Tim May used to reckon creeps like this could be evicted from the holy
capitalists property,(or even governments,for that matter,private property
is sacred to the free market anarchist.Still an anarcho-capitalist Mongo?
Worker control breathes life into ailing factories
November 9 2002
http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/08/1036308479390.html
The Union and Force metallurgical plant is flourishing under workers'
control. Photo: Reed Lindsay
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."