Occupy, Resist, Produce! Lessons from Latin America’s Occupied Factories
Latin America’s occupied factory movement has built an expansive system of workers’ self-management through direct action and the expropriation of the means of production. The worker occupations lend insight to workers around the world, demonstrating that direct actions at the workplace can lead to revolutionary practices, self-determination, and worker control—three essential elements of a free society, and an essential component for an anarchist economics if we are to study what self-management might look like in a post-capitalist future. In Argentina, more than 13,000 people work in occupied factories and businesses, otherwise known as recuperated enterprises. The sites, which number more than 200, range from hotels to ceramics factories, balloon manufacturers, suit factories, printing shops, and transport companies, as well as many other trades. And these sites provide examples in embryonic form of what anarchist economics might mean applied to our experiences of work.
The working class has occupied factories since the onset of the industrial revolution as a strategy for workers to defend themselves against deplorable work conditions, unsafe workplaces, and retaliation. Recently in Latin America, workers occupied the workplace not only to make demands heard, but also to put worker self-management into practice. In Argentina, and other nations throughout South America such as Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela, workers rediscovered the factory occupations starting in 2000. Occupations spread in Argentina as the region faced a financial crisis in 2001 in which thousands of factories closed and businesses bankrupted. Growing unemployment, capital flight, and deindustrialization served as the backdrop for the factory takeovers in 2000.
Even though worker-recuperated enterprises have created jobs, fostered community projects, and improved working conditions for thousands, these sites face legal uncertainty and state attacks that have forced them to resolve problems autonomous from government intervention. The Argentine experiment in self-management has essentially questioned the very logic of capitalism. This may be why government representatives, industry representatives, and factory owners have remained silent and often times reacted with hostility on this issue; they are afraid of these sites multiplying and the example they have set. These experiences potentially could replace capitalism.
In anarchist writer Voltairine de Cleyre’s text “Direct Action,” she writes that capitalists’ possession of the means of production is absolutely worthless without workers’ activity and labor. Argentina’s recuperated enterprises reaffirm the notion that workers do not need bosses to produce. When workers expropriate land, factories, businesses, or housing, they provide solutions to their own problems without the intervention of the state or other authoritarian institutions. This is what governments and capitalists find unacceptable—that workers are proving that the foundation of the capitalist model and the supposed “need” for state management is a farce. Nearly a century after Voltairine de Cleyre published “Direct Action,” the text still proves relevant. As capitalism falls into an irreversible crisis now, workers throughout the world are employing factory occupations as a viable direct action to defend workers’ rights and transform social relations.
Along with the birth of industrial capitalism, the working class commenced the dream of freeing themselves from exploitation, destroying the capitalist system through direct action, and re-appropriating the means of production. As historians and writers long noted, the aspiration for direct worker management of production has culminated in many worker takeovers through the greater part of the twentieth century—Russia (1917), Italy (1920), Spain (1936), Chile (1972), and Argentina (2001).
Industrial capitalism brought the employment of wage labor and, with wage labor, revolutionized the means of production igniting class struggle. Capitalist owners, since they owned the means of production, could then control labor, accumulating capital from the labor of the workers, in a concept which Karl Marx termed “surplus value.” Given the very nature of capitalism, class relations have remained antagonistic throughout the course of modern society and the expansion of globalized industrial capitalism.
Since capitalists extract their profits from the productive process, they want the lowest wages possible for their workers and the least amount of costs in production (even at the expense of workplace safety and the environment). The objective of this cycle of exploitation is selling their products back to the masses at the highest price possible. Bosses have long sought to suppress the bargaining power of workers through economic and political manipulation. Throughout history they have sought to do so by any means necessary—including forceful, violent coercion. The state has unleashed violence on workers who decided to defend their rights in numerous attacks in the past 200 years (e.g., the Homestead Massacre in Pittsburgh 1892; Ludlow Massacre 1914; Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago 1937; and Argentina’s own 1976–1983 military dictatorship, which targeted union organizing and “disappeared” 30,000 people).
