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About processes of self-management and labour re-collectivization in current Argentina*

Gabriela Wyczykier
National University of General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Email: gwyczykier@yahoo.com

Received: 12.23.2008 Accepted: 4.01.2009

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Introduction

In this article we propose to contribute to the analysis and characterization of a set of labour self-management experiences emerged in Argentina between the 1990s and the beginning of the current millennium. Although this phenomenon is not innovative in terms of historical occurrence as much in various international geographies, as regional and national,¹ we can point out a series of problematic elements that assign it a singular character and dynamics.

On the one hand, companies managed by their own workers were increasing their presence –in relative terms- at the mentioned period, as a response of popular sectors in view of dealing with occupational problems present in the country and that attempted against their socio-labour integration. Thus, and in a context crossed by economic, political and social principles that boasted neoliberalism's individual and market proper of the 1990's, started to reconfigure labour collective experiences as a form of dealing with material, social and cultural prejudices emerged with the loss of occupational inscriptions, in this case, proletarian. In this context, and since the systemic crisis of 2001 that bursted into the public scene with social protests from December 19 and 20 in the country,² these self-management experiences began to be multiplied, acquiring an unusual visibility in comparison with other previous historical periods, as it is especially shown in the universe of the so-called Companies Recovered by their Workers (ERT) that we wish to particularly address.

Now well, which are some of these specific traits that were are interested to problematize in this paper? Firstly, we noted that a distinctive feature regarding other experiences of self-management and recovery of precedent companies, was the social, political and economic context in which they lived. Before an inusual labour crisis in the country, and in the Latin American region, that showed along the 1990s and beginning of this century an increase in unemployment, informality and labour precarity, these companies allowed that groups of workers continued obtaining a monetary income through the performance of a collective labour. This was possible largely by the opportunity of these groups, who transited from dependency to labour self-management, of having influential allies (Tarrow, 1999) in the context of that systemic crisis. Indeed, these groupings received support from some few guild organizations, social organizations that emerged and consolidated accompanying this process, neighborhood assemblies, some leaders and political parties, university sectors, neighbors, who had a central role in the accompaniment of the various stages that this process was going through.

In this sense, in the next lines we will raise that these experiences were constituted in labour re-collectivization in a context marked and characterized by a process of labour, social and political un-collectivization. For us, the concept of re-collectivization contains in this form a condition linked not only to the need of workers to obtain incomes but conjunctly, to not being displaced of a social space that had been fundamental to configure professional and identitary trajectories. And this, we believe, assigns this phenomenon some unique traits in relation to other self-management experiences emerged in precedent decades.

With this orientation, we intend to argue in which way we understand the un-collectivization process, pointing on certain bibliography that lights us thereon, to be able to then think in which way, and based in which interpretative dimensions, we can allude to the recovery process of companies as a labour re-collectivization process. 

These reflections are nurtured of an investigation made between 2003 and 2006 in Argentina, on a set of companies managed by their workers. For this we privileged a qualitative study of social research, selecting 4 experiences of Companies Recovered by their Workers, 1 of them arising in 1992, and the other 3 in 2002.³

The process of companies' recovery

 The category of Companies Recovered by their Workers (ERT) refers to a set of experiences whose emergence was mediatized by the presence of conflicting situations between labour and capital, being the first protected by labour continuity of the productive space. They were spaces conformed by factories and formal capitalist companies, in which there had been developed various conflicting situations between employees and employers due to the existence of wage-earning debts, holidays, bonuses, failure of pension contributions and social security. Before the patron's abandonment of productive spaces, or the sending of telegrams with dismissals in some cases, workers, assisted by guild and social organizations remained in their workplaces to find a solution to the labour uncertainty they had to face, viewing progressively during the days and months that conflict lasted, the possibility of re-taking the production process by their own means. This recovery process of companies required, on the other hand, for its encouragement in significant percentage of experiences, the judicial and legislative intermediation that allowed the management and direct appropriation of the means of production by workers⁴. It should be noted that these companies were in crisis or in bankruptcy process when conflicts unleashed and culminated in labour self-management.⁵ 

Within this universe we distinguished the recovery experiences of companies that we studied in greater depth along the research 1) Work Cooperative (CT) Adabor 2) The CT L.B -former company La Baskonia- 3) The CT Graphic Arts El Sol 4) FASINPAT. The CT Adabor is a metallurgical company whose process of recovery and self-management began in 1992. Located in the party of Florencio Varela, Province of Buenos Aires, this cooperative emerged as result of a dispute with the entrepreneural grroup Techint. Before the possibility of closure and unemployent of all its employees, the leaders of the Workers Metallurgical Union (UOM) which represented the workers of this factory, proposed them to form an enterprise which they could self-manage.  After protests made by this grouping, worker guards at the doors of the factory and realization of other activities, they reached an agreement with the company Techint who granted them the productive section of the plant, so that they continued producing by their own means. After close to 15 years of existence and with various critical commercial and economical periods, the 50 workers that there produce, continued to face a difficult situation to place their products (caverns and decanters) on the market.  

