Worker-Recovered Enterprises as Workers’ Cooperatives The Conjunctures, Challenges, and Innovations of

Self-Management in Argentina

Las empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores como cooperativas de trabajo

Coyunturas, desafíos, e inovaciones de la autogestión en la Argentina

By: Marcelo Vieta and Andrés Ruggeri

This draft: May 30, 2007

Chapter submitted for: J.J. McMurtry and Darryl Reed (Eds.). International Co-opertion in the Global Economy,

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press (forthcoming).

Abstract

This chapter works through two particular characteristics that often get overlooked or downplayed by studies that explore Argentina’s worker-recovered enterprises (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores, or ERTs). First, workers’ initial actions of seizing control of their deteriorating or failed companies from former owners, occupying them for weeks or months at times, and eventually putting them into operation once again under self-management (autogestión), come out of fear rather than a preconceived predilection for workers’ control or working class revolt. That is, ERT protagonists’ original impetus for self-management are defensive reactions against a callous and collapsing neoliberal system that is embodied in the nefarious actions of business owners, bosses, and managers. Second, most ERTs reorganize themselves within the rubric of a workers’ cooperative only after workers gain control of former owner-run plants, not because the recovered firm’s workers already have vision of becoming cooperativists, nor because they possess predetermined political ambitions but, rather, as legal and pragmatically defensive strategies that emerge during or after the struggle to occupy or seize their workplaces. To begin to understand these two overarching characteristics of Argentina’s ERTs, the chapter: 1) surveys the historical and political conjunctures that ERTs emerge from and find themselves in, 2) the connections with the wider ERT phenomenon in Latin America and workers’ cooperatives beyond the region, and 3) maps out a few of the challenges brought on by ERT workers’ direct action tactics to defend their jobs and workspaces, as well as the innovations impelled by their desire to self-manage. The chapter finally looks at a few ways that these innovations and challenges, in turn, shape an ERT’s very organizational structures and cooperative practices.

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Since the late-1990s, around 185 mostly small- and medium-sized companies in Argentina that

had declared or were near bankruptcy, or were otherwise abandoned by their owners and bosses, have

been taken over and self-managed by former employees. In almost all cases, and usually after many

months of struggle, these “worker-recovered” firms formally organize under the legal framework of a

workers’ cooperative. Especially visible in the two years immediately after the country’s financial

collapse in late-2001, and responding directly to Argentina’s exhausted neoliberal political-economic

system, the micro-economic and social transformations being shaped by empresas recuperadas por sus

trabajadores (worker-recovered enterprises, or ERTs) are meeting head-on Argentina’s traditional

institutions’ inability to contain historically high levels of under-employment, unemployment, and

poverty gripping the country in recent years.

In this chapter, we appeal to our ongoing quantitative and qualitative political economic and

ethnographic work with over 70 ERTs across all economic sectors and regions over the past five years in

order to explore two particular characteristics that often get overlooked or downplayed by studies that

look at worker-recovered enterprises in Argentina.i First, workers’ initial actions of seizing control of

their deteriorating or failed companies from former owners, occupying them for weeks or months at

times, and eventually putting them into operation once again under self-management (autogestión),

come out of fear and anger rather than a preconceived predilection for workers’ control or working class

revolt. That is, most ERTs originate as direct responses to their worker-protagonists’ deep worries of

becoming structurally unemployed (Olmedo & Murray, 2002; Ruggeri, 2006). ERT protagonists’

original motivations for self-management were – especially in the “first era” of ERTs between 1997-

2003 – defensive reactions against a callous and collapsing neoliberal system that was embodied in the

nefarious actions of business owners, bosses, and managers (Fajn, 2003; Palomino, 2003). Second, most

ERTs reorganize themselves within the legal rubric of a workers’ cooperative only after workers have

gained control of the plant – and usually after many weeks if not months of struggle – not because the

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recovered firm’s workers already had a vision of becoming cooperativists, nor because they possessed

presupposed political ambitions but, rather, as a legal and pragmatically defensive strategy that emerges

during or after the struggle to occupy or seize their workplaces. For reasons that we will elaborate on in

the following pages, this organizational move has become an especially important defensive maneuver

for ERT workers in light of the very real threat of repression from the state and Argentina’s capitalist

establishment, for structuring the horizontally democratic models of decision-making and remuneration

they usually take up, and for securing market share and hard-to-come-by loans and other forms of

financing.

To begin to understand these two characteristics, we first briefly look to the historical and

political conjunctures that ERTs emerge from and find themselves in. We then briefly touch on some of

the connections with the wider ERT phenomenon in South America and workers’ cooperatives beyond

the region while, at the same time, indicating some of the distinguishing features of Argentina’s ERTs.

To illustrate these features, the last part of the chapter maps out a few of the challenges brought on by

ERT workers’ direct action tactics to defend their jobs and workspaces and the innovations impelled by

their desire to self-manage. As we will show throughout, these innovations and challenges, in turn,

usually shape an ERT’s very organizational structures and cooperative practices.

The Historical and Political Conjunctures of ERTs in Argentina

Argentine labour expert Hectór Palomino (2003) writes that the political and economic impacts

of the ERT phenomenon are more “related to its symbolic dimension” than to the strength of its size (p.

72) since, to date, the phenomenon involves roughly 185 mostly small- and medium-sized enterprises

estimated to include between 9,000 and 10,000 workers (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). While

currently making up the largest conglomeration of ERTs in Latin America, the phenomenon constitutes

less than one percent of Argentina’s 14,393,000 officially active participants in its urban-based economy

(Ministerio de Trabajo, 2004). As Palomino (2003) points out, however, while it is true that this reflects

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only a fraction of the economic output of the country, ERTs have nevertheless inspired “new

expectations for social change” (p. 72) since they especially show an innovative and viable alternative to

chronic unemployment and under-employment (also see: Scarano & Sánchez, 2005). But the road to

self-management has been, and in many ways continues to be, economically and politically rocky for

these fledgling workers’ cooperatives despite the relative recomposition of the Argentine economy in

recent years under the government of Nestor Kirchner.

Starting around 1995, thousands of smaller- and medium-sized businesses in Argentina began to

lose market share and amass unwieldy debt loads due, in part, to the drying up of export markets during

Argentina’s economic liberalizations of the 1990s and, in particular, the aftereffects of Carlos Menem’s

administration’s (1989-1999) “dollarization” of the peso and the sell-off of over 150 once-nationalized

firms. By the mid-1990s it was clear that these neoliberal policies were affecting the competitive

advantage of Argentine products in foreign markets (Damill, 2005).ii Moreover, the large wave of

privatization schemes, company downsizing, and the foreign capitalization of large portions of

Argentina’s industrial base further compromised the competitiveness of thousands of small- and

medium-sized firms, eventually causing them to declare bankruptcy at unprecedented rates starting

around 1995 (Boron & Thwaites Ray, 2004). These macro-economic realities effectively relegated

hundreds of thousands of workers to the growing ranks of the unemployed (Damill, 2005; Patroni,

2004).iii Other business owners simply abandoned their companies in the wake of such economic

difficulties leaving employees in the lurch. In many cases, workers were let go after weeks or months of

not receiving the employer’s portion of social security contributions, bonuses, and finally after not even

receiving pay cheques. While some of the ensuing bankruptcies were legitimate, due either to the

incompetence of management or the firm’s inability to compete in the new globalized reality, others

were illegal as many business owners, encouraged by the frontier-style economic free-for-all that

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defined Argentina’s economy in the 1990s, were willing to incur questionable debt, speculate away their

business assets in risky investment schemes, or turn to embezzlement to stay solvent (Damill, 2005).

In many cases that led to bankruptcies or owner-abandonment workers were really the first

creditors because bonuses, benefits, and pay cheques (usually in that order) would be the first things not

paid by negligent owners. In reality workers had little choice but to become creditors: The implicit

ultimatum given to them by bosses – an ultimatum that was well understood by workers – was to either

work for vastly reduced wages, pay vouchers, no benefits, and no overtime pay, or to not work at all

(Magnani, 2003). The massive erosion of jobs throughout the 1990s, the growing rate of immiseration, a

national currency crisis, eroding export and national markets, an un-payable national debt, and

exorbitant debt-servicing and structural adjustment demands insisted upon by the IMF and

enthusiastically carried out by the Menem and Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001) regimes – all wedded to

the political and economic establishments’ greed – serve as the macro-economic backdrop to the growth

of the ERT phenomenon in Argentina that began to noticeably surge in the socially and economically

volatile years between 2000-2002 (Palomino, 2003; 2005).

In response, the chronic economic instability and an increasingly precarious job-market forced

some workers to look to themselves and their surrounding communities for job security and dignified

living conditions. Moreover, the indifference, if not outright hostility, towards the plight of the less-

fortunate and the working classes by the country’s elites compelled ERT workers to feel that they had on

their side a moral imperative to takeover companies and self-manage them. And many Argentines across

all social sectors, aware of the chronic rates of unemployment and poverty that plagued the country,

supported workers’ tactics of occupation, takeovers, and self-management (Palomino, 2003).

ERTs as “Recovered” Workers Cooperatives

Faced with these stark realities, workers from enterprises that are nearing bankruptcy or are

already bankrupt decide to take direct action. While 94% of ERTs eventually self-organize under the

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legal framework of a workers’ cooperative during or just after the embattled workers choose to regroup

and re-occupy the firm (see: Figure 1; also see: Fajn, 2003, p. 105), the path to cooperatively organized

self-management in Argentina – especially for those ERTs that originated during the socio-economically

tumultuous years that saw the implosion of the zealous neoliberal model between 1997-2003 (the “first

era” of ERTs) – is usually long, emotionally draining, and sometimes life-threatening. And in most

cases, while some of the workers have experience in union organizing and community politics, most

workers just starting an ERT have no experience in any form of cooperativism (Martí et al., 2004).

Thus, in addition to having to recompose a deteriorated plant, learn new administrative and

marketing skills, reorganize purchases and customer orders, and generally run a firm in difficulty,

learning how to be cooperators adds to the challenges ERT workers face early on. And while it is true

that as of 2002, 41% of Argentina’s universe of cooperatives were identified as workers’ coops (see:

Chart 2a), only 1.5% of these (or 98 coops) were ERTs as of 2002 (Palomino, 2003, p. 75). That is,

98.5% of workers’ coops as of 2002 did not originate from workers’ taking over failed capitalist firms

via tumultuous political struggles that they then had to run themselves without any previous experience

in cooperativism. The great majority of workers’ coops in Argentina are, rather, cooperatives that were

formed either before the era of ERTs (i.e., post-1997), coops that did not have to pass through the

traumatic circumstances of taking over plants from deteriorating owner-run firms, and are usually

staffed by more experienced cooperators working within better economic conditions, with better

machinery, and with more stable productive capacities (Montes & Ressel, 2003).iv

So then, why is it that roughly 10,000 workers on the brink of structural unemployment, most

without any previous experience with working in or organizing a workers’ coop, engaged in risky

takeovers of their failing or failed companies and then turned to worker cooperativism as a way of

securing their jobs starting around 1997? The most direct answer is to be found in the public debates that

were in the early years of the phenomenon preoccupying ERT workers, social economy and social

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movement activists, and the phenomenon’s first political leaders such as Eduardo Murúa of the

Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (MNER)v and Luis Caro, who has since split from

MNER and formed the Movimiento Nacional de Fábricas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores

(MNFRT).vi One of the major issues on the table at the time was the legal and administrative framework

ERTs were to take: nationalization under workers’ control or workers’ cooperativism (Ruggeri,

Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005, p. 67; Fajn, 2003, p. 105-106). While nationalization under workers’

control was theoretically and historically plausible, early ERT protagonists eventually scrapped the

option when it became clear that the state – municipalities, provinces, and the national government –

was refusing to go along with the proposal (Fajn, 2003; Murúa, 2006). The only practical and legally

recognized alternative for ERTs, it was decided in these debates, was to, out of “convenience,” turn to

the cooperativist model, especially in light of a state that could not, because of its strong commitments

to capitalist enterprise, set the precedence of nationalizing once proprietary firms (Ruggeri, Martinez, &

Trinchero, 2005, p. 67; Murúa, 2006).

