Steve Herrick

As the representatives of the cooperative, its lawyers, and various legislators and social and political leaders that accompanied them went into the hearing, the protesters listened to a series of speakers. One of them was Omar Villablanca, leader of FASINPAT, Factory Without Bosses, the former Zanon Ceramics, another great example of the recovered businesses in the country. To come to these spaces, which are not our spaces, the courts (…) produces indignation (…). In these 10 years, we haven’t seen… Read More »BAUEN, day 84

Of course, it did not stop building its collective management every day. Nor did it stop building support and social strength for its demands, even as it pushed for new expropriation bills in Congress. One significant milestone in that search was the event in which it honored the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo by naming the main auditorium of the hotel after them, on April 17th, 2012. Human-rights organizations had constantly supported the workers by participating in their demonstrations,… Read More »BAUEN, day 83

Resistance and solidarity continue Throughout the following years, the legal case in which the original judge ruled that the cooperative had to leave the hotel, continued to advance through different levels of the judiciary, always with unfavorable result for workers. The appeal by the cooperative’s lawyers was granted by the judge and then rejected in appellate court on May 20th, 2008, by the National Chamber of Appeals for Commerce, Room C. In that presentation, the Secretariat of Human Rights of… Read More »BAUEN, day 82

As the years went by, FACTA became consolidated as an organization with a national reach, with affiliated cooperatives in different regions, like the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Cordoba, Mendoza, San Juan, La Rioja, Catamarca, La Pampa, Formosa, Chaco, and Buenos Aires and the City of Buenos Aires, growing to include some 60 organizations. The cooperatives of FACTA belong to different industries and areas: textiles, printing, audiovisual arts, metallurgy, tourism, gastronomy, food production, shoemaking, construction, paintings, glass,… Read More »BAUEN, day 81

But in contrast to MNER, which was made up exclusively of recovered businesses, the Federation intended from its beginning to expand the connection with other collectives of self-managed workers. Resino continues: We are worker cooperatives that are self-managed businesses, because some are recovered businesses and others are cooperatives, which, while they are not recovered businesses in the broad sense of the word, they are cooperatives that have made it possible to recover work and the dignity of the compañeros that… Read More »BAUEN, day 80

The formation of FACTA While these disputes were going on in the judicial and legislative spheres, the old mother organization of the recovered businesses, the National Movement of Recovered Businesses, was thrown into crisis. Political differences and diverging organizational practices had reached a point of no return that brought on a new division in the MNER. A significant part of the movement opted to create a federation of cooperatives in place of the lax, top-down structure they had used until… Read More »BAUEN, day 79

Chapter 11 Resistance and self-management The eviction ordered by judge Paula Hualde unleashed a wave of solidarity with the BAUEN workers that grew endlessly from then on. If there is one thing the recovery of the downtown hotel had, it was solidarity. It received all kinds of groups of popular struggle in its rooms and its hospitality, which led to that open-door policy coming back toward them in the difficult times that followed. The news of the eviction order dropped… Read More »BAUEN, day 78

The judge, in this part of the judgment, made two different interpretations. She accepted as valid and satisfactory the “offer” of the “Morando Law” that proposed that Mercoteles employ the cooperative workers, among other theoretical concessions (like the recognition of the costs of repairs made to the building by the cooperative up to an obviously insufficient amount of AR$150,000). Along the same lines, she confirmed that Mercoteles S.A. made a formal offer “…to contribute to the solution of the conflict… Read More »BAUEN, day 77

Next, she quickly concluded that there was no option but to “return” the building at Callao 360 to the registered owner, which is to say, Mercoteles, but that, as a judge, she considered it prudent to contemplate the “negative consequences” of this restitution, which she sagely deduced would be the loss of the cooperators’ jobs. She then cites several cases, taken from the website of The National Movement of Factories Recovered by the Workers Recovered (MNFRT), which were… “almost always… Read More »BAUEN, day 76

After reviewing some facts relative to the history of the hotel as of the bankruptcy (without even mentioning the prior circumstances) and grounding herself in the passage of Law 1914 (the “Morando Law”), Hualde went on to explain that in her “visual inspection” of May 17, 2006, she could see that: (…) the poor state of preservation of some sectors of the building could result in risk to the health and life of the members of the cooperative and other… Read More »BAUEN, day 75