilavert is like many others in the book. As the company was going under, the owner told the shop’s workers: “‘I am going to save myself first, myself second, and myself third.” That meant colluding with politicians and judges and cooking the books in order to strip the company of its assets, engineer bankruptcy, and fire the workers.

Instead of allowing the machinery to be removed from the shop and themselves to be thrown out onto the street, Chilavert workers slept in the shop next to the machines and continued production. In fact, they worked in secret, passing finished books out of a peephole in the side of the building, all under the noses of police stationed at the door to “impede suspicious activities, primarily, working.” At one point one worker commented to his compañeros, “Look at the things you have to do to work.”

In many cases, workers had made personal sacrifices in order to help the companies’ owners avoid bankruptcy, not knowing that the owners were plotting to sink them. The workers at the Aurora home appliances company each took out individual loans of $5,000 while workers at the Crometal metal works accepted pay cuts and even being paid in meat.

In every case cited in the book, workers successfully gained control of their businesses by occupying the premises.

As Eduardo Murúa, president of the National Movement of Reclaimed Companies (MNER), put it,

The only way to reclaim the company is to occupy it and show, first to the judge, and then to the political class, that we’re not going to leave the factory. If we were stuck outside, asking the judge to keep it open, we would get nowhere. If we were to ask politicians, even less…. Because of [the] uncertainties, this process only works in places where there is some level of organization and capable leadership.