Programa Facultad Abierta (PFA), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Founded: March 2002.
Programa Facultad Abierta (PFA) is a university extension (extensión universitaria) program based at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, focusing particularly on worker-recuperated enterprises (Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores – ERTs) and workers’ self-management. Founded in March 2002 by faculty members and graduate students amid Argentina’s 2001–2002 economic and social crisis, the program has sought from the outset to build a relationship of solidarity between the university, social movements, and popular sectors.
At the heart of PFA’s work is the research, documentation, and support of Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprise movement. The program has conducted national surveys and mappings of ERTs; assisted workers in strengthening their cooperatives and converting troubled firms into worker cooperatives; and supported ERTs in their struggles for legal frameworks, public support, and policies responsive to their needs. Through this work, PFA has built an extensive body of data and research tracing the development of Argentina’s ERT movement over time.
One of the program’s major initiatives has been the Centro de Documentación de las Empresas Recuperadas (Worker-Recuperated Enterprises Documentation Centre), established within the worker-recuperated Artes Gráficas Chilavert cooperative. Opened in 2006, the centre brings together documents and research on ERTs and preserves the memory of workers’ struggles, while functioning as an archive accessible to researchers, students, and workers. Locating the centre inside an enterprise directly managed by workers rather than on a university campus was a deliberate expression of PFA’s commitment to building a reciprocal relationship between academic knowledge and workers’ experiences.
PFA also publishes educational materials and books on self-management and cooperativism, produces documentary films, and carries out educational activities on workers’ self-management at the university. The program has also been one of the driving forces behind the Encuentro Internacional de la Economía de los Trabajadores (International Gathering of the Workers’ Economy), held since 2007. These gatherings have brought together self-managed workers, trade unions, social movements, researchers, and activists from different countries, creating a space for discussing and sharing experiences of workers’ self-management at the international level.
One of the distinctive features of Programa Facultad Abierta’s approach is that it does not regard workers merely as objects of academic research, but seeks to produce knowledge together with workers and their organisations. Rather than imposing external theories on workers’ experiences, the program aims to respect their own processes of organisation and to contribute critically but in solidarity to strengthening self-managed initiatives. From this perspective, ERTs are understood not simply as a means of saving enterprises in times of crisis, but as part of a broader search for a “workers’ economy” (economía de los trabajadores) centred on workers’ needs and democratic control.