Anabel Rieiro and Gerardo Sarachu (eds.), Gestión Obrera: del fragmento a la acción colectiva, Montevideo: Universidad de la República / Editorial Nordan-Comunidad, 2009, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-9974-0-0669-0.
Gestión Obrera: del fragmento a la acción colectiva is an edited volume that examines worker-recuperated enterprises, workers’ self-management, and experiences of associated labour, primarily in Uruguay, but also in Argentina and Brazil. The book approaches workers’ efforts to restart production in the face of economic crises and business closures not merely as a response aimed at preserving employment, but in terms of the organisation of work, collective action, and the transformation of social relations. From this perspective, the volume treats recuperated enterprises as open-ended social experiments in which workers confront the established forms of management and control inherited from the capitalist firm.
One of the book’s central concerns is that the takeover of an enterprise by its workers and the establishment of genuine workers’ self-management are not the same thing. Although workers possess important technical and practical knowledge of production, in capitalist firms knowledge of management, finance, commerce, and administration is generally concentrated in the hands of owners and managers. Following recuperation, collectivising this knowledge requires a new process of learning. The reconcentration of managerial knowledge in the hands of a small group, however, brings with it the risk that new relations of power and hierarchy may emerge among the workers themselves.
The volume also explores the tension between workplace democracy and the imperatives of the capitalist market. The disappearance of the direct authority of the employer does not remove recuperated enterprises from market relations: they still need access to customers, finance, technology, and markets, while covering their costs and competing with other enterprises. Consequently, external pressures for efficiency and competitiveness may come into conflict with the democratic decision-making mechanisms developed internally. The studies in the book show that management technologies and professionalisation may be necessary, but that adopting them uncritically from the capitalist firm can erode the gains achieved through self-management.
Another important dimension of the study is its discussion of the economic sustainability of recuperated enterprises through empirical evidence. The emergence of numerous recuperated enterprises in Uruguay, their forms of struggle, numbers of workers, and subsequent trajectories are compared, while the demographic development of worker cooperatives between 1997 and 2005 is also examined. The findings indicate that worker cooperatives do not exhibit exceptionally high closure rates compared with conventional firms. One of the important questions, therefore, is not so much why self-managed enterprises fail, but which conditions prevent the formation of such enterprises and how support institutions and public policies might facilitate their development.
The volume does not reduce workers’ self-management solely to the economic performance of the enterprise. Workers’ participation in collective decision-making, their acquisition of managerial knowledge, their reorganisation of labour relations, and the development of solidarity with other workers and social movements are discussed in terms of the potential of self-management to create new collective subjectivities and social relations. The later sections of the book therefore turn directly to the question of emancipation in and through work; the relations between recuperated factories and their communities, as well as their possibilities for broader social transformation, are also examined through thinkers such as Gramsci, Foucault, and Holloway.
Gestión Obrera: del fragmento a la acción colectiva thus treats recuperated enterprises neither simply as cooperatives that preserve employment during periods of crisis nor as inherently post-capitalist enterprises. It places at its centre the question of how workers reconstruct the division of labour, knowledge, authority, market relations, and mechanisms of collective decision-making after taking over ownership and management. By combining extensive empirical material on the Uruguayan experience with discussions of Argentina and Brazil, the volume provides an important resource for understanding not only the possibilities of workers’ control and self-management, but also their internal tensions and limitations.