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>Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 18:37:01 -0500
>Subject: Worker control in Argentina
>Reply-To: portside at yahoogroups.com
>
>Worker control breathes life into ailing factories
>
>Sidney Morning Herald November 9, 2002
>
>http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/08/1036308479390
>.html
>
>Reed Lindsay reports from Buenos Aires on a rare - and
>controversial - success story amid the ruins of
>Argentina's economy.
>
>For nearly a year, the workers at the Grissinopoli
>bread stick factory saw their weekly salary steadily
>decline from 150 pesos to 100 and then to 40.
>
>Finally, on June 3, with the firm headed for
>bankruptcy, the workers demanded recompense. The plant
>manager offered 10 pesos to each of the 14 employees,
>and asked them to leave the factory. They didn't budge.
>
>"He closed the shutters, and we stayed inside," said
>Norma Pintos, 49, who has worked at the factory, in the
>middle-class Chacarita neighbourhood, for 11 years. "We
>just wanted to keep coming to work."
>
>But what began as a last-ditch effort to save their
>jobs, or at the very least to receive some back wages,
>turned into a dogged effort to gain control of the
>factory.
>
>The workers began taking turns guarding the factory 24
>hours a day, surviving by asking for spare change at
>the public university and selling empanadas, chorizos
>and home-made bread on the street.
>
>Four months later, the city legislature expropriated
>the factory and handed it over to the workers. In
>October, Grissinopoli began producing bread sticks
>again.
>
>In little more than a year, workers have seized control
>of scores of foundering factories across Argentina.
>
>Even more remarkable than the takeovers has been the
>worker-led resuscitation of the factories, which in
>some cases are doing better than under their previous
>ownerships.
>
>Apart from saving thousands of jobs and softening the
>precipitous decline of the nation's once formidable
>industrial production, the factory takeovers are
>defying hard-and-fast notions about the relationship
>between capital and labour.
>
>They have also begun to alarm conservatives, who view
>them as a threatening private property rights. But in
>this crisis-laden nation of 37million, where more than
>half the population is below the poverty line and 34per
>cent of the workforce is unemployed or underemployed,
>the workers have won government sanction and strong
>public support.
>
>As darkness descends over the murky Riachuelo River
>that marks Buenos Aires' southern boundary, the nearby
>Ghelco ice-cream factory still hums with activity. Men
>in green uniforms mop floors while others sort papers
>in the front office.
>
>In February, the owners of the factory, once the
>nation's leading maker of the flavoured powder used in
>making ice-cream, locked the doors and soon afterwards
>filed for bankruptcy. The workers, who were owed the
>equivalent of thousands of dollars in back wages and
>benefits, were left to fend for themselves as they
>awaited the outcome of a long and uncertain legal
>process.
>
>At the urging of Luis Caro, a lawyer who has
>represented some 40 occupied factories, the workers
>formed a co-operative and mounted a permanent protest
>in front of the factory, preventing attempts to remove
>any equipment or inventory.
>
>After three months the bankruptcy judge allowed them
>temporarily to rent the factory. In September, the
>Buenos Aires legislature expropriated Ghelco - the
>first seizure of its kind in the city - and handed the
>keys to the co-operative.
>
>Now 43 of Ghelco's former employees, all of whom worked
>on the factory floor, run the company.
>
>While they say they enjoy working for themselves,
>bringing the company back to life has not been easy.
>Many are working 12-hour days as they juggle new
>managerial or administrative duties with their former
>production posts.
>
>"Before, when it was time to leave, we were out the
>door ... now, it's nine at night and we're still
>here," said Claudia Pea, who labels containers and
>cleans the bathrooms when she is not greeting customers
>and clients as a receptionist.
>
>Across the Riachuelo in the province of Buenos Aires,
>business is booming for the 54 members of the Union and
>Force Co-operative, who occupied a metallurgical plant
>for six months before securing legal control through an
>expropriation last year.
>
>The workers are earning more than twice as much as they
>did as employees and are set to take on 20 new members,
>almost all of them sons of current workers. With demand
>high for their copper and brass pipes and taps, they
>are expanding the plant and have plans to export their
>products.
>
>The workers are as surprised as anyone else at the
>factory's success.
>
>"The fellows still think this is all a dream," said the
>co-operative's president, Roberto Salcedo, 49.
>"Nowadays if you lose your job you know that you aren't
>going to find work again, and much less at our age."
>
>If shrewd industrialists with an open credit line ran
>these companies into bankruptcy, how can
>worker-controlled co-operatives with no capital and no
>business experience be thriving during the worst
>economic slump in Argentina's history?
>
>Having the books wiped clean of old debts has not hurt.
>But more important, the workers say, are the profits
>freed by eliminating the owners' hefty take and the
>higher salaries paid to managerial staff.
>
>As in most of the occupied factories, the Union and
>Force Co-operative has an egalitarian pay scale.
>Decisions are made by direct vote in regular assemblies
>and each worker earns the same, based on the previous
>week's profits.
>
>Caro estimates that workers have taken over 100
>factories and other businesses nationwide. While most
>takeovers have been at factories, they have also
>included a supermarket, a medical clinic, a Patagonian
>mine and a Buenos Aires shipyard.
>
>Often, the owners have struck a deal whereby the
>workers take over production in exchange for payment
>of rent or forgiving back wages or benefits. Other
>factories are still in a state of legal limbo. But the
>ultimate aim for many worker-controlled factories is
>expropriation.
>
>In the past two years, 17 factories have been
>expropriated in the province of Buenos Aires and in
>recent months three in the capital. Provincial and city
>legislators are drafting bills that would create a
>government agency to assist in the formation of
>co-operatives and facilitate the expropriation of
>bankrupt companies to hand them to the workers.
>
>However, dissent is brewing among influential economic
>interests, and as a result political support for
>expropriations may be waning, said Beatriz Baltroc, a
>Buenos Aires city legislator who has been a leading
>proponent of the expropriations.
>
>While the first two expropriations in the capital were
>approved unanimously by the city legislature, the
>centre-right Radical Party has since reversed its
>position, refusing to vote on the expropriation of
>Grissinopoli.
>
>"The property of the owners is being ignored in order
>to transfer it to the employees. This is not an
>expropriation, it is a confiscation," said Gregorio
>Badeni, a constitutional lawyer. "Expropriations can
>only be declared in cases of public benefit. In these
>cases there is no public benefit. There is benefit for
>20 or 30 people."
>
>But with local support for the factory-occupying
>workers strong, authorities have had little success
>removing them by force.
>
>In March, about 200 people from neighbourhood
>assemblies and human rights groups converged on the
>worker-controlled Brukman textile factory, forcing the
>retreat of 70 riot police who were acting on a judge's
>order to reclaim the property.
>
>"The idea that a capitalist is needed to organise
>production is being demystified," said Christian
>Castillo, a sociology professor at the University of
>Buenos Aires.
>
>"If things improve economically, this movement perhaps
>may fade away. But the idea of worker control is out
>there."
>
>
>
>
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