Maria Alejandra Paulucci, A caminhada de luta dos trabalhadores das empresas recuperadas, Florianópolis: Editoria Em Debate (UFSC), 2018, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-85-45535-22-5.
A caminhada de luta dos trabalhadores das empresas recuperadas examines worker-recuperated enterprises (ERTs) in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay through the problems they face after recuperation and the social and political relations that enable these experiences to endure. Based on Maria Alejandra Paulucci’s research conducted over many years, the study focuses particularly on experiences in Brazil while drawing comparative connections with ERT movements in Argentina and Uruguay. One of the book’s central questions is under what conditions workers are able to sustain self-management after taking over enterprises, and what kinds of relationships enable or constrain this process.
The book situates the emergence of worker-recuperated enterprises within the context of neoliberal restructuring, unemployment, precarisation, and factory closures in Latin America from the 1990s onwards. While workers’ takeovers initially emerged primarily as a strategy to preserve jobs and resist unemployment, the continuation of production under workers’ own decision-making created opportunities for the development of new practices of self-management and democratic management. The transformation of wage workers into cooperative members and actors responsible for managing the enterprise thus also entails a reorganisation of labour relations and the organisation of production.
For Paulucci, recuperation is not a process completed once the enterprise passes into the hands of the workers. ERTs are dynamic experiences that are continuously constructed and redefined and that generate new contradictions both internally and in their relations with the outside world. While workers must develop capacities for collective management, the enterprises simultaneously face problems such as property disputes, shortages of capital and credit, ageing machinery, access to raw materials, relations with customers and suppliers, and the ability to survive in the market. The book therefore does not separate the possibilities of workers’ self-management from its economic and institutional constraints.
A significant part of the study is devoted to the different strategies of recuperation pursued in Brazil. It examines the differences between experiences such as Cipla/Interfibra, Flaskô, and Profiplast, which advocated nationalisation under workers’ control, and enterprises that followed the path of cooperativism and self-management; the struggles of enterprises such as Cooperminas, Coopermetal, Coopermaq, and CDM in Santa Catarina are also analysed. These examples demonstrate that worker-recuperated enterprises cannot be reduced to a single organisational or legal model and that workers have developed different paths under different political, economic, and institutional conditions.
The book also considers ERTs beyond the boundaries of individual enterprises. State policies, trade unions, social movements, universities, local communities, and national and international solidarity networks established among worker-recuperated enterprises are examined as important elements in the sustainability of these experiences. Paulucci thus demonstrates that workers’ self-management depends not only on decision-making mechanisms within the factory; access to finance, legal security, knowledge, political support, and solidarity networks also shapes the future of these enterprises.
In these respects, A caminhada de luta dos trabalhadores das empresas recuperadas is an important study that approaches workers’ self-management not as a static model of enterprise but as a process continuously reproduced through economic, social, and political struggles. By connecting Brazilian experiences with developments in Argentina and Uruguay, and by examining together the different paths of workers’ control, cooperativism, nationalisation, the solidarity economy, and self-management, the book makes a particularly valuable contribution to the literature on worker-recuperated enterprises and workers’ self-management in Latin America.