Fabriques recuperees par les travailleurs: Les dilemmes de la gestion collective du travail

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the dilemmas of the collective management in factories recuperated by workers in Brazil organized mostly in the 1990s. These factories were structured either as cooperatives or as hybrid forms of management, in a context of economic restructuring and of rising unemployment, in order to keep jobs. Generally, they had the support of labor unions, and progressively became part of the Solidarity Economy movement, which was institutionalized in the following decade. 20 years after the advent of the first projects of this kind, we sought not only to verify how they remained in the market and how they adapted to the political-economic changes of the period, but also to analyze their relation to the original proposals of self-management. This article has a longitudinal scope, seeking to study factories analyzed previously (in the late 1990s), which remained in activity. In addition, interviews with leaders and workers of the projects were made, as well as with leaders of support institutions such as ANTEAG and UNISOL Brazil. Although the ideals of cooperativism and self-management remain present in many workers’ speech, its implementation has found many obstacles in practice since recuperated factories in order to become viable endure many market pressures, which eventually modify some of their initial objectives.