The Work Cooperative Foundry LB Ltda. emerged in 2002 after workers suffered a situation of abandonment by the owners of the plant founded in 1926. This company dedicated to the foundry activity went through a series of economic problems during the 1990s, inaugurating the millennium in a situation of wage indebtedness. Befote the workers' pressure who demanded the compliance of entrepreneurs obligations, the factory authorities came one day off the plant promising to return with the money to confront payments. Yet that did not happen, Ater staying 7 months inside the factory, the 70 workers who protagonized the conflict re-started production in July 2002, as a cooperative, after they were granted the temporary expropriation of the factory and its machinery. During those 7 months, they received the solidarity and assistance of the National Movement of Recovered Factories by their Workers (MNFRT), the sectional Murder of Metallurgical Workers Union and neighbors. This group was able to remount the production, although with problems of infrastructure, machinery and commercial oscillations.

The CT Graphic Arts El Sol, is dedicated to the graphic area in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and is comprised of approximately 30 workers. During its recovery process it received assistance from the Buenos Aires Graphic Federation, and once started the production process, they linked with the National Movement of Recovered Enterprises (MNER). Comercial problems, and workers' dismissal, were notorious since the end of the 1990s. Although this company was working at extremely decreasing productive levels (5, 10 % of its installed capacity) the evolution of the facts achieved to surprise this working group, when they arrived to the company to perform their work, and noted that work computers and inputs were missing and that the owner had withdrawn them in the previous days. Befote these events occuring in June 2002, this grouping went to the trade union -Buenos Aires Graphical Federation- and with its advice they formed a work cooperative. After two months and alter the port legislature granted them the transitory expropriation of the means of production, they could recompose the operation of the machinery and restart the work process under their own management. The graphic under self-management was recovering its production levels and incorporating some few new workers to the work process. Their major commercial limitations were related to the difficulty of having access to monetary credits, and to innovate machinery.

Factory Without Patron (Sin Patrón, FASINPAT) is located in the Industrial Park of the Province of Neuquén and is conformed by former workers of the ceramic company ZANON. This is a unique case in the universe of recovered companies, among other things, by the importance and size of the plant, but in addition, because the entrepreneural group owner of the factory pretended to initiate in the early millennium a process of emptying the plant so as to install elsewhere. In this sense, the company was not going through an economic and commercial crisis but on the contrary, its productive levels were positive, as being noted by their workers.  In October 2001 and with adequate wages, the entrepreneural group, alleging lack of inputs, shut down the furnaces and sent telegrams of dismissal to all its workers. Therefore most of the operators -260- opted to stay at the door of the factory waiting for a solution that would allow them to return to the work process and/or been paid for their wages. After five months of conflict, in which they organized guards at the factory's doors, they initiated judicial actions, and other activities designed to diffuse among neighbours their condition, they decided to enter the plant to restart production by their own means. The conflict for this group of workers was bigger than in other cases of the ERT, largely because the entrepreneural group sought to recover their plant, and because of the neoliberal orientation of the government of the province of Neuquén, very resistant to support or attend this class experiences. In parallel with the successive threats of police evictions that these workers were receiving, the productive levels of the factory were increasing (although they had failed to use the full productive capacity installed) as well as there increased the number of workers there occupied, becoming 460 at the end of our field work. For the progress of this self-management experience it was fundamental the solidary relationship established between this group and the guild sectional of ceramist workers of Neuquén, whose directives positions were formed mostly by workers of FASINPAT. As the rest of the ERT, the economic problems of the plant were linked fundamentally to the difficulty to access to a sufficient sum of money that allowed them to renew parts and machinery. Their legal situation at the same time remained being fragile, as happens with other ERT, although in this case the political pressure and public visibility turned out to be more significant.

As it is possible to argue, the ERT universe, and our cases in particular, is heterogeneous in several of its constituent dimensions: size of the companies, workers amount in economic activity, time of the recovery, social, trade union and political actors that intervened in the process, legal situation, modality that conflicts adopted for the recovery, commercial situation among others. However, and as we have argued above, we can see a series of features that link them in a set of shared practices, and that refers, specifically, to the visualization of these experiences through the re-collectivization process. On this we will advance in next lines.

Notes on the un-collectivization process

As we previously pointed, for us a distinctive aspect that refers to the emergence of this universe of companies recovered by their workers, from the 1990s onwards, is linked to the process of social un-collectivization that affected in an inusual way the national social fabric. Among the authors who reflect on the characteristics and the effects of this un-collectivization process, as much at local level, as in other occidental societies, we can situate the work of R.Castel and M.Svampa.

