FACTORY FINISH

One of Argentina’s oldest and largest workers co-ops, the ceramics factory previously called Zanon, now known as Fabricas Sin Patrones (FaSinPat) – Workers Without Bosses - won a a key legal ownership battle last month as the country’s workers continue to lead the way in the resistance to the havoc wreaked by the global financial crisis.

While the national government continues to refuse to draft a national law of expropriation for Argentina’s 250 worker-run businesses, which employ 13,000 people, each factory has had to struggle individually for their legal rights with the local legislature. And so it was outside of the chamber of deputies in provincial Neuquén, in Patagonia, that the FaSinPat workers gathered with hundreds of supporters to wait for the results of the debate inside. The final vote, 26 in favour to 9 against, handed ownership and legal control of the factory over to the workers with creditors to be paid off by the state.

The result was the cumulation of eight years of struggle, which began in 2001 when Zanon’s owners – who had received millions in government subsidies and foreign loans, money which rapidly disappeared – sacked the entire workforce without severance pay and owing months of back pay. Over 250 of those workers set up a camp outside the site and spent four months picketing the factory and blocking roads. After gaining entry to the factory following a court ruling that permitted the workers to sell off remaining stock, the workers voted to restart the business as a co-operative (see SchNEWS 530). The factory now employs 470 people.

In subsequent years, as the business grew alongside the supportive network of worker run businesses, the co-op successfully defended itself against a number of attempted police evictions and sustained intimidation and abuse as they battled for legal ownership of the factory.

Throughout the struggle, the co-op, like many other ‘recovered businesses’, has maintained that it is a part of a wider struggle for social justice, and has been heavily involved in community projects, social movements and other workers struggles.
The co-op retained its commitment even through the legalisation process. Many members of the legislature attempted to attach the condition for passing the bill that the workers would “guarantee a pact for social peace”. Smelling the sulphur wafting off this particular Faustian pact, the offer was rejected outright. One worker was quoted as saying, “The capitalists are constantly declaring war with tariff increases, by privatising public companies and with firings. Faced with this, the workers must defend themselves, and the workers at Zanon commit to defending ourselves, in the street, however we have to.”

The Vestas protests of recent months has been one of the first recent British campaigns to successfully combine workers struggles with wider social issues. In Argentina, the thriving co-op movement, which has seen around 20 new occupations since 2008, has not only shown the way by realising long ago that these issues are inextricably linked, they have also shown that this combination is a practical and workable model for action. “This is a battle against individualism, against everything that those above impose upon us” one Zanon worker said. “Here inside the factory we are fighting for a new human being.”

* See http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2052/1