Labour process and decision-making in factories under workers? self-management: empirical evidence from Argentina

ATZENI, MAURIZIO; GHIGLIANI, PABLO

Londres

Conferencia; International Labour Process Conference; 2006

This paper focuses on the process of work re-organisation following workers´ factory occupations, discussing its theoretical implications with the support of preliminary evidence from qualitative fieldwork conducted in February 2006 in four factories under workers´ control in Argentina. The act of occupying a factory and the workers´ decision to maintain the control of production unleashes a series of consequences at the level of both self organisation and consciousness. By putting upside down pre-existing social relations at the level of production, workers start to deconstruct and demystify all these patterns of control, hierarchy and authority implicit in the capitalist employment relationship. At the same time they are forced to compete in the market if an economic sustainability is to be achieved. Thus two potentially contradictory tendencies may emerge: a) a re-formulation of work organisation and division of labour more oriented toward collective decisions, participation and shared knowledge of the production process. b) The pressure of competition and market mentality on this horizontal decision making process. Considering these contradictory tendencies as two opposed poles on a continuum line, different outcomes and combinations can be expected. With this background in mind, the paper tries to offer answers to the following questions: How do workers redistribute work? How far do workers manage to move away from the capitalist rationality in the division of labour? To what extent is workers´ democratic participation developed within these factories?