Many of the workers’ struggles that we’ve been seeing around the world in this moment of crisis have been for people to just get their severance pay, because all of these factors are closing abruptly. Companies are using the crisis as an excuse to shed jobs and to close facilities. And so, much worker energy has been mobilized just to get the last paycheck.
But what happens to those people after that? What the Republic Windows and Doors struggle shows, and what all of these recovered companies in Argentina show, where they’re actually worker-run, is that the next phase is far more important. How do we get to there, where the jobs are maintained or even that the workplace has become democratic in the process of being saved from bankruptcy? Because it’s one thing to get one last payout and spending a week in Detroit. It’s devastating how many people are fighting the last great fight of their working lives in order to get another three months of what they were owed. What happens after that?
So these struggles need to go forward to not just, getting the severance—preserving jobs and creating jobs, because worker-run enterprises are so much more efficient, without CEO salaries, stupid marketing campaigns and other executive gambling and derivatives and everything else, that worker-run factories and businesses are actually much more profitable and can afford to employ many more people.
An excerpt of Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s documentary, The Take, about workers in Argentina taking over factories abandoned by their owners:
Zanon Ceramics. After two years under worker control, it’s the granddaddy of this new movement. Today, the factory is in production with 300 workers. Decisions are made in assemblies: one worker, one vote. Everyone gets exactly the same salary.
It wasn’t always like this. A couple of years ago, the owner claimed that the plant was no longer profitable, that it had to be shut down. The workers refused to accept that fate. They argued that the company owed so much to the community in debts and public subsidies that it now belonged to everyone. In the Menem years, the Zanon factory had received millions in corporate welfare, and the owners still ran up huge debts. Now that his workers have restarted the machines, he’s back. Saying “The government will give it back to me. The government will give it back to me.”
That means the workers can never rest. They keep a twenty-four-hour guard at the factory, and everyone is equipped with a slingshot, in case the police show up.
Their struggle against authority has even won them fans in one of Argentina’s biggest rock bands. Bersuit is in town, and the band is dedicating its show to the workers of Zanon.
Zanon’s real weapon is the support of the community.
Zanon works better than under the former owners, because at least people are working. The tiles are cheaper, and the future is brighter than it was under the owners. All they did was get subsidies from the state, nothing else, and they kept the money for themselves.
The community supports them 100 percent, because they’re not stealing, they’re not killing anyone. On the contrary, they’re working to feed their families.
There are many companies that should be in the hands of the workers. But it seems that this is not politically convenient. That’s the real problem.
Zanon’s community building has paid off. Since the workers’ takeover, they have fought off six separate eviction orders. Each time, thousands of supporters have flocked to the factory, set up defenses and been ready to put their bodies between the machines and the police. Each time, the judges’ trustees have retreated, leaving the factory under worker control. For now, Zanon really is the property of the people.
Today, the factories continue to operate, and better all the time. And also, there are new factories that are being recovered. And something else is also happening. Many children of these factories, are being born with a horizontal work style, separate, completely autonomous of the government and political parties, creating a boss-less model and also new alternatives of cooperatives that are health cooperative projects, education, clothing, metalworking. Hundreds and hundreds of recovered factories and thousands and thousands of new projects, cooperative projects that are in solidarity, they’re also working with us. Lavaca is a cooperative. But, for example, they’re working with us on projects of psychiatric hospitals, and the doctors are discovering that the job, the work, helps to cure insanity.
The media are not media. They aren’t medium of nothing. Their journalists are not journalists, and information is not information. It’s what we call formatting of heads, of minds. So the possibility for factories and new projects is to create new options and to make their own voices heard.
Argentina, the huge protests, the cacerolazos, they threw out the president, then they went through—they cycled through four more presidents in a period of three weeks. In this period, when Argentina was really on fire, the protests were outside the congress, outside the Plaza de Mayo, but they were also outside the media stations, outside Clarin, outside the radio stations, holding corporate media accountable for the way in which they were distorting the protests.
And at the same time as you had this popular rebellion across the country, there was also an independent media revolution going on in Argentina. Indymedia Argentina was crucial in this period. And it was really the first time where you saw Indymedia in an absolutely central role, in really a national uprising. You went to Indymedia to find out where the next protest was, to communicate. And Lavaca came out of this period.
The factory movement is related as an adult relationship with whoever. The difference is that the person that decides is the assembly. That’s who decides. In relationship to the state, at one point the workers called it a dumb state, a stupid state, that doesn’t understand and is not interested in understanding because of its alliance with the companies. The importance of these projects—I don’t know if you could call them “the revolution,” I don’t know if there’s one single revolution. But I learned that there can be many small revolutions that change people’s lives, that allow them to work, create new relationships among themselves, and democracy now. We are doing it.
Discussion: Sergio Ciancaglini
Sergio Ciancaglini, co-author of Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories.
– from democracynow.org, democracynow.org