Factory Takeover: Chicago Workers Take A Page Out Of Argentine Worker’s Book, Demand Rights

When the Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors glass factory laid off 250 workers with only three days notice, the predominantly-Hispanic employees decided to fight back by staging a peaceful take-over of the factory. Representatives have said that they won’t budge until their demands are met, most importantly demands for the severance and vacation pay which were denied them after the layoff.

“We decided to do it because this is money that belongs to us,” said Maria Roman, who’s worked at the plant for eight years. “These are our rights.”

Republic was included in the government bail-out, and its employees feel that the money should be used to help its laid off employees stay afloat until they can find other work, especially since Republic failed to adhere to the law requiring employers to give 60 days notice before a mass layoff.

Something similar happened in Argentina during the 2001 economic crisis there, when the collapse of the banking system led to mass factory closures and the unemployment rate soared to almost 25%. In Argentina’s case, the fired employees were a bit more ambitious - after taking over the closed factories, many organized into cooperatives with “democratic worker management” and started up production again. It wasn’t a ubiquitous occurrence, but enough factories were taken over (about 170 factories with a total of ten thousand workers) to make it a significant trend. Explained a worker from the Zanón ceramic tile factory;

“We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders.”

Though our thoughts immediately jump to socialist ideology, the workers activism in Argentina wasn’t explicitly political. Rather, some argue, it was simply born out of the need to make a living, and the workers’ awareness that they were getting the shit end of the stick, for no legitimate reason. Or to put it more technically;

The legal and political case for worker control in Argentina does not only rest on the unpaid wages, evaporated benefits and emptied-out pension funds. The workers make a sophisticated case for their moral right to property - in this case, the machines and physical premises - based not just on what they are owed personally, but what society is owed. The recovered companies propose themselves as an explicit remedy to all the corporate welfare, corruption and other forms of public subsidy the owners enjoyed in the process of bankrupting their firms and moving their wealth to safety, abandoning whole communities to economic exclusion.

The idea of workers “owning” the place they work in goes against what we’ve been taught about private property rights, but in an economic situation like 2001 Argentina and present day America, maybe these kinds of takeovers could be an innovative way for workers to get their compensation.

“Occupy, resist, produce” [New Statesman]
The Politics and Poder of the Takeover : Laid Off Chicago Workers Occupy Factory [VivirLatino]