Within capitalism, workers have no other choice than to sell their labor. In order to survive, workers needs a wage or they starve. Of course, this system has led to a conflict of interests between the working class and capitalist class. Through direct action, workers throughout history hoped not only to make their demands heard for a shorter workday, better working conditions, and higher salaries, but also transformed their own consciousness to understand that another system of production is possible.
Argentina offers one of the longest-lived experiences of direct worker management of this century. As such, the experiences of self-management in Latin America provide an example of new working-class subjectivities, self-determination, and working culture while they fight against dominant institutions, including the state and capitalist bosses. Their struggles provide a liberatory vision by sowing the seeds for a new society today, challenging market systems of domination, and questioning the legitimacy of private property.
Many anarchist traditions have been interwoven into the resistance strategies of Latin America’s autonomous social movements, which includes the worker-controlled factory movement. In many cases, the worker occupations transformed class struggle into a collectivized system of self-management through direct action, essentially changing the entire premise of production within a capitalist society. No longer do workers produce under the exploitive supervision of bosses who appropriate their surplus capital. The workers themselves, after occupying their workplace and appropriating the means of production from their bosses, transformed the workplace into a space for liberation and cooperation.
“All co-operative experiments are essentially direct action”
—Voltairine de Cleyre, “Direct Action”
The occupied factory movement carries to its core the ideals and practices of class struggle—not only in the way they have adopted the factory occupation as a legitimate tool for workers around the world, but also in the way they have resolved their problems autonomously from state intervention and put into practice workers’ self-management.
The sites that have fostered systems of worker self-management first began with a worker occupation or some direct action at the point of production. The context and circumstance of each of the sites vary, but almost all share the commonality of the occupation. Many of Argentina’s recuperated enterprises borrowed the slogan “Occupy, Resist, Produce” from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), which for nearly a quarter of a century has built a massive movement of over one million families and taken over nearly thirty-five million acres from large land owners. Like MST in Brazil, Argentina’s worker-controlled factories were occupied to find a solution to joblessness autonomously from the state, which was unwilling to intervene.
First the workers occupied their workplace, in a number of different circumstances, widely in the context of a bankruptcy. Then they had to defend the occupation and resist forceful eviction attempts. Production was frequently started when the workers were resisting and fighting for legality. Often actions such as highway blockades, street protests, and even threatening to destroy the sites of production accompanied the occupations.
Breaking Chains
One of the most emblematic actions was the workers’ decision at various locations to cut off a lock to the factory or workplace with the lock symbolizing the protection of private property. Workers break the chain, putting their legitimate claim to jobs with dignity over the sanctity of private property.
“The most important factor, and most subversive, is that the recuperated enterprises confirm that businesses don’t need bosses to produce,” says Fabio Resino from the BAUEN Hotel. The nineteen-story, 180-room hotel has been operational since workers took it over in 2003. It operates despite a court-ordered eviction notice and void of legal recognition. The hotel has been a launch pad for the new occupied factories; many of the workers from the new take-overs have come to the BAUEN Hotel seeking advice and support.
The BAUEN Hotel had closed in December 2001. The alleged owners, Grupo Solari, acquired the hotel in 1997 and filed bankruptcy in 2001. Leading up to the hotel’s closure, the hotel’s rooms and facilities deteriorated, and the bosses began laying off workers. The remaining workers were fired in December 2001. The bosses abandoned the hotel located on a major avenue in downtown Buenos Aires, boarding it up and allowing it to become an eyesore, reminding the city of the impending financial crisis and widespread unemployment the nation faced.
The decision to occupy came in 2003, two years after the initial closure. Nearly thirty workers, along with supporters from other occupied factories and workers’ movements, participated in the action. The workers first held an assembly at Chilavert, a printing press collectively run by its workers since 2002. There the workers voted to occupy the hotel.
Arminda Palacios worked as a seamstress at the hotel for over twenty years and played a key role in the occupation. Her account of the occupation rings with emotion, which she describes as a turning point in her life as a worker. The occupiers entered through an adjacent hotel on the block. When they got to the gate that connected the two hotels in the basement they made a pivotal decision to break in. “There was a small lock. We cut it off and we walked in,” said Palacios giving the impression that the owners were assured that the private property was so sacred that no one would question the fraudulent bankruptcy. Immediately afterward, the workers went to the reception area and huddled together in tears when they realized what they had accomplished: saving their jobs and recovering their dignity.