As Castel (1997-2000) warns us, since the 1970s we attend a process of collective frameworks' disappearance. Social life is in this sense crossed by a kind of de-institutionalization, understood as a decoupling of the objective frameworks that structure the subjective existence. In this direction, unemployment and labour precarity, contain particularly destructuring effects on workers category. And this is so in two ways: on the one hand, because two workers of equal qualification show deep disparities when their trajectory as occupied, or unoccupied, generates inequalities between them; but also, because the diffusion of atypical forms of employment (intermittent, precarious, informal work) conspires against the effectuation of collective actions whose primary anchor had been consolidated during the XX century in the large company. In this sense, it constitutes one of the most important effects of un-colectivization that individuals are becoming more exposed to individually confront situations that put at risk the material and social reproduction of their life conditions (Castel, 2000).

Svampa (2005) retakes the notion and process of un-collectivization –previously introduced and worked in Svampa and Pereyra (2003)- to refer to the effects both objective as in the political subjectivity in the argentinean social fabric caused by the disindustrializing dynamics and the impoverishment of the popular world. Among objective factors, together with the author we can situate the main structural processes which altered the labour market dynamics since the 1970s, and that were deepened in the 1990's, being noted a rise in levels of unemployment, structural and intermittent, underemployment increase, precarious labour, persistence of informality.⁶

During these years, thus was generalized in the country a scenario that crossed the expectations and present and future labour certainties of the entire worker class. Uncertainty and the fear to comfront the risks of this class of un-collectivization fell on an extensive portion of argentinean society, constituting at the same time in a factor of intimidation for the generation of collective action around work, particularly in the private sector of the economy.

This un-collectivization process produced at the same time changes in the political subjectivity.  As well states Svampa (2005), individuals had to confront a set of labour risks submerged in a deep political disorientation, as most of the trade unions became subordinated to neoliberal political orientations of the menemist government.

Workers disorientation with regard to the opposite position of national trade union organizations in relation to the defense of work sources, and the introduction of labour flexibility in enterprises, in combination with risks that individual experimentation of the professional crisis drew, were constituted in situations that encouraged the inter and intra-category problems of solidarity in the working-class.⁷ In general terms both types of un-collectivization -objective and that of political subjectivity- provided their own dynamics to the transformations of the national social structure.

In this way, a common trend crosses the professional and vital trajectories threatened or affected by this process of un-collectivization: they are persons that do not access to work conditions that have characterized the wage-earning society.⁸ Their relationship with collective protections is non-existent or extremely fragile, not being able to act in a framework of certainty that characterizes that protective system of life conditions, enabling to deal with uncertainty and vital risks. This in a scenario, for the unemployed, precarious and informal workers, that by their condition are mostly expelled or not fully integrated into organizations of classic collective protection, such as trade unions.

In this context there emerged companies recovered by their workers that we analyzed as labour re-collectivization experiences.  This process can be described and observed through a set of dimensions that we will consider pertinent to analyze in each of the cases that formed part of our research. We will make progress on this enunciatively in the next paragraph.

About processes of labour re-collectivization

In one of his already cited works, Castel interrogates himself the following: How to deal with the back of labour de-collectivization, which presupposes a process of re-individualization that compulsively forces people to deal with the risks and uncertainty of their occupational inscriptions, and to trace autonomously their professional careers? The author responds to this with a brief enunciation: recollectivizing deregulated individualization processes. 

One of the phenomena outcoming from the local un-collectivization process was the emergence, averaging the 1990s, of unemployed workers organizations which consolidated vindictive practices around work fundamentally, of strong territorial and community anchor. These organizations were formed by workers excluded of social and labour rights linked to work, which sought to recreate mechanisms of re-collectivization and politicization basically emplaced in the community tissue. 

In this context of un-collectivization, we situate the emergence of self-management experiences around work that the neoliberal model contributed to shape since the early sighs of the 1990s. Thus, as a result of the factors which encouraged the progression of the un-collectivization process in the working and popular sectors, a portion although small of the worker class, devoid in general terms of cognitive, experimental, ideological resources around self-management, as well as lacking a class emancipatory horizon -as it can be traced in other international historical processes and in much greater extent, national- opted by prosecute the reconstruction of work collective experiences. Thus the risks that promote labour disintegration were faced through collective responses of labour self-organization.

Moreover, the disintegrator risks that unemployment situations contained in those years, notes Kessler (1997), usually led to the diffusion and massification of individual adaptation strategies above those of group type. As well warns us the author, the lack of work stood for those affected ones –who directly or indirectly related with this problem- as a collective but desocializer risk. This threat fell over population forcing each individual to rebuild his position in the market, in a situation of deprotection and social distress.

Only in cases of massive dismissals of a same source of work, he suggests the situation could lead to the realization of some form of collective action. Although it would not be a generalizable trend in the precedent years –we pointed out- these arguments invite us to show situations in which this was possible, under what circumstances and with which features.

In this sense, labour self-management experiences object of this analysis constitute a phenomenon of re-collectivization whose primary anchor is not situated in the neighborhood or community tissue. They were not experiences protagonized by informal workers, or who had lived a situation of unlinking unemployment situation.⁹ This process resends us in the contrary to the life world of formal workers.