Thus, a point we must underscore here is that the “decision” by an ERT’s workers to eventually

organize as a workers’ cooperative is not really a choice with many other options in Argentina, given the

states’ lack of will to seek alternative organizational models for ERTs. Each ERT’s worker collective

comes to the awareness of a cooperativist solution usually after the process of occupying or taking over

the firm has begun and often after consulting with social economy protagonists that had been a part of

these early debates, older ERTs, sympathetic lawyers and local politicians, or ERT organizations such as

MNER and MNFRT. In other words, rather than turn to cooperativism proactively out of a preconceived

or longstanding desire to be cooperativists, ERT protagonists “decide” to turn to cooperativism as part of

their defensive strategy once they realize that it is the most practical, already-available, and ultimately

one of the only feasible and legally recognized organizational structures in Argentina for self-managing

a bankrupted firm (Fajn, 2003; Martí et al, 2004).vii In addition, an ERT’s workers’ collective, as some

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workers have told us in interviews and as we explain later, comes to the realization that becoming a

workers’ cooperative actually offers them a much more egalitarian foundation from which to counteract

the effects and memories of the exploitative structures and practices of the capitalist firm they had once

been a part of (Centro de Documentación, 2007). The legal framework of a workers’ coop thus

facilitates addressing workers’ communal desires, needs, and issues that arise with its workers; the

democratic forms of one-worker-one-vote decision-making most ERTs adopt; and the equitable

redistribution of revenues many of them seek. At the same time, becoming a workers’ cooperative rather

than another form of entity (see: Figure 1) opens up the ERT to financial and taxational benefits, protects

the worker-members from the seizure of their personal property should the coop fail, and ensures that

the ERT does not have to pay taxes on revenues (Fajn, 2003, p. 105-106). Becoming a coop is also fairly

straightforward in Argentina: cooperators need only wait 30 days for the founding paperwork to be

processed and can start to commercialize the coop immediately after filing the papers requesting to

become a cooperative (p. 106). There are also practical benefits of forming a cooperative: The move

legitimates the ERT in the minds of potential customers and other firms within their market sector,

transforms the ERT into an entity that can more easily receive credit and government subsidies, and

makes it infinitely easier for worker-recovered firms to seek legal protection from returning owners.

A more nuanced answer to the question of why ERTs become workers’ coops requires us to

look, if briefly, into the history of workers’ struggle in Argentina, recent experiences with workers’

control and workers’ cooperativism in other conjunctures, and current ERT experiences throughout

Latin America.

While, as we work out throughout this chapter, ERTs possess some peculiar characteristics that

distinguish them from workers’ coops in other conjunctures, in several ways they too fit the broader

definition of a workers’ cooperative found in the literature. For example, ERTs are voluntary

associations of workers cooperating in running a productive entity where each worker has an “equal

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say” in the running of the coop (Matthews, 1999, p. 198) via workers’ boards or councils elected from

its membership base (Quarter, 1992, p. 27). ERTs too are productive entities where “labour hires

capital” (Smith, Chivers, & Goodfellow, 1988, p. 25), where “work” is the common contribution of each

member, (INAES, 2007), and where “control is linked to work” (Oakeshott, 1990, p. 27). And, ERTs

revenues and profits are also the common property of the coop (Ontario Worker Co-op Federation,

2007), although, as with the workers’ coop movement historically and worldwide, how to divvy

revenues and profits to individuals and reinvest revenues back into the firm remains an open-ended

question being imminently worked out within each individual ERT (Oakeshott, 1990; Ruggeri,

Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005).

But in some other practical ways ERTs delineate new experiments in worker cooperativism.

Their novelty, as we will outline in the following pages, flows from five main characteristics that are

rooted in their origins as ERTs and their subsequent organizational innovations. These characteristics are

present in almost all ERTs we have looked at: First, all ERTs are distinguished by the fact that they were

taken over by embattled former employees in risky occupations or confrontations with owners or

Argentina’s juridical-political establishment out of fear and desperation at having to face the closure of

their workplace in an economy with record levels of structural unemployment and poverty (Fajn, 2003;

Ruggeri, 2006). Second, most ERTs endevour not to replicate the management hierarchy and

exploitative practices of the former company, at least in their first months of operation as a self-managed

firm. Even though, as we will discuss shortly, subsequent economic hardship within highly competitive

markets has compelled some ERTs to return to more hierarchical management practices (Fajn & Rebón,

2005), ERT workers tend to nevertheless struggle against this temptation as much as possible. Third, and

as such, many ERTs have extremely flat self-management structures and almost all to some degree

engage in one-worker-one vote direct-democracy adopted not necessarily from the values of

cooperativism but, rather, from the anti-capitalist “contagion” of horizontalism that emerged from

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Argentina’s anti-neoliberal social movements of the 1990s (Ghibaudi, 2004, p. 6). Fourth, unlike most

other cooperative experiences, many ERT workers’ coops are distinguished by a predominance of total

or near-total cross-the-board egalitarian pay schemes despite worker seniority or skill-sets (Bell, 2006;

Matthews, 1999; Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). Finally, these four factors, as we will discuss

throughout the rest of the chapter, emerge out of and because of ERTs’ long road to self-management

(Palomino, 2003; Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). While we of course do not claim that other

workers’ cooperatives in other conjunctures have not encompassed one or more of these distinguishing

marks, we do make the argument here that the pervasiveness of these tendencies in most of Argentina’s

185 or so ERTs are, taken together, unique experiences in the history of workers’ cooperatives and

workers’ struggles against capital in Argentina and perhaps also beyond its borders (also see: Fajn,

2003; Martí et al., 2004; Camilletti et al., 2005).

It is perhaps no surprise that the early ERT debates that settled on worker cooperativism emerge

in a country with a long past in cooperativism. Its first cooperative society being founded in 1875

(Shaffer, 1999, p. 149), Argentine cooperativism is linked to the country’s long history of European

economic influence and the waves of immigrants from all corners of Europe that flooded in with new

ideas of how to organize working life in the last quarter of the 19th century (Montes & Ressel, 2003).

Indeed, Argentine cooperativism was the “first to begin in a country outside the industrialized countries

of Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United States” (Shaffer, 1999, p. 149). But Argentina’s

cooperative sector has gone through fairly profound economic changes in the past two decades.

For example, Argentina’s cooperative sector has witnessed a paradoxical development as an

outcome of the country’s sharp turn to neoliberalism over the past three decades. As Chart 1 shows,

there was, on the one hand, a marked increase in the number of cooperatives between 1985 and 2002. In

1985, there were a total of 4,204 cooperatives in Argentina, jumping to 8,142 by 1991 and 16,008 by

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2002. While this represents almost a threefold increase in the number of registered cooperatives in

Argentina in just under two decades, combined membership in cooperatives, on the other hand, dropped

almost twofold in the same 17-year period: In 1985 there were over 10 million cooperative members in

the country. In 1991, just over 9 million. And by 2002, the number of total cooperators in the country

had fallen to just over 6.8 million members (Montes & Ressel, 2003, pp. 17-20; Shaffer, 1999, p. 139).

Recent studies hypothesize that this paradoxical inversion of growth in the number of coops with

declining membership had to do with the rise of neoliberalist policies, especially the establishment of an

unregulated free market system and the entrenchment of a globalized marketplace in Argentina which

intensified competition, destroyed established national networks of production and distribution, and

subordinated much of the country’s economic development to the whims of international financial

capital (Basañes, 1999; Camilletti et al., 2005). While this truculent neoliberal model was strengthening

its hold on the Argentine economy throughout the 1990s, labour flexibilization and privatization

schemes were also exerting strong blows to cooperatives especially with those that operated within

sectors most affected by Menem’s unregulated free market policies, such as agriculture, transportation,

public services, and natural resources (Muñoz, 2005; Roggi, 2002). As Alberto Muñoz (2005) has

recently written: “In the privatization process of the mid-1990s, the cooperative movement was not only

denied the possibility of participating as an alternative, it was effectively excluded” (p. 97).

Some have theorized that this inverted growth of coops/drop in members might have to do with

the rise in what in Argentina are called “false cooperatives” – cooperatives that were formed by the

outsourced workers of larger firms and multinationals that were downsizing during the 1990s in order

for these corporations to unburden themselves of high labour costs. “Assisting” former workers and

entire workspaces to become “cooperatives” that downsizing firms were then to ostensibly do business

with were, in reality, practices of labour flexibilization and union busting. Fundamentally, the practice

served to deaden the inevitable negative reactions by organized labour to what in essence were job cuts.

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As Mario Mittelman (2005) suggests, these firms facilitated the creation of these “false cooperatives” in

order to appear to be supporting an “alternative to the loss of jobs” (par. 2). For Mittelman, these

practices were counters to a “problem that presents itself periodically” in Argentina – labour strife in the

midst of downturning economies and unemployment (par. 2).viii

Indeed, the rise in worker-productive cooperatives in Argentina, from 25% of total cooperatives

in 1991 to over 40% by 2002 while the number of cooperators dropped twofold over the same period

can in part be explained by the surge in these “false cooperatives.” But the rise in the number of small-

and medium-sized ERTs and cooperativized micro-enterprises in recent years, plus the state’s

subsidization of new coops as a method of outsourcing the delivery of public services that it had

privatized in the 1990s have also contributed to the surge in worker productive coops in the country

(Montes & Ressel, 2003; Muñoz, 2005; Roggi, 2002; Una Argentina Solidaria, 2005).

ERTs Across Latin America: A Brief Comparative Look

Alfredo Camilletti et al. (2004), Juan Pablo Martí et al. (2005), and Javier Ghibaudi (2004), in

comparative studies of the strategies and tactics of ERT workers’ cooperatives and other forms of self-

management in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Camilletti et al., and Martí et al.), and Argentina and

Brazil (Ghibaudi) all emphasize the particular longevity that ERTs have enjoyed throughout Latin

America. They also assert that the sharp rise in worker-recovered enterprises that then become workers’

cooperatives in recent years in the region is proving to be a viable grassroots answer by workers facing

structural unemployment and the dismantling of national economies by speculative global capital and

neoliberal market policies. A brief comparative look at Argentina’s ERT experiences in light of other

Latin American countries over the past 15 years or so – namely Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela – shows

how the defensive strategy by workers who faced the most negative effects of neoliberal policies across

the region unfolded within similar socio-economic and political conjunctures. It also reveals the

outcome of the more supportive position towards ERTs taken up by governments and unions in these

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other countries in contrast to the ambivalence or outright hostility from the state and unions that most

ERTs in Argentina have had to innovatively work around. In light of any consistent institutional support,

the relative longevity of ERTs in Argentina is a testimony to the resilience and innovative capacities of

its workers.

While Argentina’s ERTs are the most celebrated in the literature, ERT-type cooperatives

currently exist in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and Uruguay (Centro de

Documentación, 2007). Next to Argentina’s experiences, however, and for reasons we will elaborate on

in the next few pages, Brazil’s, Uruguay’s, and Venezuela’s are the most developed in Latin America

(Camilletti et al., 2005; Martí et al., 2004; Ruggeri, 2006). Ecuador and Mexico have only a few cases of

ERTs each (Centro de Documentación, 2007) and space will not allow us to get into their particularities.

In Bolivia, grassroots occupations of property and nationalization schemes can be most readily found in

the primary resources sector such as mineral extraction, agriculture, and water (Ceceña, 2005; Grant &

Shuffler, 2005). But if we stick to our strict definition of ERTs based on their most common experiences

– formerly capitalist entities that have failed due to bankruptcy or owner abandonment in the face of dire

economic conditions and that were taken over by its former employees and transformed into workers’

cooperatives – only a few small-scale mines could be said to be ERTs in Bolivia (Bocangel, 2001). And

in Peru, a handful of ERT-type workers’ coops share the scene with hundreds of smaller self-managed

agricultural and housing initiatives (Babilon Poma, 2005). Because of the relative incipiency of ERT

experiences in Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, and Ecuador, a closer economic and political comparison to

Argentina can be gleaned from looking at Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

In Brazil, ERTs, called the autogeridas (the self-managed), started to emerge in the early 1990s

as a consequence of the rise in bankruptcies and unemployment due to its inflation and monetary crises

of that decade (Ghibaudi, 2004; Oxfam, 1999). Like in Argentina, almost all of Brazil’s 140 ERTs take

on the organizational structure of workers’ coops for similar legal reasons. The major difference

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between the two countries is the strong support most Brazilian autogeridas enjoy from national and state

governments and the strong presence of the ERT umbrella organization Associação Nacional dos

Trabalhadores de Empresas de Autogestão (ANTEAG)ix which assists the autogeridas with

technological, financial, and administrative needs (Ghibaudi, 2004). In addition, and unlike the

Argentine experience, unions affiliated with the Workers’ Party-affiliated Central Unica do

Trabalhadores (CUT)x have been heavily involved in assisting Brazilian ERT workers with the

processes of company takeovers and self-management. Moreover, the Brazilian state considers ERTs as

integral players in its burgeoning social economy and, subsequently, they have the full attention of

President Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party. Consequently, to date, Brazilian self-managed workers have

not had to traverse as many political and economic hurdles as in Argentina (Ghibaudi, 2004).