Since the workers’ occupation, the space has transformed into a modern-day commune, a far cry from the origins of the hotel with ties to the nation’s bloody military dictatorship—which forcefully “disappeared” 30,000 workers, activists, and students. Hotel BAUEN was built in 1978 with loans from the military junta which dictated the nation from 1976–1983. Argentina’s national soccer team took the 1978 World Cup and the military used the world championship as a media campaign to cover up the gruesome human rights abuses occurring at the time. Guests at the hotel, among whom were high-profile military and government reps, chanted a counter-human-rights slogan: “Somos derechos y humanos!” (We are right and human! ) They cheered with the Argentine flag in hand, as thousands of women and men cried in terror while undergoing indescribable torture sessions; as the military drugged prisoners and then dropped their bodies into the Atlantic Ocean in the vuelos de muerte, or death flights. “This hotel was a symbol of the dictatorship: of the repression and looting that this country endured,” said Raúl Godoy, a worker from the Zanon ceramics plant, the largest recuperated factory in Argentina in the Patagonian province of Neuquén. “Now this hotel is a symbol of the workers, the workers that are beginning to recover from 30,000 disappearances and take back what was stolen from us.”
Hotel BAUEN’s original owner, Marcelo Iurcovich, received more than 5 million to construct the BAUEN, with a government loan from the National Development Bank (BANADE). Iurcovich never held the hotel up to safety inspection codes, and never paid back state loans. He ran up debts and committed tax evasion while making millions of dollars in profits and acquiring two more hotels. Throughout the ’90s the hotel became the emblematic symbol of neoliberalism, serving as the election bunker for former president Carlos Menem (1989–1999), who, ironically, has been blamed for ruining the nation’s economy through privatization and reactionary free market policies.
In 2008, Victoria Donda, a national deputy whose mother and father were disappeared by the military dictatorship, sponsored an expropriation law in the national congress that would give the BAUEN legality. “The purpose of the bill is for the hotel to be expropriated by the State and for the workers to manage it. We are fighting for a law to declare this workplace, which already belongs to the community in Buenos Aires and the people, to declare it public domain.” Donda’s past was also clouded by the terror of the military junta. She was born at the ESMA (Military Navy Mechanics School), the nation’s largest clandestine detention center, while her mother was in captivity. She is one of the 500 children born and kidnapped by the military and by people with connections to the military from 1976–1983.[1]
Nearly thirty workers occupied the BAUEN when it was first taken over in 2003. Today the cooperative employs more than 150. The BAUEN cooperative has proven that workers can efficiently manage hotel services, but also demonstrated creativity in opening this space to the cultural and social movements in the city. On a local level, BAUEN Hotel has participated in efforts at coalition building and the development of a broad mutual support network. In the midst of legal struggles and successfully running a prominent hotel, the cooperative’s members haven’t forgotten their roots. The worker-run hotel has become a political center for movement organizing.
Direct action led to the BAUEN collective redefining the workplace on three fronts: struggle, culture, and work. Hotel BAUEN serves as a meeting place for worker, human rights, and environmental justice organizations. Subway delegates who have been organizing an autonomous, independent union use the BAUEN as a meeting space and venue for press conferences when announcing wildcat strikes. Human rights organizations like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, HIJOS, and international intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Michael Albert have expressed their support of the Hotel BAUEN’s commitment to worker control. Nora Cortinas, president of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s founding chapter, has confirmed her commitment to defending the BAUEN Hotel. When asked how she would defend the BAUEN she said, “Like this,” while striking a boxer’s pose ready to deliver the knockout punch.
On the cultural front, the Hotel BAUEN has held numerous street festivals in defense of workers’ control. Thousands attended a street festival in November 2008 for a national expropriation law for Hotel BAUEN where Argentine rock legend, Leon Gieco, performed. Inside the hotel, many collectives have performed fundraising shows for the BAUEN and other social movements.