The re-collectivization process to which we are referring alludes in this sense to a series of dimensions that characterize it and to which we will allude below.

Re-collectivization and collective links

On the one hand, the term re-collectivization refers substantially to the possibility of the workers who protagonized these experiences of recreating collective work situations, and to deal in this way with the material, cultural and symbolic risks caused by the loss of labour registrations in these formal companies.  Indeed, both the cooperativized workers at the beginning of the 1990s, as those who did so at the beginning of the current millennium, observed unemployment as a hardly avoidable fate. Therefore the possibility to recreate collective work trajectories conformed an alternative that would enable them not to individually face uncertainty and the risks that the loss of labour and relations cause.

Thus, both the fall in unemployment and the provision of labour compensations in productive microenterprises that mostly failed commercially, and/or the care dependence related to employment social plans that the State promoted since the mid-1990s forward,¹⁰ were instituted as significant fears that workers sought to evade with the recovery of their source of labour. Some testimonies illustrate these arguments:

"In that moment the colleagues of the Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD were fighting for a genuine job. They wanted work, and there was not, or you did that of the MTD¹¹ for $ 150,¹² or you entered to work at the factory trying to make a decent salary to sustain ourselves" (Interview done by the author to Tincho, 38 years old, FASINPAT worker, March 2005, Neuquén)

We then noticed that before a de-socializer vision of the unemployed and assisted by the State, the productive space was established as a capital that favoured to obtain a monetary income coming out of the reproduction of a proletarian labour. The factory/company was thus coated as a social space of positive fight, to confront a de-mobilizing scenario and crossed by the damages that the individualization process of the vital experiences provokes.

Yet in addition, and besides, we believe that it was not only the need of access to a monetary income, what favoured the disposition of these groups of workers to committ in the conflicts culminating with productive self-management, and to face the consolidation of these companies. This material aspect has been highlighted in big part of the bibliography that addressed the study of this problematic.

Our study allows us to analyze in addition, that a strongly energizing element of this process, was the possibility glimpsed by these groupings of being able to continue, in the context of un-collectivization, rebuilding and reconfiguring collective situations of work. Situation that would enable them to remain connected with a labour experience that had structured professional trajectories in a particular local company and at the same time granted an identity on an occupational, political and class category. This situation we can observed it both in those workers with much seniority in enterprises and who bet on ending their active labour life between the walls of those work units, as in young workers, or with scarce seniority, who had incorporated the possibility of organizing their biographies in these working spaces. The following elected testimonies sediment our arguments:

"And, one already had the colleagues made, and sometimes, it was nice to fight all together" (Interview by the author to Alejandro, 50 years, CT) Adabor, April 2004, Buenos Aires)

“Here we did our sacrifices. Together we lifted this factory, these warehouses, most of the columns we did them. We arrived as kids, and we did as our house. "We live here" (Interview done by the author to Felipe, 68 years; Marcos, 65; Rodolfo, 65 years, workers of the Work Cooperative L.B, October 2004, Buenos Aires)

"My first factory experience is this, what I learned I did it here inside, I stood because all my colleagues did" (Interview done by the author to Diego, 29 years, CT LB, August 2005, Buenos Aires)

"I decided to keep on fighting, because I was not inclined to lose my 15 years of work here in the factory" (Testimony of a worker (woman) from FASINPAT, Mate y Arcilla documental, Grupo Alavio)

"And there are colleagues, that we are accustomed to work, to work pace of work" (Interview done by the author to Marcos, 55 years, CT Adabor, April 2004, Buenos Aires)

As these testimonies denote that companies' recovery process is not only framed in the possibility of facing material risks, and in this sense to continue producing to obtain a material income for it. Besides, other elements strongly intervened to incline workers to jointly face labour self-management processes. In effect, these were companies in which, especially during the 1990s, the conditions of employment had turned precarious, but they constituted a space with labour, social and collective links that granted certain certainties about the present and the future.

The diverse testimonies reveal in this sense that for many of the workers that transited from dependency to labour self-management, and grouped around this new associative status, it was central the possibility of being tied to an experience linked to the previous wage-earning status and to the known and experienced space and means of work, although reorganizing social links of new type. This is important because it enables us to point out, in addition, that self-management was not in these experiences loaded of o class emancipatory ideology or liberator of labour alienation relations, but on the contrary, it was crossed by the need for preservation and not claudication of relationships and ways of work known by these groupings.

In this sense, the workers of these companies, unlike those who had to deal with the status of unemployment, could rebuild their vital experiences from a labour identity that did not die. It was transformed, but registered in collective work experience that in material, symbolic and cultural terms managed to survive through these re-collectivization experiences. Thus, workers of these labour associations did not have to keep overalls and their work clothes in a place of their memory, but continued carrying them to reconfigure their professional belonging in the new context of self-management.

