ABSTRACT
The process of recuperation of enterprises by workers that began in Argentina in the 1990s and expanded during the great crisis of 2001–2002 attracted worldwide attention for its massiveness and the radical nature of its practices, in a context where it was growing the debate about globalization and its consequences. From Argentina, where the phenomenon was occurring, the vision was less idealized. Up close, what could be observed was that the workers occupied the factories that the bosses abandoned in the midst of the crisis to try to preserve the jobs and, in doing so, they unwittingly activated the resurrection of self-management (autogestion in Spanish), a concept that symbolized the “new left” of the sixties and seventies. However, the term was almost absent in the tradition of the Argentine labor movement, so the name “recuperated enterprise” was the one that prevailed. The emergence of recuperated enterprises contributed to questions about the history of workers’ self-management in Latin America. This chapter sketches the history of these processes in this part of the world, based on the experience of the Argentinian recuperated enterprises.