In order to survive, the BAUEN cooperative has resisted legal attacks and an uncertain future. Despite numerous eviction orders and lack of legal support, the BAUEN cooperative has continued to operate successful hotel services, convinced that they have a legitimate right to work without a boss. The global economic crisis has brought negative consequences for business at the hotel as tourism continues to drop. Many of the occupied factories have had to forge autonomous solutions to legal and market challenges. State representatives have been reluctant to put into motion an eviction attempt, sensing that because of the BAUEN Hotel’s strategic location and ability to rally support, efforts at eviction would result in a costly bloodbath. Subway workers have threatened a total city transport shutdown if the courts were to sanction a police operation to evict the hotel collective.
The BAUEN Hotel has demonstrated that through direct action workers can avenge their historic exploitation by expropriating symbols of neoliberalism and oppression for the benefit of the community and working class. Since the workers broke the chains protecting private property, their lives and the workplace have transformed into a liberatory space. Whereas the hotel had been a dark symbol of the nation’s state repression and neoliberal policies, today it symbolizes working-class resistance and culture.
Hide-and-Seek Capitalism
A number of factors set off each of the occupations in Argentina. When asked why the workers made the decision to occupy, 77 percent answered that the bosses owed the workers unpaid salaries; 41 percent answered that the company went bankrupt; 35 percent said that the company attempted to liquidate assets/empty out the factory; 29 percent pointed out work instability as a significant factor; 29 percent answered that they were expecting impending firing; and 18 percent answered that the boss or owner had abandoned the workplace.[2]
Most of the worker takeovers were actions to guarantee that the owners wouldn’t be able to liquidate assets before filing bankruptcy to avoid paying workers indemnities and back salaries. Workers’ demands steadily grew from measures to safeguard their jobs to the idea of implementing a system of self-management. With little hope that bosses would ever return to pay workers what they owed, they devised plans to start up production with no boss or owner whatsoever.
Bosses abandoning their workplaces were a common impetus for the workers’ occupations. This was the case of La Nueva Esperanza cooperative, a balloon company formerly known as Global, which employed more than eighty workers in the 1980s. At the time of the factory’s closure, the plant only employed forty workers. When the workers came to work on a Monday in 2004, to their surprise the factory’s gate was closed with a sign reading, “closed until further notice.” They jumped the fence to find that the factory’s machinery had been taken away—essentially the workers found the plant ransacked. “We didn’t know what to do. The first idea we had was to set off the factory’s security alarm so the owner would show his face,” said Claudia, a young worker with nearly ten years at the plant. The owner, Jorge Sasinsky, never showed up, having owed taxes, four years in unpaid salaries, contributions to workers’ social security funds, unpaid vacation time, and cash to suppliers.
Neighbors living next to the plant in a residential neighborhood in Buenos Aires informed the workers that on Friday after they finished their shifts at 5 p.m., they saw moving trucks and men removing machinery from the plant. The balloon workers interviewed said that they immediately set out on an independent investigation to find out where the boss took the machinery. They discovered that the boss had transferred the balloon manufacturing equipment to a warehouse in a nearby suburban city outside of the capital, in an industrial belt, but they didn’t know exactly where. “There are a lot of factories in that area; factory owners get suspicious if they see a group of workers knocking on factory doors and asking questions. But we kept looking,” said Nereo, a veteran worker at the factory. After days of searching, and losing what little hope they had left of finding the “factory,” three workers persevered in their hunt.
Ready to give up, balloon producers saw a man sweeping the sidewalk outside of a factory and asked him if he had seen any sign of a factory opening. He tipped them off of a nearby deposit warehouse. It occurred to Nereo to open one of the garbage bags outside the warehouse. “Inside I found—the factory—I mean balloons.”
Immediately the workers set up camp outside the warehouse to demand their jobs, unpaid salaries, or severance pay. The desperate situation dragged on for months. The workers rotated shifts at the sit-in. Judges from the labor courts and government representatives refused to hear the workers’ claims. The trustee handling the workers’ claims never met with the workers. Now jobless and broke, the workers relied on outside support to survive. “People who you don’t even know bring you coffee, sugar, yerba mate. We couldn’t believe the support that we got,” said Eva, a worker at the factory for more than twenty years. The solidarity they received changed their perspectives and outlook. They also describe how uniting as workers while camping out gave them the courage to form a cooperative and take action. For more than eight months, eighteen workers maintained the sit-in outside the factory until they were violently attacked. According to the workers, following a news report that aired on television the boss sent lackeys to beat them. While two women were guarding the tent, a group of men attacked them, hitting one worker over the head with a bottle. That’s when the workers decided: “Enough is enough.”
