After going to Zanon earlier this week, I was very enthusiastic about seeing more worker-run businesses in Buenos Aires (indeed, I bought several books about the movement from the bookshop within the occupied Bauen Hotel). So yesterday I went to Brukman, a textile factory, and one of the most prominent recuperated factories in Buenos Aires.
Out of pure chance, when I arrived, a number of the comrades I´m going to Bolivia with were already there, talking to Luis Caro, ´leader´of the National Movement of Factories Recuperated by the Workers (MNFRT). I wanted to ask him why he´d led a right-wing split from an earlier organisation of factories (the MNER), why a "Catholic lawyer" would be interested in helping out the workers, and so on, but the reason was clear enough - a bit of an ego.
The worker who showed us the factory told us the - of course fascinating - story of the workers´struggle to expropriate their corrupt bosses. For example, the start of the process - in Argentina´s economic turmoil of 2001, after weeks of non-payment of workers, then a derisory payment of $2, the workers joined together and made the bosses promise to pay them $50 the next day - just to keep going. The next morning, when they came downstairs from the shop floor to get their pay, they found all the office doors open - the bosses and admin staff had simply run away. Not without, of course, smashing up some of the machines with the aid of right-wing workers, so that the workers couldn´t "usurp" it.
Another worker told us of how, in a police attempt to remove the workers from the factory, he had been shot in the back with 8 rubber bullets. After that fight, injured workers in hospitals were dragged out by police so that they could be imprisoned on charges of "usurpation" and "theft". Even the 7-year-old daughter of a worker was taken to prison. Amazingly, despite the now legal expropriation of Brukman, some workers still have charges hanging over them.
She also said about how Luis Caro had came along to give advice, then increasingly attempted to marginalise other lawyers and influences. His line is "all they need is work" - our guide saw this as reactionary and representative of his disrespect for workers. Sadly, most of the workers agree with him, and only about 15 or so take part in the solidarity work which helped the Brukman workers so much in their fight against police aggression. Unlike Zanon, the class consciousness in general at Brukman is apparently weak - it´s a shame that that could happen, after such a heroic struggle.