Uruguay’s 18 ERTs, as with Argentina’s, also began to emerge around the late-1990s as

responses to growing unemployment and bankruptcies in a country with an economy heavily intertwined

with Argentina’s and Brazil’s (NETICOOP, 2005). The subsequent institutional experiences of

Uruguay’s ERTs, however, differ from Argentina’s in that they, like Brazil’s ERTs, were supported

early on by the country’s only union federation, PIT-CNT. As in Brazil, Uruguayan ERTs have thus

enjoyed more economic stability than Argentina’s on the whole (Camilletti et al., 2005). In addition,

Martí et al. (2004) contend that because, in contrast to Argentina, there has been historically in Uruguay

a tighter and more amiable relationship between working class organizations and the cooperative sector,

the Federación de Cooperativas de Producción del Uruguay (FCPU)xi has played a major role in

helping to articulate the methods of transforming formerly owner-managed workspaces into workers’

coops. The FCPU has also done much to provide start up funds to new ERTs as well as offering them

various forms of technical, educational, and administrative assistance (p. 94).

And in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has been inspired by the ERT experiences in Argentina, Brazil,

and Uruguay for his vision of blending self-managed workspaces with his project of nationalizing

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industrial plants via co-gestión (co-management) (Argenpress, 2005). The concept of co-gestión in

Venezuela has affinities with Yugoslavia’s model of state-sponsored co-managed factories working

within a blended centrally-planned and market economy (Lebowitz, 2005). While in Venezuela,

according to Marie Trigona (2006b), only “some 20 companies” as of late-2006 “have been nationalized

and function under worker co-management or control” (par. 2), a further 1,200 formerly owner-managed

companies that, as in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, had declared bankruptcy or had been abandoned

by their owners were estimated to be occupied by their workers under no legal framework as yet. To a

greater degree than self-management in these three countries, the Venezuelan state has had a prominent

role in co-gestión, and occupations have been inspired and even openly encouraged by Chavez’s vision

of a worker-led “Bolivarian” revolution (Argenpress, 2005; Lavaca, 2005). Indeed, since 2005, the

Chavez government passed numerous decrees facilitating such actions by workers (Campos, 2007).

However, while in mid-2005 Chavez predicted the worker takeover and nationalization of 800 or so

plants by the end of 2006, the 20 ERTs currently operating under co-management in Venezuela

represents only a handful of the 1,200 plants that are currently thought to be occupied in the country

(Trigona, 2006b; Venezuela Analysis, 2005). In light of the slow pace of nationalization, a grassroots,

worker-based umbrella group called Frente Revoloucionario de Trabajadores de Empresas en

Cogestión y Ocupadas (FRETECO)xii was formed in mid-2006 by workers of the nationalized and

worker-managed valve manufacturing plant INEVAL in order to “strategize how the worker occupied

factory movement can multiply industry under genuine worker control” (Trigona, 2006b, par. 3). It is

still too early to tell how successful FRETECO will be in this task or if its presence will assist and

speedup nationalizing the 1,200 occupied plants.

A Network of ERTs Across Latin America: Tentative First Steps

The First Latin American Encounter of Recovered Enterprises that took place Caracas,

Venezuela in October of 2005 was the first region-wide gathering of ERTs in Latin America (Lavaca,

15

2005; Martín, 2005; Trigona, 2006a). Attended by 400 worker protagonists from 235 recovered

enterprises, sympathetic unions, and government representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil,

Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, the event finally “internationalized” the ERT phenomenon.

Up till then, the sharing of ERT experiences had been relegated to comparative academic studies with

occasional contacts between the various country’s ERT leaders and invited workers at social economy

events such as the World Social Forum (Centro de Documentación, 2007). And the Argentine delegation

of 300 workers, led by MNER’s Eduardo Murúa, took on an inspirational role at the event, while

Chavez’s presence and his “Bolivarian” project offered the legitimacy of the Venezuelan state, financial

backing, organizational force, and articulated a regional vision for ERTs.

Besides completing 75 contracts and promissory agreements between the region’s ERTs, the

conference participants also managed to cobble together what has come to be called the Compromiso de

Caracas (Caracas Accord) (Lavaca, 2005).xiii The accord detailed the vision for a multinational, worker-

led, and continent-wide initiative for a solidarity network of ERTs and other worker-run enterprises that

Chavez termed “Empresur” (Movimiento 13 de Abril, 2005). Empresur was envisioned as an

intercontinental economic network that would engage in not only traditional forms of trade between the

region’s ERTs, but also see ERTs interact with each other outside of the neoliberal marketplace. As the

gathering’s participants envisaged it, such solidarity-based interactions would also include the sharing of

technical know-how, the creation of funds for “fair loans and investments,” and the provisioning of raw

materials rooted in bartering, all working within a transnational network of cooperation that would also

offer political support for the legal hurdles faced by ERTs across the region (Martín, 2005). The accord

also took a strong stand against US-led neoliberal economic designs in Latin America (i.e., the FTAA)

and delegates envisaged Empresur as a key component of Chavez’s alternative to the FTAA, the

Alternativa Bolivariana para América Latina y el Caribe (ALBA).xiv Additionally, the delegates urged

all of the region’s governments to set aside capital funds for ERTs and demanded that state governments

16

draft national laws and engage in constitutional reforms that would better support worker-recovered

enterprises and other forms of microenterprises.

But this event would also prove to be the apogee of the move to internationalize the ERT

phenomenon across the region; most of the contracts and initiatives that were signed, especially with the

Argentine ERTs, have yet to come to fruition. This was highly discouraging for Argentina’s ERT

worker delegates who had gone to Caracas with expectations of signing numerous lucrative contracts.

And while the Caracas gathering witnessed Chavez officially launch his nationalization and factory

expropriation plans, the vision for an alternative Latin American network of “multinationals without a

boss” fell short of its promise. Our reading of why Empresur has failed to tangibly materialize is linked

to the substantial differences between ERTs in Argentina and those in Brazil, Venezuela, and Uruguay.

Argentina’s official government delegation to the Caracas gathering, which was made up of third-string

bureaucrats with little political power, clearly delineated its government’s indifference towards ERTs

and its unwillingness to co-finance Argentina’s portion of the US$50 million in subsidies for the

region’s ERTs that the Venezuelan government put on the table at the gathering. This has had real

material consequences for Argentina’s ERTs: While various deals between the Venezuelan state and

ERTs in Brazil and Uruguay have already been consummated thanks to these states’ full support of their

ERTs, international protocol has prevented Venezuela from allocating these funds to or finalizing deals

with individual Argentine ERTs without the mediation of the Argentine state.

Something similar occurred with union representation at the Caracas meetings. While, as we

have already indicated, in Argentina ERTs have surged without the support of most unions, in Brazil,

Venezuela, and Uruguay ERTs have always been intimately linked to major unions as central players in

national labour struggles. Recognizing this central role, the Uruguayan cooperatives at the gathering, for

example, were accompanied by representatives from PIT-CNT. And Brazil’s ERTs in Caracas were also

17

grouped with reps from the CUT. Argentina’s unions, on the other hand, were represented by a handful

of observers.

Because of the mixed outcomes of the Caracas meetings and the lack of government and

widespread union support for Argentina’s ERTs, it was impossible to plan the second gathering that had

been planned for the region’s ERTs for 2006. And the accords and contracts signed between Venezuela

and Argentina’s ERTs have mostly been forgotten. Moreover, while regional conferences on self-

management such as the Caracas meetings and smaller academic gatherings have guaranteed some

continuing cross-pollenization of these experiences across the region, the bulk of the organizational

decisions, daily economic challenges, and socio-political conjunctures faced by the region’s ERTs

remain uniquely tied to the national economic and political conjunctures they find themselves in.

Consequently, the Caracas Accord’s vision for Empresur remains largely a dream. In Argentina, this has

meant that most ERTs have had to put the project of forging a network of solidarity across Latin

America to the side as they continue to rely on the ingenuity and drive of its own workers, the solidarity

of the surrounding neighbourhoods, and fledgling national ERT networks. Thus, unlike in Venezuela,

Brazil, or Uruguay, the Caracas gathering put into relief and on display for all of Latin America’s ERT

protagonists how deeply in Argentina the state, most unions, and even the traditional cooperative sector

have been slow to step up and assist its fledgling ERTs. As we continue to articulate throughout the rest

of the chapter, this reality has shaped the practices and structures taken up by Argentina’s ERTs.

The Antecedents of Argentina’s ERTs

Notwithstanding the emergence of ERTs across Latin America in recent years that is estimated to

include over 30,000 workers (Trigona, 2006, par. 1), worker takeovers of firms and even large portions

of economic sectors is not new in the region. Historically in Latin America, however, instances of

workspace occupations and attempts at co- or self-management have occurred in exceptional political

contexts and usually with direct leadership from state governments, political parties, or unions. The most

18

salient historical examples include the 125 factories that were nationalized under workers’ control in

Salvador Allende’s Chile between 1970-73; the nationalization and co-management of mines and rural

enterprises during Bolivia’s National Revolutionary Movement of the 1950s and J.J Torres’s

dictatorship of the early-1970s; the surge in cooperativized “industrial communities” in General Velasco

Alvarado’s leftist military regime in Peru during the late-1960s; and various situations of union-

instigated workplace takeovers in Argentina during the governments of Arturo Frondizi (1958-1962),

Isabela Perón (1974-1976), and Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2003; James, 2003).xv

Argentina’s earlier experiences with workspace takeovers were not ERTs, however; in these

instances occupations were temporary union tactics occurring over short periods of time in the pursuit of

labour demands (Palomino, 2005). The phenomenon of worker-recovered enterprises as we know it

today in Argentina is, rather, a unique process associated with another type of socio-economic situation

that emerges out of the hegemonic and regressive neoliberal politics of the 1990s. The practices of

workspace occupations by ERT protagonists are only loosely linked to these earlier cases, drawing some

inspiration from them in the collective memory of those ERT workers, historians and theorists, and other

social protagonists that lived through them or recollect them. Moreover, the practice of self-management

in the Argentine ERT phenomenon is not about the revolutionary takeover of the state by the working

class, as were the intentions of the Bolsheviks or the role of workers’ cooperatives and industrial

collectives under the Spanish Republican government of 1936 (Woodcock, 2004); the reinforcing of an

already-established or aspiring socialist state under the rubric of co-managed factories, as in the state-

owned and worker-run factories in Tito’s Yugoslavia, Allende’s Chile, or the current aspirations of

Chavez in Venezuela (Petras & Veltmeyer, 2003; Trigona, 2006b); or about fighting for sectoral labour

victories via temporary workspace takeovers, such as the experiences of earlier Argentine factory

occupations, or worker takeover of plants in Canada as with the occupation of the Maple Leaf meat

packing plant in Edmonton, Alberta in 2005 (UFCW, 2005) or the ALCAN workers in Quebec in early-

19

2004 (La Nuit, 2004). Nor do Argentina’ ERTs emerge out of workplace buyouts as with some

Employee Share Ownership Plans in the US (Bell, 2006; Melnyk, 1985). Instead, the origins of

Argentina’s ERTs resemble more other situations that emerge in other conjunctures during downward

economic cycles that see a large and sustained rise in unemployment. In these situations, as Johnston

Birchall (2003) asserts “the most direct response” to the effects of economic depression, deregulation,

and globalizing markets “was to set up workers’ cooperatives that took over failing firms or parts of

firms that were still viable” (p. 48). Other than the Latin American experiences with ERTs, similar

surges in workers’ coops as solutions to the growing rate of unemployment occurred, for example, with

the noticeable expansion in labour coops in Finland in the 1990s in the wake of the economic disruption

of that country’s white collar and service sectors caused in part by the break up of the Soviet Union

(Birchall, 2003), and the exponential growth in the Industrial Common Ownership workers’ coop

movement in the UK during its deep economic recessions in the late-1970s and early-1980s (Melnyk,

1985; Oakeshott, 1990). But something different also happened with ERTs in Argentina when compared

to these other historical conjunctures of rising unemployment: As Charts 2b and 2c show, ERT workers

coops are multisectoral, widespread, and cut across Argentina’s entire territory. In addition, they are not

affiliated with state politics, are not union aligned, are not directly associated with an older cooperative

sector, and have been, despite the disparate nature of the sectors represented and the lack of strong

solidarity networks between ERTs, surprisingly long-lasting.