Along with other social movements and workers from occupied factories, the ex-Global workers voted to expropriate the machinery and take it back to the original, but now abandoned plant. Workers from IMPA, a recovered metallurgical factory in Buenos Aires, provided trucks since they couldn’t “rent” trucks to move equipment that legally didn’t belong to the workers. Other activists from the recuperated enterprises, including the Chilavert printing shop, BAUEN Hotel, and Conforti, also participated in the expropriation. One worker describes how he packed up the truck until the last piece of machinery was loaded. Often times, workers from recuperated enterprises have decided to cease production at their workplace to participate in solidarity actions with other occupied sites—the idea being si nos tocan a uno, nos tocan a todos, (if they mess with one of us, they mess with all of us.)
Together they entered the plant in the suburbs, moved the machines onto trucks, and brought the machines back to the factory in the capital. When they were unloading the last truck the police showed up. They called for backup and five patrol cars came. The police told them they couldn’t unload the truck, and the workers resisted until they were able to unload the last compressor. Video footage shows the workers, supporters, and other occupiers hurriedly locking the gate to prevent police from raiding the plant.
When the workers arrived at the plant, they found it in ruins and a part of the deposit area burn down. To assure that the workers wouldn’t try to occupy it, the former owner set fire to the plant, according to the workers. Most of them had produced balloons for the company for at least several decades at the factory.
Another stage in the struggle implied the fight for legalization. The workers had to convince legislative representatives to support an expropriation bill to hand over the real estate and machinery to the cooperative. For five months, the workers occupied the factory illegally. On September 22, 2005, the city legislature granted the La Nueva Esperanza cooperative temporary expropriation and legal rights. “I never thought that I would be working in a cooperative; we feel as if the factory belongs to us and we’re running it perhaps better than the former owner,” said Claudia.
In many of the occupations, the bosses often played a game of hide-and-seek capitalism. Bosses have to hide because what they are doing is unethical, unfair, exploitive, and often times illegal. The post-modern theorist Michel Foucault posed the following question in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals?” Given the nature of modern capitalism, it is not surprising—factories, in fact, resemble prisons in their layout and organization of time, as Foucault suggests. The factory in modern globalization serves as a location for manufacturing that can disappear and reappear across borders—spaces that are hidden from the gaze of society so they can exploit and control workers toiling inside with impunity. Many transnational manufacturing sites could be considered modern-day prisons—with workers laboring for nearly slave wages for unrestricted workdays and in deplorable conditions, bussed into extensive labyrinths of barbed wire and fences like the little media has shown viewers of maquiladoras in free trade zones. And many prisons have been transformed into modern-day factories with corporations paying inmates less than humane wages to manufacture products. In the case of Global balloons, the owner abandoned the old plant and workers to open a new factory with new workers willing to accept lower wages and higher production rates. The workers had to find their boss, who “disappeared” into thin air, to make their demands. The boss didn’t count on the workers winning this game of hide-and-seek.
The workers, on the other hand, have opened their factories under worker control to the community. No longer do the sites have guards and gates to keep outsiders out—they have invited students, activists, and other workers to visit the factory to see what they have accomplished: creating jobs with dignity and building democratic workplaces. These sites have also fostered cultural spaces and community programs. More than twenty-three adult education programs operate in recuperated enterprises and the factory has now become a classroom for hundreds of adults. Chilavert printing shop, BAUEN Hotel, and Zanon ceramics factory regularly host schoolchildren who tour the sites to learn that workers can successfully run a business without a boss or owner, where all workers are equal—a concept children find inspiring and fascinating.
