The Social Legitimacy of Recuperated Enterprises in Argentina

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Notes

1 The repercussion and valuation of the recuperation of enterprises can be seen in the reform of the Argentine Bankruptcy Law, introduced by the Executive Branch and enacted in 2011. This reform institutionalized the recuperation process, establishing that workers organized in cooperatives could use the debts owed to them to purchase a bankrupt enterprise. In March 2010, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner presented her plan for the modification of the law in the recuperated “Envases Flexibles Mataderos” factory. In her speech at this time, she said: “I feel that Argentina is a giant recuperated factory” (La Argentina, 18 March 2010).

2 The Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires comprises the autonomous city of Buenos Aires and the suburban belt around the city, composed of 24 municipalities or districts. At the end of 2012 the population estimate of the area carried out by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses was 13,234,000.

3 The sample design was multistage, stratified, and probabilistic. The sample is of 599 cases with a margin of error of ±4 percent, with a confidence level of 95 percent for the maximum dispersion (p=q=0.5).

4 Peronism is a political movement that emerged around the figure of President Juan Domingo Perón (1946–1955 and 1973–1974). In his first terms he promoted a broad process of social integration of the working class. Prior to Peronism, the working class had already had significant experience of struggle and organization related to different left-wing traditions – anarchism, revolutionary trade unionism, communism and socialism. Peronism represented a process of massification and institutionalization of trade unionism promoted from the State, which until then had tended to repressive behavior and non-recognition towards workers' organizations (Murmis and Portantiero 2004).

5 In Peronism's original project, this progressive institutionalization of workers' interests – related to its starting point – in theory didn’t necessarily imply an antagonism with capital and private property as a value, but rather was presented as a form of incorporation of the workers into a national capitalist project (James 1990). The worker's responsibility in production and his or her labor protections were the ideological mortar in the intended class reconciliation, with capital posited as the element necessary for production that would turn private property and labor into two values that were plausibly complementary.

6 In 2002 alone, the GDP fell by a staggering 10.9 percent. The rate of poverty grew from 15.9 percent in 1992 to 45.5 percent in 2002. Moreover, in 2001 the rate of unemployment was 18.4 percent in context of a decline of the economically active population (INDEC).

7 The political crisis shocked the Argentine state; between 20 December 2001 and 1 January 2002 there was a succession of several ephemeral presidents.

8 The social approach to class position was carried out by adapting Dalle's (2012) classificatory schema to our data. Owners, highly skilled wage-workers and/or workers with managerial functions in the productive process, and self-employed workers with jobs that required high qualifications were classified as middle class. On the other hand, wage-workers without occupational hierarchy, without many qualifications, along with self-employed workers without many qualifications, were classified as working-class.