During the first decade of the current century, workplace recuperations and production under workers’ control seemed to be limited mainly to South America. It was beyond the imagination of most workers and scholars in industrialized countries that workers would or could occupy their workplaces and run them on their own. Nevertheless, the crisis that started in 2008 put workers’ control back on the agenda in the northern hemisphere where several companies from Greece to Italy and the US have been taken over by workers. They were not only influenced by the Latin American experiences, they also have direct contacts with Latin American workers who have recuperated their workplaces. We are going to look at the different experiences and discuss on common features, differences and challenges.
Referent*in:
Dario Azzellini, Marina Sitrin
Dario Azzellini belongs to the founders collective of the web site workerscontrol.net and has published several books and films. He recently published the documentary “Occupy, Resist, Produce – RiMaflow” on a workers’ controlled factory in Milan/Italy and edited the book “An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy” (2015). Marina Sitrin is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place Culture and Politics at the City University of New York, with a focus on social movements, specifically looking at new forms of social organization and relationships. She has authored Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, and her most recent co-authored book is They Can't Represent Us: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy.