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 make them up and and also self-manage their destiny, so that’s why we’ve named it the Argentine Federation of Cooperatives of Self-Managed Workers. Any kind of cooperative can be here, it can be a worker cooperative, service cooperative, or housing cooperative. The condition that we put is that they are self-managed and that that horizontal relationship exists within the cooperative.
The role of the BAUEN was important for the social and political fabric that made up the Federation. Resino also highlights:
(…) which means the BAUEN, its relationship and its geographic location, comes to be a nucleus of relationships with another kind of workers, for example the Casino.1 During their whole conflict, the Casino workers held assemblies held in the BAUEN, as did the the mail workers, and the subway workers. In a great many conflicts that happen, decisions are made inside the BAUEN, and we believe that is necessary to take all those matters to the heart of the Federation.
With this, FACTA announced clearly that it belongs to the working class, and in that sense, “that each struggle, of each worker, is also their struggle, and that doesn’t matter if the person is an employee or part of a cooperative.”
- The conflict of the workers of the Casino of Buenos Aires took place during 2007, the time of the above-mentioned declarations by Fabio Resino to the alternative media outlet Ágora TV.↩