Worker Ownership

Worker-owned businesses are spreading, mainly via the world-wide growth of cooperatives and the Latin American-led wave of workers recuperating factories and other businesses.  The businesses range from small, collectively owned industries of women manufacturing T-shirts in their neighborhoods, to national-level coop networks, to laborers claiming once-closed factories for their own.  

At a basic – but critical – level, worker ownership creates and sustains jobs, production, and services, and offers possibilities for long-term employment stability and living wages.  Whether their inception was driven by desperation or values, they open possibilities for employment with dignity, transformed social relationships, self-management, democratic governance, and equitable power and income.  Most are implicitly, if not explicitly, based on the values of solidarity, respect, commitment, shared participation, and community.  

In Brazil, the National Association of Worker-Managed Enterprises, or ANTEAG by its Portuguese acronym, helps coordinate and strengthen more than 300 worker-managed cooperatives involving 15,000 workers.  South Africa in the early 1990s had about 1,400 cooperatives; today that number is up to 17,000.i The U.S.  Federation of Worker Cooperatives, which was launched in 2004, now counts among its members 150 worker cooperatives, and it claims that this is just a fraction of the total number that exists in the U.S.  This is a very limited list.

Argentina is home to one remarkable worker-owner model: the recuperada, or recuperated business.  When Argentina’s economy crashed in late 2001, thousands of business owners locked their doors and fled, leaving their employees without jobs or back pay.  As independent filmmaker Alejandro Barrientos commented, “The crisis wasn’t just a disaster.  It was an opportunity for transformation.” And transform it did.  Motivated more by the poverty and indignity of unemployment than by revolutionary ideal (though there was some of that, too), as many as 10,000 workers from roughly 200 closed businesses eventually decided to defy their loss of occupation and income and to reclaim the factories.  Eight years after the crisis shut down factories across Argentina, thousands of workers are still running their own companies.  

The story of Argentina’s recuperadas belies certain ‘truths’ that have kept rights, decent wages, and dignity from workers throughout modern history.  These are: that private property is paramount, that the profit motive is critical to business success, that factories and other businesses require managers because workers can’t run things, and that the demands of production on the job site don’t leave time for the often laborious process of democratic governance.  

Free from the exploitation and insecurity of their former worksites, workers in Argentina’s recuperadas have organized themselves in a new way.  No one is the owner, or rather everyone is.  Much greater equality exists in human relations, policy decision-making, and pay scale.  Ornella, a factory worker who asked that her last name be withheld, told us that “The idea is not only to protect a source of work, but to support a new society toward a new construction of power.”

One outgrowth of the experiment is self-esteem, so important for people who have always held an under-valued place in society.  Labor quotas have been replaced by pride.  Many workers, especially women, speak of their amazement at how much capacity they’ve discovered in themselves, and how gratifying it is to have others recognize it in them, too.

The experiment reverberates throughout Latin America, where many hundreds of recuperadas are at work producing goods and services.  Most started with the international financial crisis between 2000 and 2002, while a few worker-run enterprises have existed for several decades.  

Most came to existence in three different ways: through owners abandoning the factories in the midst of the brutal economic crisis, leaving those factories with workers who after the fact learned to administer them; through workers having occupied them in the midst of a labor or social struggle; or through the state having become owner of bankrupt businesses with the objectives of saving production, waylaying unemployment, and saving the owner.ii

In 2006, the Venezuelan government passed decrees expropriating factories that had been left idle by their owners and turning them over to workers.  Costa Rica and Uruguay have some recuperadas, too, while in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa is pressing the concept forward.    

While the recuperadas and their counterparts in worker-coops have not transformed a deeply unjust system, they do point to a way out.  They offer a glimpse into what industrial economic and social organization, based on democracy and equity, could look like.  They are what one fan of the experiment calls “little flickering flames.”