In relation to this, the re-collectivization process is linked with the development at the interior of these experiences of a new intergroup sociability, understood from reproduction, as well as to the transformation of certain dimension of a work culture which was present in the working past dependent of workers. Culture formed by notions of discipline, routine, order, cooperation and conflict, which the capitalist productive process itself provides for its effectuation.

In this direction, the internal solidary relationships of workers were transmuted. These relations characterized mainly by the impersonality in capitalist enterprises, were personalized and reloaded of a novel familiarity and affection, resulting in the configuration of new type of social ties within work processes.

It was very important to be good companions, loving each other, to tell us the house intimacies to each other” (Interview by the author to Jerónimo, 55 years, worker of the C.T. L.B., August 2004, Buenos Aires)

In all these self-managed experiences the production process was consolidated under a new situation of associative interdependence, from the creative re-updating of routines and systems of work that had been deployed in previous formal companies. This aspect was vital so that workers could establish an authority and collective regulation that was different to the authority that the organizational structure of capitalist enterprises hierarchically has.

“I believe that what helps us, is that everyone continues making the work he made before in his workplace, the same hours, the same number of days” (Interview conducted by the author to Victor, 60 years, worker of the C.T. L.B, November 2004, Buenos Aires).

“Each one knew his work, each machine operator knew which machine he had to use, and how to do it. Then there were no problems, each one put himself in his place, and we did the work (Interview done by the author to Sabrina, 50 years, worker of C.T Graphic Arts El Sol, August 2004, Buenos Aires)

“It were being rescued much of what was entrepreneural, as indirect form of an order”' (Interview done by the author to Fabián, 36 years, FASINPAT worker, March 2005, Neuquén)

These testimonies allow to analyze that the sustainance of several of the above labour routines, that were updated and re-signified in the new context of work, should not be however appreciated from a merely instrumental vision and aimed at promoting productive efficiency, although this is not a minor aspect when considering the re-implementation of work processes in the different experiences. In this sense, having shared a joint productive organization in its work links, provided that each one could occupy a place in principle already previously established, to organize work spaces and recover collective confidence. 

Quoting Sennett (2000), work routines, of which modern and flexible capitalism searches to outflow, can degrade, but can also protect. It can help to generate positive narration for life -in this case- labour. The known habits contribute thereby to give meaning and certainties to our vital practices. And then we can aim at generating confidence not just in individual terms, but even more, of collective and intergroup type.

Giddens (1997) can guide us comprehensively on this process, when he argues about the importance which confidence and routines for the individual's life during his socialization process acquire, affirming the significance that daily conventions and habits contain to provide ontological security, and confront the anxiety and fear affecting our existence. The basic confidence is thus related especially with the interpersonal organization of time and space. And in this, habits and routines favour social relations because they give them security and confidence by acting socially. By being essential against the threat of anguish, they are also invaded with tensions.

As we pointed out in one of the above testimonies, it was rescued from the beginning and in the continuity of these experiences, the need to give an order to the chaos that the employer breaches and the crisis of enterprises had generated both in productive units as in workers' professional trayectories. To organize this new space and time, trying to restore previous modalities of work organization was, with various nuances of an extremely important significance to give account of the sense that re-collectivization produces in vital experiences of these workers.

Unemployed workers who were detached from the world of work, or young people who cannot find a space where to acquire the "work culture” are pushed to the existential disruption of their vital experiences, to fear, to anguish of not being able to rebuild trust and ontological security. These are expelled from frameworks that may contribuye to shape labour trajectories in societies where work developed in security conditions of collective type is a fundamental vector of structuring and organization of experiences and welfare.

Thus, we note that labour self-management did not seek in these cases to question and transform labour alienation relations, but sought fundamentally to reaffirm the condition of being a worker with rights to security and social welfare which can provide collective protections proper of modern society.

Thus we note that to reinstall certain working conditions of the previous formal experience –labour discipline and labour routines- oriented in this way to grant a new "order" and to contextualize the interpersonal links that the loss of the previous labour system had put in danger.

Re-collectivization and organizational relationships

The re-collectivization process that we alluded refers simultaneously to the relationships of organizational solidarity developed between the workers collectives of of self-managed companies, with social and labour organizations, of new and old type, which had a central role in promoting and accompanying the companies' recovery processes. This protagonism had implications on the one hand in the displacement of material and institutional resources towards workers. Indeed, these accompanied the basist labour collectives which opted to transit from dependence to self-management with material goods as food in months of fight in which establishments were not producing, legal advice, accompaniment in conflicts with police authority and/or owners of companies, money, among other things.

Yet in addition, these organizations representing the interests of these workers supplied them an opportunity to regenerate, recreate or not abandon, linkages that transcended primary productive space to establish labour and political solidarities. And then, not to be detached from collective protectors, and that conferr at the same time identitary supports. 