Taking over workspaces to gain labour victories has been a practice that in Argentina extends as

far back as the anarchist labour movements of the early 20th century (Munck, Falcon, & Galitelli, 1987).

Over the past 60 years, in particular, the cultural and political practices of the country’s workers in these

militant labour sectors have been most vividly influenced by the nationalist and corporatist ideologies of

Peronism and the political tactics that in the past had been taken up by more militant trade unions falling

20

under the pro-Peronist Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT).xvi This Peronist-tinged imaginary

has, not surprisingly and via the memory of ERTs’ most militant workers, overlapped into the

phenomenon’s cultural and political milieu. Politically, many ERT protagonists have come from some of

the most militant industrial sectors of Peronist syndicalism such as the metallurgic and graphics sectors

which, not surprisingly, together make up 32.1% of all of Argentina’s ERTs (see Chart 2c). We

especially witnessed this in the narratives related to us by many of the ERT protagonists we interviewed

(Centro de Documentación, 2007): For them, work is not only a “right” but it also defines much of one’s

human dignity. These are views that, within the context of the Argentine working class, Juan Perón

himself was the first to persuasively articulate (Munck, Falcon, & Galitelli, 1987; Svampa & Pereyra,

2004).

Paradoxically, the Argentina of the 1990s also witnessed an intensification of the severing of the

strong ties that syndicalist Peronism had traditionally enjoyed with the country’s popular sectors since

the late-1940s (Svampa & Pereyra, 2004). The dismantling of the “just society” that was first

consolidated by Perón in the 1940s began most fully with the neoliberal prejudices and brutal

repressions of the 1976-83 dictatorship (Patroni, 2004). The final vestiges of Perón’s vision of social

justice for all Argentines finally dissolved with Menem’s zealous neoliberalist plans (Svampa & Pereyra,

2004). Menem’s final dissolution of Perón’s nationalized “benevolent state” throughout the 1990s

relegated hundreds of thousands of Peronist syndicalism’s traditional grassroots supporters – the

unionized working classes – to the ranks of the unemployed and the desperate. In response, starting

around 1996, thousands of those that were part of this descendant class and that lived in the cities and

towns that had been predominantly employed by Argentina’s national firms began to take to the streets

and highways of the nation in the only form of protest that remained for the unemployed: squatting

roads and highways. In these tactics organized groups of the structurally unemployed managed to

directly hit the economic veins of the country. These mobilized and horizontally organized groups have

21

since come to be known as los piqueteros (the picketers) (Svampa & Pereyra, 2004, pp. 50-54).

What overflowed from these mobilizations of the unemployed onto other forms of popular

struggle beginning in the mid-1990s was a renewed sense of collective purpose against a callous,

exploitative, and socially alienating system; a growing ethos of democracy “from below” (Colectivo

Situaciones, 2002, par. 3); and a massive “reactivation” of “communitarian social experience” (Svampa

& Pereyra, 2004, p. 222). Antonio Negri (2003) observes that the responses of groups such as the

piqueteros to the radical liberalization of the national economy – tactics of occupying and squatting

public and private spaces, horizontal forms of organizing, myriad neighbourhood grassroots social

initiatives, etc. – bore witness to a new “energy of universal conviction and of egalitarian social

recomposition” (par. 2) that emerged from the urban barrios and rural towns of the country at the time.

These are the most direct roots of Argentina’s recent horizontal contagion that also caught the ERT

protagonists, a contagion that impelled thousands of grassroots activists to self-organize organically and

under the rubric of peoples’ assemblies working within the principles of direct democracy. And, ERT

protagonists’ tactics of workspace occupations and seizures were most directly modeled after the new

social transformations that were taking shape around them (Svampa & Pereyra, 2004).

Thus, ERT workers’ strongest roots are not in the country’s recent cooperativist or union

movements but, rather, in a history grounded in grassroots workers’ struggles, Peronist syndicalism, and

newer forms of social protest against neoliberalism. And, it is the political tools that they learned from

these sources, not the cooperative model, that inspired thousands of Argentine workers to subsequently

begin to experiment with manager-free, horizontalized, and self-managed workplaces.

The Challenges of Forming ERT-Specific Organizations in Argentina

The complex historical and micro-particularity of each ERT in recent years makes identifying a

unified “ERT movement” virtually impossible. One reason for this is that ERTs, despite the support they

garner from other ERTs during the stages of occupation and resistance, and despite incipient attempts at

22

creating networks of solidarity between them, tend to become, on the whole, progressively isolated from

each other once they start production again, each ERT living out their own experience of self-

management within a capitalist sea that has managed to calm itself after the most intense crisis years of

2001-2002 (Fajn, 2003, p. 76). Thus, it has been difficult to organize them as a “movement,” within an

umbrella organization, or as a union.

Between early-2005 and the time of this writing (the first trimester of 2007), MNER, the lobby-

group and umbrella organization that between mid-2002 and mid-2003 constituted the largest grouping

of ERTs (and that, via the relentless early work of its president, Eduardo Murúa, had done much to

articulate the processes and tactics of workplace occupation and recovery) has been experiencing a

period of acute fragmentation (Centro de Documentación, 2007).xvii Indeed, perhaps this fragmentation

was foreshadowed by MNER’s bifurcation in 2003, which produced the other major umbrella

organization, MNFRT, under the tight leadership of the conservative young lawyer Luis Caro.xviii In our

ethnographic and quantitative investigation of ERTs, we were able to determine a numerical parity of

ERTs belonging to either MNER and MNFRT as of early-2005 – on their own, each organization

represented roughly 34% of ERTs that existed at the time (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005, p. 94).

At the same time we were also able to identify a fairly large lack of commitment on the part of most

ERTs with regards to these two umbrella organizations that were supposed to be representing their

interests. What we were also able distinguish was a more pronounced identification with these

organizations with ERTs that found themselves in the midst of their most conflict-filled days, and the

widest gap with these organizations with those ERTs that perceived themselves to be fully consolidated

as self-sustaining workers’ cooperatives. These findings, perhaps more than any other in our work with

ERTs, reveals the difficulty of organizing these highly autonomous workers’ collectives. One reason for

their non-committal nature to organizational politics, we theorize, lies in the perception amongst ERT

workers that their struggles were indeed their struggles and that, at the end of the day, it was only

23

themselves, their families, friends, and neighbours that truly risked their lives at times for the fight to

open up their workspaces as self-managed entities.xix

The vacuum caused by the subsequent dissolution of MNER and MNFRT’s tightened control of

its ERTs have recently given impetus to several new fledgling ERT federations. The Federación

Argentina de Cooperativas de Trabajadores Autogestionados (FACTA),xxfor example, was formed in

mid-2006 by several greater Buenos Aires-based ERTs with aspirations to create a space where ERTs

can collectively lobby and coordinate funds from the state and forge alliances with universities and

NGOs. Their hope is that these alliances will assist with technical and administrative upgrading, increase

ERTs’ revenue potential and market share, create or reinstitute lost retirement benefits, secure medical

and health coverage for ERT workers, and articulate tighter links between ERTs from the interior and

other cooperatives (Castiglioni, 2006; EnRedAndo, 2006). Another promising solidarity initiative is

being spearheaded by a group of steelworkers in the southern region of greater Buenos Aires, based out

of the Quilmes local of the national steelworkers union.xxi This cooperative/ERT/union consortium

currently assisting 13 member ERTs most notably managed to also negotiate agreements with several

European agencies and with the University of Quilmes to provide these ERTs with sources of technical

assistance and professional consulting services (“Proyecto Redes de Personas,” 2006).xxii Yet another

small group of ERTs are linked to the Federación de Cooperativas de Trabajo de la Provincia de

Buenos Aires (FECOOTRA)xxiii and other political sectors working out of the municipality of

Avellaneda (FECOOTRA, 2006; Saavedra, 2003). And finally, ERTs working in the graphics and

printing sector are currently attempting to formalize a solidarity network of cooperatives throughout

greater Buenos Aires in order to pool resources and more effectively tackle the various challenges they

face in a highly concentrated and competitive printing and publishing market (Centro de

Documentación, 2007).

24

Interestingly, the only group that has formed in recent years along the lines of a formal trade

union for ERTs has been the Asociación Nacional de Trabajadores Autogestionados (ANTA).xxiv

Emerging from within the progressive Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA),xxv and founded

in late-2005 by sympathetic union activists that have had experience with various forms of self-

management, ANTA formed as a response to the state’s and traditional unions’ general indifference or

outright hostility to the plight of the self-managed, underemployed, and the unemployed. Initially made

up of 83 organizations of ERTs, microenterprises, and other workers’ collectives, ANTA has begun to

lobby the state to recognize the labour rights of the self-managed and militate to secure pensions,

stabilize sector-wide wages, create a national health and workers’ compensation plan, and provide these

self-managed entities with favourable loans. While a promising initiative, there are to date only a

handful of ERTs that associate themselves with this still-nascent organization; the majority of ANTA’s

members are made up of cooperatives and microenterprises associated with Argentina’s promising but

still-insipient “solidarity economy” and that have not originated from formerly capitalist firms (Centro

de Documentación, 2007; CTA, 2007; Vales, 2005).

ERT-specific organizations such as MNER and MNFRT formed early on in the phenomenon,

during its “first era” (1997-2003), in part in order to articulate the processes of workspace recovery and

give ERTs and their unique experiences their own particular political voice and identity. The unifying

identity for the ERT phenomenon envisioned by MNER’s and MNFRT’s leaders early on was not

cooperativism per se but, rather, the very fact of being a worker-recovered enterprise (Lavaca, 2004).

And, by placing emphasis on the figure of the worker rather than the figure of the cooperator, MNER

and MNFRT steered ERTs away from forging strong links with the cooperative movement during

ERTs’ “first era.”

While cooperative associations such as the aforementioned FECOOTRA and the Instituto

Movilizador de Fondos Cooperativos (IMFC)xxvi had tried to make inroads with ERTs during the “first

25

era,” they had an uphill climb in convincing most ERT workers that linking up with the cooperative

sector would be beneficial given that a good number of them had been employees in capitalist firms with

no experience with cooperativism or had had negative experiences with “false cooperatives.” Having

said this, in the current, more politically stable “second era” of the ERT phenomenon (2003-present),

some ERTs have been encouraged to link themselves more closely with the cooperative organisms they

once shunned. Moreover, when talking to ERT workers today, one begins to notice a new tendency

among them to revalorize or reconsider what it means to actually be a workers’ cooperative. The

emergence of newer ERT-specific organizations like ANTA and FACTA, the loss of the political clout

of MNER and MNFRT, popular educational initiatives geared at ERT workers, and the reconsolidation

of the Argentine economy has led many ERTs to take a second look at the more established cooperative

sector as a possible space from which to forge new alliances and collectively recover (if not “recreate”)

larger sections of Argentina’s economic output from capitalist interests. In addition, the tax advantages

and financial and legal support that Argentine cooperative legislation offers ERTs have begun to be

recognized by its protagonists as important reasons to emphasize more their role as cooperators. What’s

more, current ERT leaders such as those working with ANTA also feel that the state should establish a

unique legal status for ERTs that would recognize the particular needs and challenges of self-managing

recovered workers’ cooperatives within current national and global conjunctures and in light of the fact

that these workers had to take it upon themselves to learn things they could never have imagined they

would have needed to know.

What one notices in this brief overview of ERT organizations is that the character of formalized

associations and organizations of ERTs has transformed since the earlier days of the ERT phenomenon:

The early and implosive socio-economic years between 1997-2003, the ERTs’ “first era,” required

MNER and subsequently MNFRT to primarily focus on articulating and assisting ERTs’ direct action

tactics as well as initiate the struggle – quite effectively, as it turned out – for a national political voice

26

for its workers and for the reformulation of the country’s bankruptcy and expropriation laws.xxvii In the

current “second era” of ERTs, the need for more politically-minded entities such as an MNER or an

MNFRT has diminished substantially given the new and recomposed socio-economic climate of

Argentina. Currently, more economically focused and conciliatory umbrella organizations such as

FACTA or ANTA are stepping in to meet the new challenges faced by already-established ERTs within

a consolidated Argentine economy.