Syndicalism and Self-management
“Revolutionary syndicalism, basing itself on the class-war, aims at the union of all manual and intellectual workers in economic fighting organizations struggling for their emancipation from the yoke of wage slavery and from the oppression of the State. Its goal consists in the re-organization of social life on the basis of free Communism, by means of the revolutionary action of the working-class itself.”—Rudolf Rocker
As the largest recuperated factory in Argentina, the Zanon ceramics factory has redefined the bases of production: without workers, production is impossible and without bosses, production flourishes. Zanon, still Latin America’s largest ceramics manufacturer, is located in the Patagonian province of Neuquén, a region with rich working-class traditions and history. The workers officially declared the factory under worker control in October 2001 following a bosses’ lockout.
In 2001, Zanon’s owners had decided to close its doors and fire the workers without paying months of back pay or severance pay. Leading up to the massive layoffs and plant’s closure, workers had gone on strike in 2000. The owner, Luis Zanon, with over $75 million in debt to public and private creditors (including the World Bank for over $20 million), fired most of the workers en masse and closed the factory in 2001—a bosses’ lockout. In October 2001, workers declared the plant under worker control. The workers subsequently camped outside the factory for four months, pamphleteering and partially blocking a highway leading to the capital city of Neuquén. While the workers were camping outside the factory, a court ruled that the employees could sell off remaining stock. After the stock ran out, on March 2, 2002, the workers’ assembly voted to start up production without a boss.
Since the occupation, the workers renamed the factory FASINPAT (Factory without a Boss). The Zanon workers have grown from a group of workers self-managing a union organization to a collective self-managing a factory under worker control. Omar Villablanca, a young worker, said that worker control wouldn’t have been possible without the union organizing efforts previous to the occupation. “Zanon is what it is today because the workers recuperated the factory’s internal trade union. If we hadn’t won back the union, Zanon wouldn’t be functioning under worker control. The Zanon workers learned from the lessons of the internal union and listening to workers organizing in other factories.”
Prior to the takeover in 2001, workers organized and won control of the ceramics union. A shop-floor movement won union representation elections inside the factory in late 1998, ousting the old union delegate tied to the bureaucracy and the employers. In 2000, delegates from the rank-and-file movement won the provincial-wide elections of the Neuquén Ceramists Union by a three-to-one margin. By 2007, having operated four years under worker control, Neuquén Ceramists Union assembly voted in favor of a new union statute reinventing the democratic principles and guidelines for the union inspired by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the General Confederation of Labor (or CGT).
Without support from the union, workers held a strike in 2000 following the death of Daniel Ferras, a twenty-two-year-old worker who died in the factory due to lack of emergency medical care and employer negligence. The eight-day work stoppage forced the company to provide an ambulance on site and form a joint commission of workers and managers to oversee production safety within the factory.
While FASINPAT includes a diverse array of political ideologies and backgrounds, in numerous public talks I have heard workers reference the historic example of anarcho-syndicalist organizations that organized self-managed work places during the Spanish Civil-War. The Zanon workers’ experience of fighting for control of a mass union prior to the worker take-over at the plant helped create a precedent of collectively self-managing a struggle within capitalist society. It also helped to develop in the workers a sense of their power to run things. In this case, the sense of self-managing a union struggle led to the autogestión of a massive factory.
Central to the organization at FASINPAT is the notion of class struggle. At the factory, the workers transmit their identity as workers in social conflict with the capitalist and managerial classes with a perspective of emancipation for the working class. Beyond worker control at FASINPAT, the worker general assemblies held at the plant often discuss issues related to labor conflicts throughout Argentina. The assembly has voted to contribute to numerous strike funds and to participate regularly and physically in protests in support of social movements locally and nationally.
The Zanon occupation took place in the context of an explosion of social movements and political organizing. Leading up to the popular rebellion in December 2001, in which former President Fernando de la Rúa was ousted, unemployed worker organizations were blocking highways throughout the nation to demand real jobs and a solution to the deepening economic crisis that left more than 50 percent of the population in dire poverty. The unemployed worker organizations, or piqueteros, were also building networks of popular movements based on the ideals of direct democracy, autonomy, and direct action. Popular neighborhood assemblies were appearing in neighborhoods in nearly all metropolitan areas, occupying banks and other abandoned spaces to provide autonomous solutions to local problems.
