Worker – Owned Cooperatives and the difficulties in achieving horizontal self-management
History and analysis of a worker-recovered factory in Argentina
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24215/23143738e100Keywords:
cooperatives, self-management, worker-recovered factoriesAbstract
This article aims to examine the emergence of a worker-recovered factory, the way it became a worker cooperative and how it operates at present, in order to identify the scope and limits of self-management.
The company under consideration is a paper manufacturing cooperative, located in the city of La Plata in Argentina. In the middle of the economic crisis of 2001, the company went bankrupt and the workers took over it so as not to lose their jobs and to continue producing. In this way, it became a worker-owned company managed by its workers that began to operate as a cooperative.
The results presented are based on data collected through different techniques: in-depth interviews, participant observation, documentary review (reports, press articles, videos, etc.) and a survey applied to the whole population of workers in the cooperative. By the data collected, we were allowed to know the history of the cooperative, to analyze the changes in the labor process and especially, to identify the social and technical division of labor as well as the existing working relations.
In the central part of our article we develop a series of aspects that we consider were an obstacle for the cooperative to unfold the full potential of self-management. In this regard, firstly, we examine in what sense self-management emerged as a defensive strategy to keep jobs and was not an end in itself. Secondly, we show why in the cooperative under analysis there was a limited diffusion of self-management and cooperativism principles. This prevented the emergence of a new work culture, labor relations based on collaboration and trust, and a new view of the production process in which all workers feel committed to participate actively in the decision-making. Thirdly, we describe the existence of a fragmentation within the cooperative staff, on the basis of generational distance and on differential work values, which has prevented the consolidation of a group of workers with the same objectives. Finally, we explain how technical and technological determinants as well as the broader economic environment have limited the expansion of self-management in the factory under review.
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