“We used to work for money.  Now we work for dignity."

 
I try not to gawk at Christina Pina, a matchstick-thin housekeeper in a weary yellow uniform whose top button has been replaced by a safety pin.  She and a half-dozen colleagues, bed-changers and bathtub-cleaners all, are sitting in the housekeepers’ lounge, a small room filled to capacity with one desk and two small vinyl sofas where most of them squish together. I think of friends of mine who have cleaned hotel rooms around the U.S. whose jobs afforded neither real money nor real chance for dignity.  Am I hearing her properly?

I am. And I hear the same theme, with variation, throughout Argentina.

After an economic crisis left thousands of factories and other businesses shuttered, workers suddenly found themselves unemployed and desperately poor.  As many as 10,000 of them from roughly 200 enterprises eventually said to heck with loss of income, loss of occupation, loss of dignity.  Through trial, error, commitment, and organizing, they retook their former places of employment… except this time not as peons, but as owners. Today, they continue producing on an industrial, competitive scale, manufacturing everything from sewer parts to balloons, tractors to ice cream under conditions of democracy, equity, and autonomy.

Seventy percent of factories were retaken after fierce campaigns, either physical takeover or long occupations in front of the factory gates.  The sit-ins lasted an average of five months  - weary, often hungry, sometimes violence-filled ones.

With so many not having been paid in months, their survival choices came down, as analyst Modesto Guerroro put it, to the following: “Either they tried to occupy and work the business or they would have to go beg in the streets, prostrate themselves, steal, or wait for their luck.”

Getting themselves physically back into the factories involved either cutting the locks or getting permission from the courts. What workers found once they did reenter was devastating. The places had often been ransacked by the former owners, right down to the light bulbs and business records.  Machines had been stripped of every valuable part.  Many of the factories were without electricity, water, or gas.

The workers usually spent many months hauling away debris.  They cannibalized equipment and improvised with scrap to make at least one of each necessary machine. Neighbors donated what they could, be it their welding masks or their labor on a spare Sunday. As for what they faced in restarting production: They had no capital or credit lines with which to make over their former places of employment. For starters, they manufactured and sold infinitesimal amounts of whatever items they could produce with scrounged primary materials.

But get back on their feet many of them did, and slowly profits began to trickle in, challenging the workers to decide how to deal with the surplus. These fábricas recuperadas, or recovered businesses have explored different forms of self-management, from coordinators rotating every few months so that all have a turn to everything being decided by the collective. Each recuperada hold assemblies through which everyone votes on internal policies and the way production will take place.   In regular meetings workers discuss everything from proposed changes in hours to personal issues. One worker notes: “As strange as it may seem, the time dedicated to equal debate improves the level of production per hour, something that goes against the current of the hegemonic business model… Hours no longer mean what they used to.  Back then, I worked 12 hours and returned home feeling exploited and destroyed.  Now, if I return home tired, it is a different kind of tiredness.  Because inside you is passing a caravan of satisfaction that is sometimes difficult to explain."

Many workers told us that democracy will thrive so long as transparency exists and egalitarian mechanisms are maintained.  As production and income increases, workers will be challenged not to return to simple production-for-profit and not to become new bosses to new subordinates.  As soon as workers lose their ideals, power struggles will emerge, access to information will become privileged, and collective power will be denied.

"To me the idea is not only to protect a source of work, but to support a new society toward a new construction of power," says a woman in red sneakers as she lays type at Chilavert printing press. In addition to creating and sustaining jobs, production, and services, factories are very explicitly values-based. Far more than production or the financing of their craft, workers talk to us about solidarity, respect, commitment, the importance of shared participation, and community.

The challenges to this survival are many: they control the means of production within their factories but not the laws that govern market capitalism and production. Nor do they control the politics of Argentina, nor the asymmetrical relationship between Latin America and the U.S., all of which shape the factories’ future. Marcelo Rualde, president of the Hotel Buaen Coop, says, “I am not a dreamer. The capitalist market is very savage.  We are an island of the marginalized and the excluded.  We could create an alternative market, but we aren’t going to change the schema of capitalism.”

 
Survival strategies – and even potential for growth - certianly exist, however. Strong political solidarity to build the might of the sector within the political economy is one route. As Gabriela Bazan of the vinyl factory Viniplanst puts it: “That blessed phrase, ‘In unity there is strength,’ is exactly our situation.”  Another is the supply chain between different factories. The brass and copper tubing factory could supply parts to the refrigerator manufacturing factory, the data processing operation could offer record-keeping services to the paper bag company, and so on.  The president of one unemployed worker association stubs out her cigarette and says, “We were taught not to give up. History is not finished. The story isn’t over. We won’t die silent.

Regardless of the future, the experiment proves that just and equitable economies not only can, but do, exist. It is yet one more seed sprouting in a garden where, as one activist-writer says, “future generations can reverse the logic of capitalism by producing for communities, not for profits and empowering workers, not exploiting them.” People the world over have been inspired by the Argentine worker experience, which is exactly how alternatives multiply.

To learn more, visit www.otherworldsarepossible.org.  To lend your direct support to help the recuperadas survive, see www.theworkingworld.org.  To spread the vision and the hope, work for democracy in your own workplace.

Beverly Bell and Moira Birss are members of the Other Worlds collaborative, www.otherworldsarepossible.org.  Photos by Andy Lin.