Criminalising workers: fighting for the right to work in Argentina
Alice Bryer | 05.05.2006 21:04
Faced by high unemployment and poverty in Argentina after the crisis of 2001, workers have taken control of over 200 bankrupt companies accross the country. Despite fighting long resistance campaigns against government oppression, workers are now threatened with criminalisation for simply defending the right to earn a living.
Criminalising workers: fighting for the right to work in Argentina
In Argentina during the 1990s, the government and the IMF implemented a drastic neoliberal economic program that provoked levels of unemployment and poverty previously unknown in the country. The collapse of economic and political institutions that characterised the crisis of 2001 forced many people to find alternative means of meeting their needs. Neighbourhood collectives, movements of the unemployed, asambleas barriales, student groups and other social movements built diverse projects of self-organisation: communal kitchens, exchange systems, popular assemblies, or education and health services. Confronted by mass factory closures and sackings, many workers decided to occupy and revive the means of production, defending their livelihoods and building new ways of understanding work. Despite the government’s attempts to suppress the movement, workers in over 200 companies across the country - representing diverse manufacturing and service sectors - have created sustainable enterprises that reject capitalist management, operating instead on the basis of egalitarian and democratic organisational forms.
As a result of intense conflict and legal battles where workers have demanded the right to work, the majority of companies in Buenos Aires achieved temporary legal status through the expropriation law. However, because powerful economic and political interests often want to take control of the now profitable companies, this situation is under constant threat. An important case is the worker-run Hotel Bauen; a four-star hotel in the heart of Buenos Aires transformed by workers from a centre for Argentina’s economic elite to a social institution that promotes alternative social, political and economic activity. The success of the hotel under worker-management means that groups connected to the former owner have sought to evict workers by any possible means. In 2005, workers and supporters fought a strong resistance campaign against attempts by right-wing sectors of the government to enforce a law that would have handed over the ownership of the hotel to the previous owner, despite his proven fraudulent activities and months of with-held wages. More recently, these groups have launched a new offensive that aims to criminalise the president of the cooperative for opening the hotel without ‘legal’ approval, suppressing the bankruptcy of the company and the huge economic and personal investment made by the workers themselves. Such an action essentially aims to impose the right of private property over people’s right to work. In response, workers of Hotel Bauen and solidarity groups call for an international denouncement of this attempt to criminalise workers struggling for the right to earn a living and support their families.
In Argentina during the 1990s, the government and the IMF implemented a drastic neoliberal economic program that provoked levels of unemployment and poverty previously unknown in the country. The collapse of economic and political institutions that characterised the crisis of 2001 forced many people to find alternative means of meeting their needs. Neighbourhood collectives, movements of the unemployed, asambleas barriales, student groups and other social movements built diverse projects of self-organisation: communal kitchens, exchange systems, popular assemblies, or education and health services. Confronted by mass factory closures and sackings, many workers decided to occupy and revive the means of production, defending their livelihoods and building new ways of understanding work. Despite the government’s attempts to suppress the movement, workers in over 200 companies across the country - representing diverse manufacturing and service sectors - have created sustainable enterprises that reject capitalist management, operating instead on the basis of egalitarian and democratic organisational forms.
As a result of intense conflict and legal battles where workers have demanded the right to work, the majority of companies in Buenos Aires achieved temporary legal status through the expropriation law. However, because powerful economic and political interests often want to take control of the now profitable companies, this situation is under constant threat. An important case is the worker-run Hotel Bauen; a four-star hotel in the heart of Buenos Aires transformed by workers from a centre for Argentina’s economic elite to a social institution that promotes alternative social, political and economic activity. The success of the hotel under worker-management means that groups connected to the former owner have sought to evict workers by any possible means. In 2005, workers and supporters fought a strong resistance campaign against attempts by right-wing sectors of the government to enforce a law that would have handed over the ownership of the hotel to the previous owner, despite his proven fraudulent activities and months of with-held wages. More recently, these groups have launched a new offensive that aims to criminalise the president of the cooperative for opening the hotel without ‘legal’ approval, suppressing the bankruptcy of the company and the huge economic and personal investment made by the workers themselves. Such an action essentially aims to impose the right of private property over people’s right to work. In response, workers of Hotel Bauen and solidarity groups call for an international denouncement of this attempt to criminalise workers struggling for the right to earn a living and support their families.
Alice Bryer
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alicebryer@hotmail.com
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Fighting for the right to be lazy (In praise of idleness)
08.05.2006 14:48
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.
In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild’s stables, served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the Norman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops. Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines. [1]
When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not vet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which, alas, is degenerating, may still boast of possessing fewer factories than we have of prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices in his admiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts, straight and flexible as a steel rod; and the heart leaps at hearing the beggar, superbly draped in his ragged capa, parleying on terms of equality with the duke of Ossuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort of slavery. [2] The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods:
O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.
Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.
Paul Lafargue, right to be lazy
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
By Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
Dolce far niente
Fighting for the right to work? What a disastrous dogma.