Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies

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* Article: Article: Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies. By Dario Azzellini. Critical Sociology 2018, Vol. 44(4-5) 763–776

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Discussion

Dario Azzellini:

"Workplace recuperations became most visible and known around the takeovers in Argentina because of the 2000–1 crisis, when they became a widespread practice. In early 2016 there were approximately 360 WRCs in Argentina, involving 15,000 workers (CDER, 2014), at least 78 WRCs employing 12,000 workers in Brazil (Chedid et al., 2013: 249–51) and almost two dozen WRCs in Uruguay (Rieiro, 2015). In Venezuela there are several dozen WRCs, some managed jointly by workers and communities. There are also struggles for workers’ control in a few dozen of the nationalized and state-owned companies in Venezuela (Azzellini, 2012, 2014, 2016). A handful of WRCs have emerged in Mexico (Cuninghame, 2015), India and Indonesia. In the course of the contemporary crisis, many more workplace recuperations took place in Argentina (CDER, 2014) and Venezuela (Azzellini, 2016), and a few in Italy, France, Greece, Bosnia, Croatia, Egypt, Turkey and in the US (Azzellini, 2015a).

Over the past 150 years, workers have taken control of their workplaces in different historical circumstances (Azzellini, 2015a; Ness and Azzellini, 2011). But while earlier takeovers happened in the context of workers’ or revolutionary offensives, the takeovers of the past two decades occur in defensive situations. In the general context of the crisis many workers have no other job prospect or means of subsistence. In most cases they do not have the support of the main unions or institutional political forces. Often the machinery is obsolete, in need of repair or has been taken away by the owners and the old business relations do not exist anymore. The workers do not have prior experience in self-management or access to financing in order to invest. In the midst of a capitalist crisis and a crisis of traditional unionism, the workers move to self-organized offensive struggles. Almost all WRCs are small and medium sized enterprises. There are WRCs in most industries, such as metal, textile, ceramics, food processing, plastic and rubber, print shops and others. There are also WRCs in the service sector, such as clinics, education facilities, media, hotels and restaurants, though still much less than the industrially-based ones (Azzellini, 2015b, 2016; CDER, 2014: 72–5; Chedid et al., 2013: 249–51). Material conditions, laws and political context vary from country to country. Nevertheless, there exist common characteristics among WRCs. The departure point of any WRC is a self-organized group of workers that refuses to accept that private ownership determines whether the workplace will continue existing. They dismiss solutions based on the individual reallocation of their labour power and advance an alternative based on collective processes.

Workplace recuperations entail the transformation of a hierarchically structured capitalist business, which pursues primarily the increase of surplus value, into a democratically self-managed company with the workers’ well-being at its centre. In this process almost everything changes: the workers’ subjectivities; social relations among the workers; labour process; internal dynamics and relationship with the providers, customers and communities. A workplace recuperation is therefore not only an economic process but also – or even primarily – a social process (Azzellini, 2015b; CDER, 2014; Chedid et al., 2013; Ruggeri, 2014; Sitrin, 2012). Economic viability is important, but in WRCs it is intrinsically connected with the aims of democratization, solidarity, justice, dignity, alternative value production and overcoming workers’ alienation. Most WRCs take the form of cooperatives. It is usually the only juridical form that allows collective management, thus providing a legal base for the operation of the company (Azzellini, 2015b; Novaes and Sardá de Faria, 2014: 86–7; Ruggeri, 2014: 14–17).3 Nevertheless, there are important differences between cooperatives and WRCs. WRCs are not formed by a pre-established group of volunteers who share a set of values. Argentinian researcher Andrés Ruggeri points out: In a WRC there are all the workers that used to be in the company. That means from the leftist vangardist convinced of going straight against capital to the one who yesterday voted for the first time, who was the employers’ best friend. The conclusion is self-management does not need vanguards, everyone can be part of a process of self-management.

As Luca Federici from the RiMaflow WRC in Milan, Italy, reveals: ‘Some people here have previously voted for Berlusconi or the Lega Nord and today they are here to recuperate a factory. If you had told them that six years ago, they would have said: Who? Me? Are you crazy?’ (Azzellini and Ressler, 2014). The inclusion of different subjectivities opens up the possibility that the commonsbased economic activity can ‘create a social basis for alternative ways of articulating social production, independent from capital and its prerogatives’ (DeAngelis, 2012: 185).

In most WRCs the workers see the means of production – as the Greek Vio.Me. workers – ‘as collectively managed commons that enable them to work and produce, rather than as the property of individuals’ (Kioupkiolis and Karyotis, 2015: 316). Therefore WRCs do not have individual shares of property, unequal distribution of shares or external investors, as it is the case with some workers’ buy-outs (Azzellini, 2015b). WRCs socialize the former private capitalist property. This transformation was at the origin of parts of the workers’ cooperative movement a century ago, but it is no longer present in most cooperatives (Ruggeri, 2014: 16). WRCs originate from the contradiction between capital and labour and the existence of a struggle. Workers in WRCs are well aware of this. Through the experience of occupying and self-managing a workplace the workers reaffirm their identity as workers (but without an employer), which entails the question of class, instead of an identity as ‘cooperativists or “excluded,” […] in which the notion of a class living off its work gets lost’ (Ruggeri, 2014: 16)."