Although most guild organizations did not attend in the phenomenon of companies' recovery, some few trade unions of different levels of organizational aggregation, as Graphic Federation of Buenos Aires, the sectional UOM Quilmes and Matanza and Neuquén's ceramist trade union -SOECEN- resulted being significant actors to accompany this process. These, together with the two organizations formed to represent the workers' interests of these working collectives at the beginning of the current millennium, as have been the MNER (comprised by some of the mentioned guilds) and the MNFRT, were central to transform a social problem in public demand, and to promote the self-management's evolution in these companies.¹³

It is indisputable that these last two organizations alongside the mentioned guilds, constituted in central actors in the representation of the ERT sectoral interests, taking forward vital activities so that enterprises managed by their workers could establish themselves in the market, mobilizing diverse resources to do so. These activities included the organization of social manifestations to demand the municipal, provincial and national legislators a definitive solution so that workers could definitely and legally appropriate of the means of production, mediatic diffusion of the process, contacts with political leaders, development of encounters among workers of the ERT, among others.

Yet at the same time, these organizations favoured new identitary linkages for workers that integrated them. Aspect, this latter, that highlighted more in the stage of multiplication of this type of work experiences. In this sense, for workers of these collectives, the recovery of their labour practices meant in varied cases the possibility to remain connected with those organizations of interests' representation that had been present, with greater or lesser strength during their dependent professional trajectories. Thus, they could continue being linked to the guilds corresponding to the economic activity carried out by the company, as occured with the metallurgical workers, graphics, ceramists.¹⁴ These links allowed in this direction that many of those could continue being part of a collective representation experience which had been present in their labour past.

Therefore, as much for these workers as for those who did not receive the support of their guilds to retrieve and then manage the companies, the two organizations nominally self-referenced as movements, settled as spaces of interests' representation and of identitary links recreation. Identity linked in these cases, to the ties which these organizations could provide -observed more strongly in the boiling stage of this phenomenon– of a sense of group belonging, of an us, which enabled to share the struggle to make viable the companies'self-management, and procure continuity of these labour experiences unknown hitherto by the majority of the protagonists of this process.

In this sense, one of the political slogans of the MNER shows us a very basic aspect of this possibility to restore identitary links: "If they touch one, they touch them all ". "Sentence which translates not only the possibility for having institutional and human resources to find joint solutions to conflicts that faced the workers of the different factories and enterprises, but also, on the possibility of establishing a collective belonging allowing to recompose sectoral, guild and political relations.

This recomposition of relations, and the modality they assumed, we can anyway consider them of a much higher weakness in comparison with another type of relational constructions around work, as the trade union especially when guilds were not present to support these workers. On the one hand, this is due to the immaturity of these new interests' representation organizations around work, and to the type of ties that were building the self-managed companies as collectives with organizations. On the other hand, the consolidation of these relationships was mediatized by the availability of workers to reproduce or or strengthen these links.  To this we must add analytically, the importance of the own position and action strategy regardibg the evolution of these organizations that were deployed by those who acquired a place of leadership in them. 

In consequence, for some workers this process of their labours' recovery allowed to reconstruct, and construct, relationships as much with trade union actors already present in their quotidian productive activity, as with others of new type, whose organizational configuration was being deployed at the heat of the events, being able to erect in this process, new labour and political solidarities.

The relations of sociability forged outside the walls of the work unit, were here permeated not only by the relationship of these individuals with the market - of being a worker in this case- and that gathers them in a same branch of activity -as being metallurgical, graphic etc-. Yet to this is added a particular adjective: the self-managed. And still more, given the legal conversion requirements for these companies: that of being cooperativized workers. This regulatory condition, although it did not convince most of recovered companies, obliged them to carry on economic managements and of labour relations with certain attributes. In this way we must warn about nuances and differences with regard to this dimension of re-collectivization that this process supposed, considering the 4 cases studied in particular.

Thus, cooperativized metallurgical workers at the beginning of the 1990s illustrate a case of organizational atomization which had the exclusive solidarity of the sectional UOM Quilmes to undertake the collective experience. It was years in which the un-collectivization process began to show its sharp effects on the working class, but on which there had not still emerged political conditions that stimulated an extension of the labour, social and timidly political solidarities around the companies' recovery process.

The three other cases, on the contrary, show a greater convergence of interests and relations with other social, guild and political organizations, occuring in a context of systemic crisis as it happened in December 2001, and of social protests multiplication. However, the analyzed collectives allow to set forth some appreciations thereon. The collective graphic that retrieved the company basically established solidarities with its guild and the MNER, maintaining relations of certain autonomy with regard to this last organization, and of greater distance in relation to other collectives on equal conditions. In another direction, the C.T. L.B. workers established broader solidarities with other social and community organizations in the course of their conflict to recover the company, and an intra-collective link with more amalgamated and paternalistic MNFRT, in the sense that the leader of this movement was actively involved in some decisions taken by the collective regarding its management.

The FASINPAT case constitutes, on the other hand, a particular and unique example inside the universe of recovered companies, because its relation with the ceramist guild of Neuquén was symbiotic and extremely articulated, favouring from there the enlargement of the arc of labour, social and political solidarities and its openness towards other basist conflicts prosecuted by workers who protagonized different pectoral conflicts.

