Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis on May 15th will be at Cooper Union in New York City, they are taking part in a panel that looks at this phenomenon, called Fire the Boss: The Worker Control Solution from Buenos Aires to Chicago.
We’ll be joined by people from the movement in Argentina as well as workers from the famous Republic Windows and Doors struggle in Chicago.
In 2004, they made a documentary called “The Take” about Argentina’s movement of worker-run businesses. In the wake of the country’s dramatic economic collapse in 2001, thousands of workers walked into their shuttered factories and put them back into production as worker cooperatives. Abandoned by bosses and politicians, they regained unpaid wages and severance while re-claiming their jobs in the process.
But what shines through in the film is the simple drama of workers’ lives and their struggle: the demand for dignity and the searing injustice of dignity denied.
As we toured Europe and North America with the film, every Q&A ended up with the question, “that’s all very well in Argentina, but could that ever happen here?”
Well, with the world economy now looking remarkably like Argentina’s in 2001 (and for many of the same reasons) there is a new wave of direct action among workers in rich countries. Co-ops are once again emerging as a practical alternative to more lay-offs. Workers in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to ask the same questions as their Latin American counterparts: Why do we have to get fired? Why can’t we fire the boss? Why is the bank allowed to drive our company under while getting billions of dollars of our money?
Here is a quick list of workers taking control of their destiny around the world.