The Challenges and Innovations of Argentina’s ERTs

In this last section we lay out some of the ways that ERTs’ challenges on the path to self-

management shape their new work processes, their egalitarian remuneration schemes, and the forms of

horizontality adopted by each particular ERT cooperative.

The span of time between the initial threats of owner-led closures of the business or bankruptcy

and full workers’ control as a workers’ cooperative tends to be long and filled with arduous struggle.

While most ERTs were either seized or taken over by workers, our research found that 50% of ERTs

operating currently in Argentina had to engage in lengthy periods of courageous workspace occupations

sometimes pitting militant workers against the state or thugs in the service of owners and even their

sector’s unions (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005, p. 54). Whether workspaces were seized without

much fuss or occupied for an extended period of time before becoming and official workers’

cooperative, most ERTs have had to then usually engage in lengthy battles with the courts and regional

legislatures for legal recognition of the workers’ cooperative and its right to control and use the

machines and assets of the recovered firm. Hence the slogan that was popularized by MNER’s Murúa:

“occupy, resist, produce.”xxviii The slogan also serves to concisely capture the three distinctive stages

most ERTs go through on their way towards workers’ control and self-management (Murúa, 2006; Vieta,

2006a).

It is important to note that once the cooperative is formed, the struggle for recognition and self-

27

management is, more often than not, not over: Full workers’ control of the workspace also assumes that

local courts will override the outstanding bankruptcy proceedings that are usually still pending during

the first months of the ERT’s existence or that a new debt repayment scheme will be struck with the

cooperative. It also assumes that local legislatures will ultimately decide to grant the militant workers

the right to operate the firm as a cooperative and have the ley de expropiación (expropriation law)

declared on their behalf.xxix Usually, such court and legislative decisions only come after weeks and

months of more struggle as ERT workers lobby judges and legislators or even resort to the public

pressure of worker sit-ins at courthouses and legislative buildings.xxx

Some of the Practices and Tensions of Workers’ Cooperation in ERTs

Most ERTs become workers’ cooperatives for the reasons we outlined earlier (see: Figure 1).

However, the form that cooperation is to take is still being worked out within each ERT workspace and

across the sector. For example, the practical nature of the third principle of cooperatives – how “member

economic participation” is to be taken up (Shaffer, 1999, p. 45; MacPherson, 1995, par. 46) – is still up

for debate within most ERTs. That is, besides the widespread agreement among ERTs of the value and

necessity of “members controlling the capital” of the firm (MacPherson, 1995, par. 46) – made easier

and encouraged by the flat horizontal model and small size of most ERTsxxxi – how ERT members are to

receive “limited compensation on the capital” (par. 46) of the cooperative or how losses are to be

contended with, continue to be worked out pragmatically and debated within each ERT as it matures and

lives out the intricacies of self-management within a globalized market economy. For example, while in

many ERTs revenue capitalization and salary amounts regularly debated, voted on, and agreed upon by

the workers’ council or assembly, there is no trend across ERTs concerning what percentage of revenues

should return to the cooperative as capital, if some revenue and what percentage of it might be allocated

to local community needs,xxxii and how much is to be allocated for salaries and benefits. Also, these

revenue allocation decisions are often very susceptible to market cycles. More financially challenging

28

months are usually bridged with cuts to community contributions or, most often, salaries. These

difficulties have multiple causes but tend to be rooted in having to face intensifying market competition

with chronically low cash reserves, perhaps a fleeting customer-base, difficult orders to fulfill, and

challenges in securing loans.

Irrespective of these cyclical challenges, the continuing debates within ERTs and throughout the

ERT sector underscores what Ian MacPherson (1995) has characterized as one of the “remarkable

special characteristics” of the Inernational Co-operative Asociation’s cooperative principles: their

“inherent flexibility” to adapt to the economic and political particularities of a cooperative and the

collective needs of its members (par. 34). Indeed, the continued discussions within each ERT and

throughout the sector concerning the form that member economic participation should take accentuates

the importance that many ERT protagonists give to the principle of “democratic member control” (par.

34). And it is this aspect of Argentina’s ERTs – the high degree of ERT members that “actively

participate in setting…policies and making decisions” (par. 34) – that many journalistic reports often

highlight (see, for example: Albert, 2005; Garrigues, 2002; Lewis & Klein, 2004; Utne, 2003). Our

research, as well as other recent in-depth studies (Fajn, 2003; Rebón & Saavedra, 2006), found however

that there also are, not surprisingly, many nuances in how democratic member control is carried out in

practice. On the whole, larger ERTs tend to be administered by workers’ councils made up of ERT

members elected with a mandate of one or two years, while many also hold regular workers’ assemblies

that meet either on a periodic basis (usually monthly) or when major issues arise, or both. Smaller ERTs

tend to administer themselves primarily via the workers’ assembly and the collective solidarity of its

members. Day-to-day concerns are more often than not worked out ad hoc on actual shop floors via the

adoption of production processes that are (re)organized around flexible work teams. The internal

tensions between viable production processes and an ERT’s democratic values are intimately related to

and echo the tensions of pitting democratized cooperatives within capitalist markets. These tensions

29

mean that ERTs must ensure that production runs remain as efficient as possible while also balancing the

needs and skills of each worker and the ERT’s horizontal commitments. Also, their ad hoc work

processes and the empowerment that many ERTs give to each worker on the shop floor ensures that, as

we have mentioned before, the workers’ coop contrasts as much as possible with the exploitative

conditions they were under when they were employees.

One notable innovation being worked out by many ERTs is the preponderance of pay equity no

matter how senior a worker is or what skills he or she possesses. Our research found that 56% of ERTs

as of early-2005 were practicing complete pay equity (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005, p. 67).

This is perhaps one noticeable innovation that differentiates ERTs from the practices of other workers’

cooperatives. The other 44% of ERTs practice varying degrees of more hierarchical remuneration

schemes tied to specific skill sets, seniority, or – highlighting again how an ERT’s history of struggle

shapes their organizational and remunerational structures – whether or not workers were present during

the initial days and months of occupation (p. 80). Interestingly, the longer the ERT has been under

workers’ control the more likely it is to practice pay equity when compared to newer recovered firms.

For example, as Figure 2 shows, 70% of ERTs recovered during or before 2001 practice complete pay

equity while only 39% of those recovered between 2003-2004 do so (p. 80). In addition, the size of the

firm tends to also be linked to pay equity: 64% of firms with 20 workers or less practice pay equity,

compared to 47% of firms having between 20-50 workers and 54% of firms with more than 50 workers

(p. 81).

There are several explanations for these differing remuneration practices: Most notably, the

collective of workers belonging to smaller ERTs tend to spend more time interacting with each other on

a daily basis than those in larger ERTs and have more intimate knowledge of each other’s jobs, personal

lives, and concerns. This means, we have found, that smaller ERTs also tend to experience less

factionalism, individualism, and shop-floor competition when compared to larger ERTs with more

30

dispersed work teams (p. 81). Another reason some ERTs tend towards pay equity more so than others is

because workers from more egalitarian ERTs have usually known each other and worked together for

longer periods of time or have a longer history of experiencing common struggles together. A related

reason for an increased likelihood of pay parity suggested by our data was specifically linked to the

economically and socially harrowing days of the last financial crisis; workers belonging to older ERTs

that formed between 1997 and 2003 told us that the intensity of their militancy and specific collective

struggles influenced their desire to practice pay equity, especially – and again – as a way of

counterbalancing the most exploitative practices they experienced under owner-management during

these years (pp. 81-82). On the whole, our findings here suggest that a tight, intersubjectively existential

social structure rooted in necessity and direct action, common bonds, and shared experiences permeates

ERTs that organize their work and remuneration schemes in more horizontal ways.

Responses to Intensifying Market Competition

The rise in new labour struggles in the past six years marked a change in Argentine workers’

perceptions of their own plight that also influenced ERT protagonists. The era of workers’ deep-seated

terror of “death in life,” the moniker evocatively characterizing structural unemployment in Argentina,

is perceived to have been left behind by many Argentine workers. As Argentina’s economy recuperated

and unemployment rates went down starting in 2003 fewer new cases of ERTs have emerged in recent

years. In its place an insipient but committed workers’ struggle has returned to the social stage,

increasingly challenging capital to once again improve workers’ living standards. In recent years,

strikes, demands for better work conditions, and struggles for union representation – representation that

hundreds of thousands of Argentine workers lost during the privatization years of the 1990s – have

returned (CTA, 2006). ERT workers were, in many ways, a vanguard within this new antagonistic

labour landscape. Indeed, the new imaginary of worker agency ERTs helped carve out has assisted in

31

reviving the active and grassroots political participation of workers in Argentina. But this new

conjuncture in the “second era” of ERTs has not been without its difficulties.

First, while the current socio-political landscape within a recomposed national economy favours

workers more than the landscape of the 1990s, the recuperation of higher levels of national economic

activity brings each ERT face-to-face with the need to recompose itself within economic sectors and

markets in full expansion (Fajn & Rebón, 2005). This means that economic success for ERTs in this

expanding capitalist system must unfold in terms conditioned by competition with companies that have

not experienced the same traumatic processes of recuperation. Moreover, these competitors have

maintained their old hierarchical management structures, capitalist labour processes, suppliers, and

customers; in sum, they have not had to confront the challenges of reconstructing their business models

around principles of self-management which adds myriad complexities to an ERT’s micro-economic

situation. Similarly, ERTs must confront challenges that older or more stable cooperatives working

within the same capitalist market paradigm also usually do not have to face.

Second, while non-conventional and irregular sources of funding such as community fundraising

drives and selective government and NGO financing have helped sustain some ERTs thus far in light of

these difficulties, many ERTs still remain at a disadvantage because of the intensification of competition

within particular market sectors. Gabriel Fajn & Julián Rebón (2005), for instance, point out that the

financial precariousness undergirding some ERTs push some of them to focus primarily on generating as

much revenues as possible from the meager inputs available to them. This insecurity heightens the daily

pressures and precariousness of the particular ERT cooperative. As such, many ERT workers work with

the constant awareness that not being able to reach either established or new markets due to the lack of

productive capacity, capital investment, or raw materials necessarily means that sufficient revenues will

not be generated to pay salaries. These material difficulties underscore a large part of the daily concerns

of most ERT cooperatives. They also illustrate the main contradiction implicit in self-management

32

within a greater capitalist system: When staying afloat becomes the primary focus of and ERT it risks

losing sight of the collective spirit and democratic ideals that in part drove them to become a workers’

cooperative in the first place. The resulting pressures that come with the desperate pursuit of sufficient

returns refocuses the attention of the ERT from its cooperativist possibilities back into the very capitalist

system that it contested in the first place. These economic pressures heighten the risk of reconverting the

ERT, once again, into a workspace motivated by capital accumulation and competition rather than one

rooted in communal values and a collective desire for autogestión. For Fajn and Rebón, the effects of

these challenges are reflected in the increasing trend with some ERTs to return to an organizational and

management style in tune with more capitalist norms, such as the reinstitution of fragmented and

repetitious work tasks, job intensification, overtime work without adequate compensation, and situations

where the control once exercised by the shop floor supervisor is returned in the form of the “collective

foreman.” As the authors point out, echoing Karl Marx’s (1981) critique of cooperatives, when workers

become overwhelmed by the daunting demands of self-management, their compensatory reactions often

lead to modes of production ensconced in “self-exploitation and [self]-bureaucratization” (Fajn &

Rebón, 2005, p. 7).xxxiii Resorting to these exploitative tendencies in order to survive within a cutthroat

market not only risks returning the cooperative workplace to an ideology of capitalist rationality above

other values, but also – as has already happened with some ERTs – tempts workers to return the

cooperative to former owners, new proprietors, or for its members or workers’ councils to transform into

cooperativist capitalists that, once again, privilege profits above all else. In these regressive situations,

“what was formerly abandoned is desired once again” as workers, in essence, either give up the vision of

self-management or become “new capitalists” (Fajn and Rebón, 2005, p. 7).

