Name
E1 Workers Taking Over Companies and Converting them to Cooperatives in Argentina: Lessons for Economic Justice and the Social and Solidarity Economy
Date & Time
Thursday, June 4, 2020, 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM
Time Zone
Eastern Daylight Savings
Location Name
Registration required - Virtual Conference links will be available 24 hours prior to session
Description

CASC/ANSER Interdisciplinary Open Event

Chair: Marcelo Vieta, University of Toronto

Workers Taking Over Companies and Converting them to Cooperatives in Argentina: Lessons for Economic Justice and the Social and Solidarity Economy

This session takes an in-depth look at the emergence of Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises, a workers’ occupy and self-management movement that surged at the turn of the millennium in the thick of the country’s neo-liberal crisis. To date, over 16,000 workers in Argentina have converted over 400 firms across its urban economy to worker cooperatives. Engaging in a collective transnational dialogue, the presenters consider the lessons of the Argentine case for the struggle for economic justice in Black and marginalized communities, for saving and re-inventing jobs in light of the cyclical crises of neo-liberal capitalism, and for expanding the social and solidarity economy via conversions of workplaces and other community spaces to cooperatives in the global North.The session is inspired by the recent publication of Marcelo Vieta’s book, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Brill, 2020, https://www.vieta.ca/newbook).

Speakers:

  • Marcelo Vieta, Assistant Professor in the Program in Adult Education and Community Development and the Collaborative Program in Workplace Learning and Social Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Author of Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Brill, 2020, https://www.vieta.ca/newbook).
  • Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, and Director of the McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program at John Jay College, City University of New York (CUNY)
  • Marina Sitrin, Assistant Professor in the department of Sociology at SUNY Binghamton