Many of the occupied factories have had to physically resist eviction attempts. At Zanon, the government has tried to evict the factory collective five times with massive police operations. Community support for Zanon has culminated to such a level that the government has had to back down. On April 8, 2003, more than 5,000 community members from Neuquén defended the factory, surrounding it, demonstrating their willingness to put their bodies on the line to defend a factory that “belongs to the people.” The nearly 500 ceramics workers have sent a clear message to the government that the factory will not be taken back without a fight. “We have said that the factory belongs to the people, we are going to defend our factory. We are going to use the legitimate tools of defense that we have to successfully run this plant,” said Raúl Godoy to a press conference prior to the April 2003 eviction attempt, appearing with activists from Mothers of Plaza de Mayo sitting behind him with their emblematic white handkerchiefs on their heads.
Zanon workers’ prior experience in class-struggle syndicalism helped to catapult FASINPAT into the forefront of the occupied factory movement. Here they have proven that through direct democratic organization and class-based solidarity workers can develop successful experiences of worker control.
The workers will defend their factory regardless of the possible consequences, forging resistance to an unfavorable legal future. Rosa Rivera, worker at Zanon for fifteen years, explains that Zanon is not only a struggle for the 470 workers inside the factory, but a struggle for the community and social revolution. “If factories are shut down and abandoned, workers have the right to occupy it, put it to work, and defend it with their lives.”
A New Chapter in Working-Class History
When left with no other option, workers decided to take over factories and take charge of production themselves. Only later, when they had the support of the community and proved that they could run a factory did they demand legality. First came the occupation. “Occupy, resist and produce; production is the last stage,” explains Candido Gonzalez, a veteran in the occupied factory movement from the recuperated Chilavert printing shop. “In order to produce you can’t skip the two previous stages of occupying and resisting.” Labor history suggests that without direct action, workers have little chance of winning. The stronger the action, the more likely they are to win their demands. The occupied factory movement embodies this logic with the slogan “Occupy, resist, produce!”
The state thus far has been unwilling to make changes to bankruptcy laws to protect workers from fraudulent lockouts and closures. In 2009, BAUEN has yet to gain full legal recognition although after nearly a decade of self-managing their workplaces, a forceful eviction is unlikely as long as the hotel can continue to rally support.
The workers at FASINPAT won a major legal victory in 2009. The provincial legislature voted in favor of expropriating the ceramics factory and handing it over to the workers’ cooperative to manage legally and indefinitely. While Zanon now has legal standing, the cooperative will continue to defend workers’ rights and self-management. This means these sites should stick to their roots as part of a worldwide network of working-class struggles.
We Can Write Our Own Futures!
Will direct actions like workplace occupations continue to grow as the world faces an economic crisis? From 2008 to 2010, Serbia, Turkey, France, Spain, South Africa, England, and Canada have seen worker occupations. The most well-known case in the United States has been the sit-down strike at the Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors plant where workers occupied their factory to demand severance pay and benefits after being abruptly fired. The occupations in Argentina continue to rise as the global crisis hits the South American nation. The Arrufat chocolate factory, Disco de Oro empanada (pastry) manufacturer, Febatex thread producer, and Lidercar meat packing plant joined the ranks of the worker-occupied factory movement from 2008 to 2009.
These sites in Latin America have developed a new model of organizing after learning the lesson that workers can’t rely on governments, even “progressive” governments, and unresponsive unions to resolve the problems of unnecessary firings and joblessness. The worker occupations have proven that through the power of direct action, the reinvention of social relations, and producing for the benefit of the community and workers rather than greedy bosses, a factory can be transformed into a liberatory space. “Maybe one day our story will be included in a chapter in working-class history that a group of workers occupied a plant and began producing,” said Adrian, from Arrufat chocolate occupied factory after lamenting the loss of his hand in the plant under capitalist supervision. And the occupied factories in Argentina are doing just that: writing a new future for working-class history and sending the message that workers can do what capitalists aren’t interested in doing—creating jobs and dignity for workers.
Endnotes
1 Victoria Donda, Mi Nombre es Victoria (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009).
2 Julián Rebón, La Empresa de la Autonomía: Trabajadores recuperando la producción (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Picasso, 2007).