Third, the risk of falling into the capitalist trap again also means that ERTs must carefully

consider how they will reinvest (i.e., capitalize) funds that are hard to come back into the firm. In

addition, they are faced with the need to redesign the organization of their production to most effectively

33

meet customer orders while also carefully balancing the production capabilities of the ERT, workers’

democratic and egalitarian desires, and the often depleted conditions of the ERT’s machinery. These

necessities require workers to learn new skills that are expensive to contract out (i.e., marketing, sales,

accounting, administration, technical, etc.). Usually, this latter need also means that an ERT must hire

new workers.

The challenges many ERTs face when they need to hire more workers serves as an illustrative

case in point here. In addition to the market and financial challenges that confound their situation, the

first barrier ERTs must face when attempting to hire new workers is Argentina’s legislation for

cooperatives, which stipulates that a coop’s full-time “hires” must be incorporated as members. By

legislation, this requires probationary periods to not exceed six months. Once a new member has

become an “associate” (socio) of the cooperative, any subsequent decision to exclude him or her from

the coop is a long and complicated process. As such, the decision to incorporate new workers takes on a

level of gravity and consideration not needed by private companies in Argentina, which have benefited

since the Menem years from lax labour laws. In other words, ERTs that decide to incorporate new

workers must be very sure that these workers will be able to execute and maintain a level and quality of

work that will justify their salaries. Indeed, a bad hiring decision by the cooperative could, for example,

cause its already hard-to-come-by revenues to drop, possibly taking it into a crisis situation once again.

Moreover, the question of how much decision-making capacity the ERT cooperative should vest on new

workers, as well as how much they should be remunerated, remain crucial points of debate within many

ERT workers’ assemblies. This is in no small part related to the uncertainty that incumbent workers

have concerning a newer worker’s level of commitment to the ideals of cooperativism and horizontal

work processes that for many of the ERT’s “founding” workers were formed during the long months of

occupation and struggle. Thus, new hires add to the cooperative’s uncertainty concerning the future

“returns” on their hiring “investment.” xxxiv

34

These are all challenges that demand important strategic decisions that ERT workers cannot

afford to err. Despite – or perhaps because of – these difficulties, many ERTs have had to turn to their

members’ resourcefulness and invent unique ways of strengthening their work processes and skills in

light of their financial challenges by, for example, teaching themselves new skills; job rotation schemes;

collaborating with other ERTs, local universities, and even oversees NGOs to upgrade technological

capacity and skill sets (as we have already pointed out); or building networks of solidarity with the

neighbourhood and communities that surround them through, for example, community fundraising

drives, open houses, temporarily taking on interns or hiring students from local technical schools, or

raising awareness and relevance of the ERT within the local community by hosting community centres,

free schools, and free health clinics on their premises. Elsewhere we have called these initiatives the

“social innovations” being invented by ERTs and linked to a nascent “solidarity economy” being forged

by the ERT sector (Ruggeri, 2006b; Vieta, 2006a). But these innovations have been, to date, too

insipient to improve most ERTs’ immediate competitiveness within the intensifying capitalist markets

they find themselves in, and too far still from the level of “sociotechnological adequacy” required of

them to be able to compete on a level playing field with capitalist firms.xxxv

Conclusion

The previous pages have mapped two key trends that often go unnoticed by academic research

and journalistic pieces covering Argentina’s worker-recovered enterprises: First, employees’ initial

motivations for seizing control of deteriorating companies from former owners and eventually putting

them into operation under their own self-management comes out of their fears of becoming structurally

unemployed and from their desire to save their jobs rather than from any predetermined political

predilections. Second, most ERT workers restructure their workplaces as a workers’ cooperative only

after workers have gained control of the plant because it is the most practical method for transforming

former owner-managed workplaces into self-managed ones. More specifically, ERT workers organize

35

themselves as a worker’s cooperative not from any deep-seated desire to become cooperators but, rather,

as a legal and pragmatically defensive maneuver to protect themselves from returning owners or state

repression, to legitimate themselves as a legal entity to customers and other firms in their market sector,

for more easily restructuring into horizontally democratic workspaces, and for securing market, loans,

and other forms of financing.

Fundamentally, the myriad challenges ERTs have had to maneuver around on the path to self-

management within their local, provincial, and national political and economic conjunctures, from the

first months of recuperation on to their unfolding struggles to stay afloat and self-manage themselves,

shape their organizational structures and mediate their ultimate success as a workers’ cooperative. ERT

workers’ capacities to put pressure on those within the juridical and political spheres of power, plus the

production and organizational innovations they manage to create, are what determine the early survival

of an ERT during its first two stages of struggle – the stages that Murúa’s MNER characterized as

“occupy” and “resist.” These two stages of struggle predominated the concerns of ERTs during the first

six tumultuous years of the phenomenon – its “first era” – between 1997-2003, the years when most

workspace occupations and seizures took place. Once these first two stages are surmounted, the third

stage – “produce” – involves experimenting with strategies of economic viability and new networks of

solidarity within and beyond each ERT’s particular market sector. And all three stages towards full self-

management – the activist (“occupy”), the political (“resist”), and economic (“produce”) – must be

engaged with care and inventiveness in order for the cooperative to become a long-lasting experiment.

Non-partisan, pragmatically driven, and yet in many ways anti-capitalist models for transforming

work into something much more democratic and just, the ERT phenomenon can be seen in many was as

being something inspirational – perhaps even “something else” – in the history of workers’ struggles

despite their ongoing challenges. Ultimately, while small in numbers, ERTs are proving to be promising

micro-experiments in new forms of self-managed work practices that, collectively, are drawing out

36

tentative sketches for an alternative economic and social reality for working people in Argentina and

beyond.

37

Charts and Figures Chart 1: Number of Cooperatives and Cooperators in Argentina, 1985 – 2002 (Montes & Ressel,

2003, pp. 18-19; Shaffer, 1999, p. 149)

Year Total cooperatives per year Total cooperators per year 1985 4,204 10,592,359 1991 8,142 9,103,269 2002 16,008 6,874,064

Chart 2: Traditional Cooperatives Per Sector and ERTs Per Sector in Argentina

Chart 2a: Traditional Cooperatives Per Sector (as of 2002) (Montes & Ressel, 2003, p. 20)

Agricultural and Livestock 2,190 13.7%Consumer 243 1.5%Credit 311 1.9%Provisioning 1,512 9.4%Insurance 50 0.3%Public Services 1,868 11.7%Workers’ Cooperatives 6,549 41.0%Housing and Construction 2,966 18.5%Others 319 2.0%

Total 16,008 100.0%

Chart 2b: Percentage of ERTs Per Major Sector and Per Major Region (as of 2005) (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005, p. 40)

City of Buenos Aires

Greater Buenos Aires (Province) Interior

Metallurgical 6% 35% 29% Graphics 25% 5% 0% Textiles 13% 8% 7% Foodstuffs 13% 11% 21% Other Services 19% 3% 21% Other Manufacturers 12% 30% 14% Health 13% 3% 7% Housing and Construction Materials 0% 5% 3%

Total 100% 100% 100%

38

Chart 2c: Breakdown of ERTs Per Sector (as of 2003) (Fajn, 2003, p. 157) Sector Percentage

Metallurgical 26.4

Foodstuffs 6.9

Textiles 4.6

Mining 2.3

Paper products 3.4

Liquid gas 1.1

Ceramics / Brickworks

3.4

Glass 4.6

Chemical products 1.1

Dairy 2.3

Printshops / Publishing

5.7

Electronic machines and appliances

8.0

Plastics / Rubber 2.3

Services 2.3

Education 2.3

Meat packing / Refrigeration

8.0

Transport 5.7

Health 4.6

Water treatment 1.1 Hotels and restaurants (tourism)

1.1

Construction materials

1.1

Supermarkets

1.1

Total 100.00

Figure 1: Legal Structures of ERTs in Argentina (as of 2005) (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005,

p. 67)

39

igure 2: Pay Equity and Year of Recovery of Argentine ERTs (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero,

Legal Structures of ERTs

94%

1%

1%

3%

1%

Workers' cooperative

State enterprise underworker's controlOther type ofcooperativeStill in negotiation

No legal framework asyet

F

2005, p. 80)

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Before 2001 2001 2002 2003-2004

Recovery year

Figure 3: Pay Equity Linked to Acts of Occupation or Level of Conflict in the Early Days of the ERT (as of 2005) (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005, p. 82)

Occupied and highly conflictual ERTs

71%

29%

Egalitarian payschemes

Non-egalitarianpayschemes

Non-occupied or not-as-conflictual ERTs

37%

64%

Egalitarian payschemes

Non-egalitarianpayschemes

40

41

Notes 1 The findings and analyses we report in this chapter draw from the work and growing data sets emerging our of our various and overlapping research projects that explore Argentina’s ERTs. For the past five years, Andrés Ruggeri, director of the Open Faculty program out of the University of Buenos Aires’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, has been working with a team of anthropologists researching the ERT phenomenon. Site visits, extensive and documented conversations with workers, and surveys of over 70 ERTs by the UBA team have been complimented by a growing archival database of cultural artifacts, government and union policy documents, political and economic analyses, and a growing collection of published and unpublished research on Argentina’s ERTs. Ruggeri also heads the ERT Documentation Centre that houses this archive (see: Centro de Documentación, 2007). The results of the first phase of this work, including the methodology used to gather the data, was reported in the 2005 book Las empresas recuperadas en la Argentina (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). The team also works with several ERTs, assisting them with upgrading their technological and organizational infrastructures. Marcelo Vieta, a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada, has been working with Ruggeri’s team and assisting in translating some of its writings into English since 2005. For his PhD dissertation, Vieta is researching the cultural aspects, political history, and the phenomenology of struggle and self-management undergirding Argentina’s ERT phenomenon. 2 Argentina’s most recent economic woes arguably began to take shape with the selling off of over 150 nationalized firms to multinational interests in the early-1990s (ostensibly, to pay down the mounting national debt that, paradoxically, ended up ballooning from US$58.5 billion in 1991 to US$155 billion by 2001). This policy was coupled with the fixed-rate exchange policy (ley de convertibilidad) introduced by the Menem administration in 1991 in order to stem the tide of acute inflation and hyperinflation that had plagued Argentina throughout much of Raúl Alfonsín’s tenurship. While inflation was curtailed, an overpriced peso caused exports to gradually decline throughout the 1990s. As a result, a chronic trade deficit took hold by the middle of the decade as cheaper imports saturated local markets. Unable to do business in such an economic environment, an escalating number of once-profitable small and medium sized businesses, faced with dwindling markets, went bankrupt (see, in particular: Damill, 2005; Patroni, 2004; Velde & Veracierto, 2000). 3 By 2001, the national month-over-month business bankruptcy rate had reached its highest point in Argentina’s modern history: During the Menem/de la Rua presidencies (1989-2001), bankruptcies soared from and average of 772 per month in 1991 to over 2600 per month by 2001 (Magnani, 2003, p. 37). Consequently, by 1995 jobs were beginning to disappear in Argentina at unprecedented speed. Moreover, the correlation between Argentina’s soaring bankruptcies, the gradual evaporation of jobs, the growing foreign debt, and, generally, the increasing entrenchment of neoliberalist economic policies, can clearly be seen when one looks at 22 year trends in unemployment between 1980 and 2002, the same span of years that saw the national debt balloon by 240%: According to Argentina’s Ministry of Labour, the official unemployment rate in 1980 was 1.9%. By 1989, at the height of hyperinflation, the official unemployment rate had risen to 7.6%. By 1994 it had hit the two-digit mark for the first time in decades, coming in at 11.5%. Between 1995 and 2001, it was averaging 15.6%. And by 2002, at the height of the financial crisis, the official unemployment rate had hit 19.7% of Argentina’s working population. Unofficial estimates, however, pegged the actual rate of unemployment at the time at well over 20%, while some unofficial analyses estimated it at more than 35% (Murúa, 2005) or even 40% (Colombo & Bril-Mascarenhas, 2003, p. 458). It is also interesting to note that by 1993, during the heady years of Menem’s market liberalization reforms, the official unemployment rate surpassed the official under-employment rate for the first time. This remained the case right up till the economic collapse of 2001-2002 (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2006). 4 As Chart 2a indicates, a large number of Argentina’s cooperatives (59%) belong to either the rural, housing, insurance, consumer, public services, and credit sectors, rather than in the economic sectors where most ERTs are to be found. To date, most ERTs have come from urban economic sectors most affected by the implosion of the neoliberal model of the 1990s, which include: urban industrial sectors or service sectors that deal with intermediary production (i.e., graphics, metal works, food processing, etc.) or final consumption (i.e., editorial houses, schools, hotels, etc.) (Ruggeri, Martinez, Trinchero, 2005, p. 47; Fajn, 2003, p. 157; Una Argentina Solidaria, 2004). 5 National Movement of Recovered Enterprises. 6 National Movement of Worker-Recovered Factories. 7 In Argentina’s bankruptcy law (article 21 of law 25.589) stipulates the following concerning employee ownership of a failed firm: “the continuity of the enterprise [in the case of bankruptcy] will consider the formal requests of its employees in