Some closing words

In the preceding pages we seek to argue on certain conditions which in our opinion allow characterizing the emergence and development of labour self-management experiences in Argentina since the beginning of the 1990s until the middle of the current decade. In this sense, one of the distinctive attributes in relation to other experiences of precedent labour self-organization in social, national, regional and international history is the one of having been constituted in re-collectivization processes around work in a scenario crossed by a marked process of social un-collectivization.

In this direction, we present some indications about this latter process, to then enunciate in which senses, and with which dimensions, we allude to the highlighted re-collectivization process. This process was undoubtely, compulsive, because workers chose within a framework of strong social constraints to form self-organized workers associations, to avoid being pushed to the construction of autonomous professional biographies and individually face the risks of un-collectivization.

In effect, we see along the XX century in Argentina that workers self-management experiences were primarily formed as workers withdrawal strategies befote the economic crises that threatened their socio-occupational integration and their relative increase from 1970s parallelly to dis-industrialization processes of the local production apparatus, continued that trend. Along the 1990s and beginning of the current millennium, this trend was confirmed in a scenario crossed by the cult of the individual (the subject), of self-regulation and the market that the neoliberal orientation imposed with the advent of C. Menem's government at the beginning of the past decade, affecting the collective protective mechanisms which the working-class had enjoyed especially since the mid of the 1940s, basically linked to full employment and the occupational insertion of great part of the population in the formal segment of the economy. And in this context emerged self-management experiences that we analyzed in particular. These differ from historical cases primarily by the context of their emergence, denoting a retrocession in social achievements obtained by the working-class, being strongly affected in its social citizenship in a significant process of subjective and objective un-collectivization that contained important effects on its modalities of occupational insertion, the increase in precarious labour relations, unemployment, and the crisis that trade union organizations went through during the 1990s.

In this direction, and as a non generalizable methodology of popular sectors, work self-organization experiences were developed to avoid being pushed to the construction of autonomous professional biographies. For this reason the different dimensions that we alluded with the re-collectivization process are important, and bring singularity to these experiences. They alluded to the possibility of rebuilding collective work experiences; to the reconfiguration of situations and labour relationships that allow these workers to be tied to an occupational experience that had vertebrated labour trajectories in formal capitalist enterprises; to the configuration of a new sociability and intergroup solidarity, to the reproduction of a work culture, to the recreation of links with organizations of interests' representation.

Regarding the sense and extent of the identitary construction, we can emphasize that these labour self-management processes reaffirmed the identity of these collectives as worker class. In this aspect, recent conflicts crossed and collective actions deployed especially by the ERT strengthened and vitalized a belonging of social class which had been heavily fought during previous years. This was particularly noticed through the workers feeling of pride by having been able to recompose the work process under their own management, after conflicting situations lived among labour and capital.

In another level of identity, which corresponds to the field of solidarities weaved with organizations of recovered companies, especially, we emphasize that these relations resulted of a greater fragility in comparison with other identitary constructions around work as the trade union. These relationships have been even volatile in varied experiences, once collective actions left space to institutionalization processes of this process.

The topic of identity can be problematized from another of the distinctive elements of this process. Workers linkage with the market and their previous dependent history shows in this sense particular attributes: many continue self-identifying themselves as workers, but are at the same time partners of a cooperative and carry on self-managed enterprises seeking to distinguísh themselves from traditional work cooperatives, in the sense of not guiding themselves exclusively by the regulation of these social enterprises, but to look on the other hand for internal organization mechanisms appropriate for each collective. And this does not generate scarce confusion and tensions regarding identities and intercollective relations, moreover, when ideological discussions have not been frequent regarding organizational management modalities and regarding patrimony.  Then, workers self-define as class workers, but sometimes also as patrons, entrepreneurs, and as partners of a common property.  These statements must be qualified among the cases. Thus FASINPAT is a distinctive experience, because class and guuild identity continuously permeated this experience, not having been registered at the end of our field work, this class of identifying tensions.

Re-collectivización implies therefore to bet on the reconstruction of lost collective protections and/or weakened in the last years. Other research works show us how community and neighborhood space also became a scenario of creation of new political identities, converting themselves into a field of politicization, as shown by the organizations of unemployed that were developed in Argentina especially since the mid-1990s onwards.  

We instead privilege to reflect the singularity acquired by re-collectivization in a collective space by definition: the one of companies and factories transited by the working class. Spaces that acquired with the companies' recovery phenomenon especially a new political sense, that is not the one of the working class emancipation from the yoke of capital, but neither only gives results the one of collective survival strategies, nor that which is inspired for its creation and sustainance on values of solidarity and associativism highlighted by work cooperativism.

