Labor Studies Journal

Labor Studies Journal

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Book Reviews

Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories.

By The Lavaca Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books,

2007. 243 pp. $16.00 paper.

DOI: 10.1177/0160449X08318577

I didn’t know that you could occupy a factory or a company. They told me that the slogan is “occupy, resist and produce” and that changed my life.

Maria del Heurto, a quarry worker

They want to see you on your knees, to show that the workers are good for nothing, least of all for running a business.

Raul Godoy, a worker in a ceramics factory

If global capitalism, with the devastation of social structures and nation states, is a poison for workers, the movement of Argentine workers from 2001 to 2004 to seize their workplaces is a powerful antidote. Sin Patrón (“without a boss”) is the compelling description of how Argentine workers from ten different workplaces, ranging from a factory to a clinic to a newspaper, “reclaimed” their workplaces and established cooperatives. This book illuminates a movement that unfortunately has passed almost without notice among American workers.

In every case described in this book, the business had been bankrupted by greedy bosses, global financial manipulations, and dishonest politicians, forcing workers to go for months without pay even as they faithfully—or foolishly—continued to work.

Rather than giving up, collecting unemployment, or trusting a state takeover, these workers seized the workplaces and began to run them as co-ops. One co-op even took the new name FabSinPat (“factory without a boss”).

The greatest parts of this book are the ten narratives by workers themselves, with their intense enthusiasms and confusions. They play which-side-are-you-on with former bosses and union officers, local creditors, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), various political parties, government agencies, the commercial media, community groups and, of course, their co-workers. One section, which is even called “those who were not there,” lists people—union officers, leftist politicians, political academics, or human rights organizations—who hid when police retook the IMECC Clinic in Buenos Aires in October 2004.

It is thrilling to see ordinary workers become extraordinary as they move into a whole new universe of running their own operations. One seamstress at Brukman, a sewing shop, remarked: I kept thinking that this was my place, and I had to fight it out. I fight for what I consider I need to fight for. I fight to convince my coworkers of what I believe . . . for me,

being here is my life. Being at Brukman is what I bet it all on, what I fought for. . . .I felt incredible joy.

Although the strength of the book is the workers’ narratives, the “Forward” by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis provides an important introduction, combining evaluations about collective action with a helpful history of the modern Argentine economy and political structure. Lewis and Klein, authors of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo,

examine the effects of the global economy on workers, and more importantly, on the worker organizations that are dealing with the crisis. They also produced a documentary film of the Argentine movement called The Take, which should be an essential companion to this book.

Klein and Lewis also participate in a global fair-trade “store,” found at http://market .theworkingworld.org, which helps create markets for commodities produced by the worker co-ops. Using Sin Patrón in a labor studies class could introduce students to an enormous global network.

Sin Patrón is a marvelous book even if our employers would file it in their libraries under the “True Crime” section.

Bill Barry

Community College of Baltimore County