42

their dependency…, or as labour creditors, who must act in the subsequent period of continuity under the form of a workers’ cooperative” (http://infoleg.mecon.gov.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/70000-74999/74331/norma.htm) (see also, Martí et al, 2004, p. 104). 8 Such was the case, for example, with the workers of the Unión Solidaria de Trabajadores workers’ cooperative (Solidarity Union of Workers, or UST), which was formally a branch of Argentina’s largest homegrown multinational, Techint. The UST workers were fractured from the company and repositioned as a cooperative and as independent contractors in 2000. Soon after Techint began to outsource the work once done within the company to the cooperativized former branch-plant workers their job-orders became unwieldy as their production costs began to surge and unremunerated overtime became the norm, now without union representation. In 2001, the UST workers occupied the plant, reconstituted their cooperative under the rubric of an ERT, sought expropriation, and have now formed into a thriving ERT in the municipality of Avellaneda. For an account of their struggle, see: Clemente (2007) and “¿Como surge nuestra cooperativa?” (2006). 9 National Association of Workers of Self-Managed Enterprises. 10 The Unique Workers’ Central. 11 Federation of Productive Cooperatives of Uruguay. 12 Revolutionary Front of Enterprises Co-managed and Occupied by Workers. 13 Of the 75 accords that were signed at the First Encounter of Recovered Enterprises in Caracas Venezuela in October 2005, 59 Argentine ERTs signed 39 accords. Venezuelan ERTs signed 26 accords, and the other 10 accords were signed by ERTs from the other countries. 14 The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean. 15 While Chile, Bolivia, and Peru’s experiences with nationalized co-management showed early promises for workers’ control in these countries, Petras & Veltmeyer (2003) theorize that they ultimately failed due not only to the eventual collapse of their national regimes, but also to the marked separations between the quotidian needs of workers on shop floors and real managerial power which rested in the hands of the state. In these scenarios, the authors go on to explain, workers were not sufficiently ensconced in the apparatuses of state power to avoid the bourgeois classes from eventually recovering their industrial control, often with the armed forces at their side (El Diario de Guyana, 2005). 16 General Confederation of Labour. 17 A big part of these internal conflicts involve differing opinions amongst its leadership regarding what kind of role MNER is to play now that the national economy has stabilized somewhat. While Murúa, for example, continues to believe in an antagonistically combative posture towards the state and advocates “fighting for a different Argentina, an Argentina without exploitation” (Murúa, 2006), others within MNER feel that a more conciliatory role towards the state and the Kirchner administration should be taken up. 18 The split between MNER and MNFRT was due to various internal conflicts that revolved around ideological issues (e.g., MNER’s desire for the basic autonomy of each ERT vs. MNFRT’s more traditional union-like approach), strategies of how to deal with the state, and, in particular, whether or not community centres should be opened within ERTs. MNER tended to operate more autonomously, but consequently also more chaotically, than MNFRT. It aligned itself closely with the global social justice movements and the World Social Forum and tended to also distance itself as much as it practically could from the state while, at the same time, lobbying the state for strategic subsidies (e.g, pensions, funds for technical upgrading, funding for cultural centres, etc.). It also lobbied hard for reforming certain laws that would ease an ERT’s legal burdens, seeking, for example, amendments to the law of bankruptcy to favour worker takeovers without having to face the financial burdens left by former owners and the law of expropriation. MNER was also instrumental in lobbying regional legislatures to reinterpret Argentina’s national law of expropriation. As a further protective strategy and as a way of giving back to the community, MNER also actively encouraged ERTs to open up community centres and other community-based initiatives within their premises, proactively supporting those ERTs that interacted openly with the neighbourhoods that surround them. Differentiating itself from MNER politically and ideologically, MNFRT, encourages its worker-recovered cooperatives not to open community services for fear that such activity would detract from the business efforts of the worker-run firm. At times, MNFRT also works more closely with the state and it is not as anti-government as some MNER leaders

43

are. It also advocates changing certain laws to favour ERTs: in particular, like MNER, it too desires to alter the bankruptcy laws so that workers would be paid back the totality of salaries, benefits, etc. owing to them first. For detailed accounts of the history of these conflicts and the various ideological differences between Eduardo Murúa’s MNER and Luis Caro’s MNFRT, see: Heller (2004), Lavaca (2004), Magnani (2003), and Rebón & Saavedra (2006). 19 Tellingly, some ERTs decide to open up their factories and workspaces to the community and offer it free spaces from which to facilitate community centres, popular schools, medical clinics, theatres, and art galleries specifically in response to this support and solidarity that many barrio neighboours, friends, and family members showed agitating ERT workers during their most risky days of occupation. 20 Argentine Federation of Self-Managed Workers’ Cooperatives.

21 This would be the Unión Obrera Metalúrgica de Quilmes (Metallurgic Workers’ Union of Quilmes, or UOM Quilmes). 22 That these two initiatives rely on European funding and technical assistance also alludes to the Argentine federal government’s general indifference towards ERTs. 23 Federation of Workers’ Cooperatives of the Province of Buenos Aires. 24 National Association of Self-Managed Workers. 25 Central of Argentine Workers.

26 Organizing Institute for Cooperative Funds. 27 MNER’s and MNFRT’s persistent lobbying for redrawing these national laws consequently saw regional and national legislatures and the juridical establishment begin to reconsider these laws in light of the possibilities that the ERT solution offers for curbing rising unemployment rates (Ruggeri, 2006). 28 “Occupy, Resist, Produce” was adopted by MNER from the slogan of the landless peasant movements of Brazil (Murúa, 2005). 29 If all goes well with the occupation or seizure of the plant and the early months of self-managed production – and there are no guarantees that things will – the process of workplace recovery culminates in the firm becoming an official, worker-run cooperative, fully controlled by its workers under the legal protection of a temporary or permanent version of the ley de expropiación (the law of expropriation) and Argentina’s legislation covering cooperatives. The law of expropriation found in article 17 of the Argentine constitution – which the legislative branches of local governments began to interpret in favour of workers’ cooperatives primarily because of the lobbying efforts of ERT umbrella organizations such as MNER and MNFRT and the legal arguments of their lawyers – is vitally important to ERTs because it prevents the auctioning off of the failing company’s assets and, together with article 21 of law 25.589 (see footnote 7), gives the workers’ cooperative partial or total control of the plant and its assets for a specific period of time. Before definitive expropriation is approved, worker-recovered workspaces are usually granted a two to five year window to operate the firm under a supplementary law of “temporary” expropriation. Temporary expropriations, however, are usually granted after much lobbying and are never guaranteed. With this provisional legal status, ERTs are ensured only temporary control of machines, trademarks, patents, and real estate while the case for definitive expropriation is being heard in courts and regional legislatures. Workers’ cooperatives that have been granted temporary expropriation must continue their struggles with the regional political establishment in order to secure the permanent law of expropriation for their firm (Magnani, 2003; Palomino, 2003). 30 Well-known cases of these long struggles that included public lobbying tactics and standoffs with the police have garnered an impressive amount of press coverage. The most notable cases include the printing houses Artes Gráficas Chilavert and Artes Gráficas Patrícios, the Brukman clothing factory, the ceramic factory Zanón/FaSinPat, and the Hotel BAUEN.

31 The mean number of workers making up an ERT in Argentina is around 35, which, as a side note, tends to be a massive drop in their personnel from an average of 180 employees per company when it was under owner-management (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). A depleted workforce is also reflective of the dilapidated conditions of most recovered companies during the days of occupation and the first months of production as an ERT. Most of the absent workers are made

44

up of employees that either did not want to go along with the occupation, retired early, or, most likely, were part of the management, administrative, or technical teams that had an easier time finding work elsewhere (Fajn, 2003). 32 Allocating a percentage of revenues to community initiatives such as neighbourhood athletic clubs, neighbourhood kitchens, barrio microenterprises, or other local infrastructural needs is a practice which some ERTs have adopted in light of the solidarity given to them by the neighborhoods that surround them and usually in the most economically challenged barrios. Not all ERTs are inclined to such practices, however. Some notable cases of ERTs allocating a certain percentage of their monthly revenues to community initiatives include Artés Gráficas Chiulavert in the economically challenged Nueva Pompeya barrio of the city of Buenos Aires, Cooperativa UST in the southern Buenos Aires municipality of Avellaneda, and Zanón in the privince of Nequén (Centro de Documentación, 2007).

33 See, in particular: Marx (1981, p. 571) and McNally (1993, pp. 184-188).

34 What’s more, the period of member/worker expansion adds an additional long-term worry for the ERT: If the number of “new” associates supercedes the number of “founding” members of the coop, could the cooperative be voted out of existence one day and become, once again, a capitalist firm perceived by newer members to be a much more efficient model for securing their jobs and tackling capitalist markets? Due to these risks, and the related internal conflicts that have actually arisen in various ERTs to date between “founding” members and “new” members of the cooperative, many ERT coops have decide to incorporate new workers as temporary contract workers without making them members of the cooperative. At times these contracts are renewed far beyond the six-month probationary period that they would have had to respect had they taken on these contract workers as outright members of the cooperative. Ironically, these situations tend to reproduce the very capitalist practices that led to the labour instability that ERT protagonists were contesting in the first place. Nevertheless, in some ERTs, there is a deep preoccupation with balancing the equitable treatment of all workers, be they founding members or newer members, while, at the same time, somehow not putting the long-term viability of the cooperative and the internal equilibrium of the organizational and production processes at risk. In these cases this balance seems to be maintained by giving priority to the practice of hiring family members, ex-workers of the cooperative (including retired workers), or workers recommended to them by friends (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). 35 Amongst others, Renato Dagnino and Henrique Novaes, investigators at the University of Campinas have, in various texts, attempted to work through the concept of “socio-technological fit” in relation to ERTs (see, for example: Dagnino & Novaes, 2004).

45

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i he findings and analysis we report in this chapter draw from the work and growing data T sets emerging our of our various and overlapping research projects that explore Argentina’s ERTs. For the past five years, Andrés Ruggeri, director of the Open Faculty program out of the University of Buenos Aires’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, has been working with a team of anthropologists researching the ERT phenomenon. Site visits, extensive and documented conversations with workers, and surveys of over 70 ERTs by the UBA team have been complimented by a growing archival database of cultural artifacts, government and union policy documents, political and economic analyses, and a growing collection of published and unpublished research on Argentina’s ERTs. Ruggeri also heads the ERT Documentation Centre that houses this archive (see: Centro de Documentación, 2007). The results of the first phase of this work, including the methodology used to gather the data, was reported in the 2005 book Las empresas recuperadas en la Argentina (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). The team also works with several ERTs, assisting them with upgrading their technological and organizational infrastructures. Marcelo Vieta, a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada, has been working with Ruggeri’s team and assisting in translating some of its writings into English since 2005. For his PhD dissertation, Vieta is researching the cultural aspects, political history, and the phenomenology of struggle and self-management undergirding Argentina’s ERT phenomenon. ii Argentina’s most recent economic woes arguably began to take shape with the selling off of over 150 nationalized firms to multinational interests in the early-1990s (ostensibly, to pay down the mounting national debt that, paradoxically, ended up ballooning from US$58.5 billion in 1991 to US$155 billion by 2001). This policy was coupled with the fixed-rate exchange policy (ley de convertibilidad) introduced by the Menem administration in 1991 in order to stem the tide of acute inflation and hyperinflation that had plagued Argentina throughout much of Raúl Alfonsín’s tenurship. While inflation was curtailed, an overpriced peso caused exports to gradually decline throughout the 1990s. As a result, a chronic trade deficit took hold by the middle of the decade as cheaper imports saturated local markets. Unable to do business in such an economic environment, an escalating number of once-profitable small and medium sized businesses, faced with dwindling markets, went bankrupt (see, in particular: Damill, 2005; Patroni, 2004; Velde & Veracierto, 2000). iii By 2001, the national month-over-month business bankruptcy rate had reached its highest point in Argentina’s modern history: During the Menem/de la Rua presidencies (1989-2001), bankruptcies soared from and average of 772 per month in 1991 to over 2600 per month by 2001 (Magnani, 2003, p. 37). Consequently, by 1995 jobs were beginning to disappear in Argentina at unprecedented speed. Moreover, the correlation between Argentina’s soaring bankruptcies, the gradual evaporation of jobs, the growing foreign debt, and, generally, the increasing entrenchment of neoliberalist economic policies, can clearly be seen when one looks at 22 year trends in unmployment between 1980 and 2002, the same span of years that saw the national debt balloon by 240%: According to Argentina’s Ministry of Labour, the official unemployment rate in 1980 was 1.9%. By 1989, at the height of hyperinflation, the official unemployment rate had risen to 7.6%. By 1994 it had hit the two-digit mark for the first time in decades, coming in at 11.5%. Between 1995 and 2001, it was averaging 15.6%. And by 2002, at the height of the financial crisis, the official unemployment rate had hit 19.7% of Argentina’s working population. Unofficial estimates,