Now well, to sustain that these labour collectives bet on the recreation of this class of work re-collectivization processes to try not to be excluded from collective protectors, does not mean any way that these groups have finally achieved to reinstall the protections they enjoyed until working conditions began to turn precarious in the companies they comprised. However, and with very different shades among cases, they managed to implement certain conditions to deal with those risks that individually would have placed them in a significant fragile economic and social situation, thus installing themselves as protection systems of other features, as much in what refers to procure the family material welfare, as the symbolic and individual in each worker. We basically refer to the possibility to continue using health services provided by guild social works, or the creation of agreements between labour collectives and different health organisms, the possibility to continue obtaining monetary income for work, and to transit the proletarian social space. Yet as we pointed out, in varied cases these income stability was variable, as well as neither it could be resolved, by the end of our research, the definitive legal situation of these companies recovered by their workers.  

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  Notes

* This article presents some research results outlined in the PhD thesis of the author.

1 To illustrate with some examples, we can mention the short and embryonic experience of labour self-organization of the Commune of Paris in the XIX century in France, the experience of the soviets in Russia at the beginning of the XX century, the Factory tips in Turin in the 1920s, the collectivization processes of Spain during its civil war, the yugoslav self-management process, the self-management experiences of Perú in the 1970s, the phenomenon of industrial cords in Chile during S. Allende's government, the increase of work and production cooperatives in Europe and Latin America from mid 1950s onwards, etc.

2 The systemic nature refers to the combination and articulation of a process of crisis in the political scope (crisis of political institutions and their legitimacy), economic (it destabilized the financial system causing significant problems in the system of production and prices), social (increase of the problems of employment and poverty, multiplication of protests and social discontenct).

3 For data elaboration we used primary and secondary sources privileging among the first, interviews in depth to workers of the selected collectives, guild leaders and militants and of organization of interest's representation arising with the process of companies' recovery Millennium (MNER and MNFRT), public officials, and qualified informants. There were made a total of 70 interviews in depth, but in this article we presented only some results of field work. A full analysis of the material collected at work field is developed in Wyczykier, Gabriela (2007) http://www.FLACSO.org.ar/Publicaciones.php

4 On a universe of 161 companies, the Self-managed Work Program dependent of the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security of the Nation estimated in 2004 that 33 % of these companies was operating submitted to expropriation by provincial or municipal law, in 8 % of cases workers rented their workspace, 5 % were owners of companies. However on a 33 % remaining of experiences, there were not registered data of this legal aspect.

5 The records of the Self-managed Work Program dependent on the Ministry of Work, Employment and Social Security of Argentina estimated in 2006 the existence of 200 ERT. All these companies had to adopt for their operation the legal form of work cooperatives.

6 In the 1990s there was produced a significant increase in unemployment, labour precarity, while informality did not act as a shelter sector to unemployment, as it occured in other countries of the region. With the systemic crisis of 2001 these variables increased their negative trend (21% the unemployment rate in May 2002) being observed a reversal of this process and a significant improvement of some of these variables, especially unemployment, since 2005 (10% at the end of 2006). However towards 2006 precarious labour affected 44,3% of the wage-earning population.

7 It is important to indicate that in the past decade there emerged labour processes and organizations of resistance to the model.

8 “A wage-earning society is not just a society in which most of the active population is wage-earning. It is above all a society in which the vast majority of the popultaion has access to social citizenship in first place from the consolidation of the work statute" (Castel, 2004: 42t)

9 Allegrone (2003), presents us a different situation in this regard, arguing on the case of a metallurgical company recovered at the end of 2002 (ISACO) by workers who had been dismissed two years earlier, without having received allowances and wage debts incurred by employers. Before the bankruptcy of the company, a group of 20 workers who continued being linked to each other by inhabiting the same residential area, decided to occupy the plant, together with other workers who were in a similar situation, and decided to join the joint project. Instead, in the rest of the experiences of companies' recovery, workers remained in workplaces - either within the establishments or at the doors of those- even when the production process had been detained.

10Is There are distinguished the Working Plan in all its versions, and Plan Unemployed Chiefs and Housewives implemented since 2002 to attend the the unoccupied popular sectors. 

11 Movement of Unoccupied Workers

12 Are approximately 43 dollars at the currency exchange value in December 2008

13 The MNER and the MNFRT recognize a common original past at the end of the past decade, and begining of the current one, regarding companies recovery process. In this direction, were joined the sectional UOM Quilmes leaders, then the graphic guild, social and political militants, and technical profile figures to give organicity to this phenomenon. However towards 2002 both organizations splitted, being the first comprised mainly by guild and social leaders and militants, while in the second case there highlighted the leadership of a leader with technical profile (of lawyer profession) who along with other professionals and members of the ERT energized the organization. Both organizations gathered most of the ERT, and their practice and speeches were distanced regarding the way of accompanying these experiences, the relations between leaders and workers of the ERT, their vision of the phenomenon, the legal proposals to resolve the definite expropriation of these companies. 

14 We reiterate that this condition is not generalizable to all workers of the ERT, base don the scarce support of trade union organizations to this phenomenon.