wever, pegged the actual rate of unemployment at the time at well over 20%, while some unofficial analyses estimated it at more than 35% (Murúa, 2005) or even 40% (Colombo & Bril-Mascarenhas, 2003, p. 458). It is also interesting to note that by 1993, during the heady years of Menem’s market liberalization reforms, the official unemployment rate surpassed the official under-employment rate for the first time. This remained the case right up till the economic collapse of 2001-2002 (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2006). ho iv As Chart 2a indicates, a large number of Argentina’s cooperatives (59%) belong to either the rural, housing, insurance, consumer, public services, and credit sectors, rather than in the economic sectors where most ERTs are to be found. To date, most ERTs have come from urban economic sectors most affected by the implosion of the neoliberal model of the 1990s, which include: urban industrial sectors or service sectors that deal with intermediary production (i.e., graphics, metal works, food processing, etc.) or final consumption (i.e., editorial houses, schools, hotels, etc.) (Ruggeri, Martinez, Trincher, 2005, p. 47; Fajn, 2003, p. 157; Una Argentina Solidaria, 2004). v National Movement of Recovered Enterprises. vi ational Movement of Worker-Recovered Factories. N vii In Argentina’s bankruptcy law (article 21 of law 25.589) stipulates the following concerning employee ownership of a failed firm: “the continuity of the enterprise [in the case of bankruptcy] will consider the formal requests of its employees in their dependency…, or as labour creditors, who must act in the subsequent period of continuity under the form of a workers’ cooperative” (http://infoleg.mecon.gov.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/70000-74999/74331/norma.htm) (see also, Martí et al, 2004, p. 104). viii Such was the case, for example, with the workers of the Unión Solidaria de Trabajadores workers’ cooperative (Solidarity Union of Workers, or UST), which was formally a branch of Argentina’s largest homegrown multinational, Techint. The UST workers were fractured from the company and repositioned as a cooperative and as independent contractors in 2000. Soon after Techint began to outsource the work once done within the company to the cooperativized former branch-plant workers their job-orders became unwieldy as their production costs began to surge and unremunerated overtime became the norm, now without union representation. In 2001, the UST workers occupied the plant, reconstituted their cooperative under the rubric of an ERT, sought expropriation, and have now formed into a thriving ERT in the municipality of Avellaneda. For an account of their struggle, see: Clemente (2007) and “¿Como surge nuestra cooperativa?” (2006). ix National Association of Workers of Self-Managed Enterprises. x The Unique Workers’ Central. xi Federation of Productive Cooperatives of Uruguay. xii Revolutionary Front of Enterprises Co-managed and Occupied by Workers. i Of the 75 accords that were signed at the First Encounter of Recovered Enterprises in Caracas Venezuela in October 2005, 59 Argentine ERTs signed 39 accords. Venezuelan ERTs signed 26 accords, and the other 10 accords were signed by ERTs from the other countries. xii xiv The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean.

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While Chile, Bolivia, and Peru’s experiences with nationalized co-management showed early promises for workers’ control in these countries, Petras & Veltmeyer (2003) theorize that they ultimately failed due not only to the eventual collapse of their national regimes, but also to the marked separations between the quotidian needs of workers on shop floors and real managerial power which rested in the hands of the state. In these scenarios, the authors go on to explain, workers were not sufficiently ensconced in the apparatuses of state power to avoid the bourgeois classes from eventually recovering their industrial control, often with the armed forces at their side (El Diario de Guyana, 2005). xv xvi General Confederation of Labour. xvii A big part of these internal conflicts involve differing opinions amongst its leadership regarding what kind of role MNER is to play now that the national economy has stabilized somewhat. While Murúa, for example, continues to believe in an antagonistically combative posture towards the state and advocates “fighting for a different Argentina, an Argentina without exploitation” (Murúa, 2006), others within MNER feel that a more conciliatory role towards the state and the Kirchner administration should be taken up. xviii The split between MNER and MNFRT was due to various internal conflicts that revolved around ideological issues (e.g., MNER’s desire for the basic autonomy of each ERT vs. MNFRT’s more traditional union-like approach), strategies of how to deal with the state, and, in particular, whether or not community centres should be opened within ERTs. MNER tended to operate more autonomously, but consequently also more chaotically, than MNFRT. It aligned itself closely with the global social justice movements and the World Social Forum and tended to also distance itself as much as it practically could from the state while, at the same time, lobbying the state for strategic subsidies (e.g, pensions, funds for technical upgrading, funding for cultural centres, etc.). It also lobbied hard for reforming certain laws that would ease an ERT’s legal burdens, seeking, for example, amendments to the law of bankruptcy to favour worker takeovers without having to face the financial burdens left by former owners and the law of expropriation. MNER was also instrumental in lobbying regional legislatures to reinterpret Argentina’s national law of expropriation. As a further protective strategy and as a way of giving back to the community, MNER

o actively encouraged ERTs to open up community centres and other community-basedals initiatives within their premises, proactively supporting those ERTs that interacted openly with the neighbourhoods that surround them. Differentiating itself from MNER politically and ideologically, MNFRT, encourages its worker-recovered cooperatives not to open community services for fear that such activity would detract from the business efforts of the worker-run firm. At times, MNFRT also works more closely with the state and it is not as anti-government as some MNER leaders are. It also advocates changing certain laws to favour ERTs: in particular, like MNER, it too desires to alter the bankruptcy laws so that workers would be paid back the totality of salaries, benefits, etc. owing to them first. For detailed accounts of the history of these conflicts and the various ideological differences between Eduardo Murúa’s MNER and Luis Caro’s MNFRT, see: Heller (2004), Lavaca (2004), Magnani (2003), and Rebón & Saavedra (2006). xix Tellingly, some ERTs decide to open up their factories and workspaces to the community and offer it free spaces from which to facilitate community centres, popular schools, medical clinics, theatres, and art galleries specifically in response to this support and solidarity that many barrio neighboours, friends, and family members showed agitating ERT workers during their most risky days of occupation. xx Argentine Federation of Self-Managed Workers’ Cooperatives.

xxi This would be the Unión Obrera Metalúrgica de Quilmes (Metallurgic Workers’ Union of Quilmes, or UOM Quilmes). xxii That these two initiatives rely on European funding and technical assistance also alludes to the Argentine federal government’s general indifference towards ERTs. xxiii Federation of Workers’ Cooperatives of the Province of Buenos Aires. xxiv National Association of Self-Managed Workers. xxv Central of Argentine Workers.

xxvi Organizing Institute for Cooperative Funds. xxvii MNER’s and MNFRT’s persistent lobbying for redrawing these national laws consequently saw regional and national legislatures and the juridical establishment begin to reconsider these laws in light of the possibilities that the ERT solution offers for curbing rising unemployment rates (Ruggeri, 2006). xxviii “Occupy, Resist, Produce” was adopted by MNER from the slogan of the landless peasant movements of Brazil (Murúa, 2005). xxix If all goes well with the occupation or seizure of the plant and the early months of self-managed production – and there are no guarantees that things will – the process of workplace recovery culminates in the firm becoming an official, worker-run cooperative, fully controlled by its workers under the legal protection of a temporary or permanent version of the ley de expropiación (the law of expropriation) and Argentina’s legislation covering cooperatives. The law of expropriation found in article 17 of the Argentine constitution – which the legislative branches of local governments began to interpret in favour of workers’ cooperatives primarily because of the lobbying efforts of ERT umbrella organizations such as MNER and MNFRT and the legal arguments of their lawyers – is vitally important to ERTs because it prevents the auctioning off of the failing company’s assets and, together with article 21 of law 25.589 (see footnote 7), gives the workers’ cooperative partial or total control of the plant and its assets for a specific period of time. Before definitive expropriation is approved, worker-recovered workspaces are usually granted a two to five year window to operate the firm under a supplementary law of “temporary” expropriation.

porary expropriations, however, are usually granted after much lobbying and are never guaranteed. With this provisional legal status, ERTs are ensured only temporary control of machines, trademarks, patents, and real estate while the case for definitive expropriation is being heard in courts and regional legislatures. Workers’ cooperatives that have been granted temporary expropriation must continue their struggles with the regional political establishment in order to secure the permanent law of expropriation for their firm (Magnani, 2003; Palomino, 2003). Tem xxx Well-known cases of these long struggles that included public lobbying tactics and standoffs with the police have garnered an impressive amount of press coverage. The most notable cases include the printing houses Artes Gráficas Chilavert and Artes Gráficas Patrícios, the Brukman clothing factory, the ceramic factory Zanón/FaSinPat, and the Hotel BAUEN.

xxxi The mean number of workers making up an ERT in Argentina is around 35, which, as a side note, tends to be a massive drop in their personnel from an average of 180 employees per company when it was under owner-management (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). A depleted workforce is also reflective of the dilapidated conditions of most recovered companies during the days of occupation and the first months of production as an ERT. Most of the absent workers are made up of employees that either did not want to go along with the occupation, retired early, or, most likely, were part of the management, administrative, or technical teams that had an easier time finding work elsewhere (Fajn, 2003). xxxii Allocating a percentage of revenues to community initiatives such as neighbourhood athletic clubs, neighbourhood kitchens, barrio microenterprises, or other local infrastructural needs is a practice which some ERTs have adopted in light of the solidarity given to them by the neighborhoods that surround them and usually in the most economically challenged barrios. Not all ERTs are inclined to such practices, however. Some notable cases of ERTs allocating a certain percentage of their monthly revenues to community initiatives include Artés Gráficas Chiulavert in the economically challenged Nueva Pompeya barrio of the city of Buenos Aires, Cooperativa UST in the southern Buenos Aires municipality of Avellaneda, and Zanón in the privince of Nequén (Centro de Documentación, 2007).

xxxiii See, in particular: Marx (1981, p. 571) and McNally (1993, pp. 184-188). xxxiv What’s more, the period of member/worker expansion adds an additional long-term worry for the ERT: If the number of “new” associates supercedes the number of “founding” members of the coop, could the cooperative be voted out of existence one day and become, once again, a capitalist firm perceived by newer members to be a much more efficient model for securing their jobs and tackling capitalist markets? Due to these risks, and the related internal conflicts that have actually arisen in various ERTs to date between “founding” members and “new” members of the cooperative, many ERT coops have decide to incorporate new workers as temporary contract workers without making them members of the cooperative. At times these contracts are renewed far beyond the six-month probationary period that they would have had to respect had they taken on these contract workers as outright members of the cooperative. Ironically, these situations tend to reproduce the very capitalist practices that led to the labour instability that ERT protagonists were contesting in the first place. Nevertheless, in some ERTs, there is a deep preoccupation with balancing the equitable treatment of all workers, be they founding members or newer members,

while, at the same time, somehow not putting the long-term viability of the cooperative and the internal equilibrium of the organizational and production processes at risk. In these cases this balance seems to be maintained by giving priority to the practice of hiring family members, ex-workers of the cooperative (including retired workers), or workers recommended to them by friends (Ruggeri, Martinez, & Trinchero, 2005). xxxv Amongst others, Renato Dagnino and Henrique Novaes, investigators at the University of Campinas have, in various texts, attempted to work through the concept of “socio-technological fit” in relation to ERTs (see, for example: Dagnino & Novaes, 2004).