Co-operative Struggles: Work Conflicts in Argentina’s New Worker Co-operatives

Co-operative Struggles: Work Conflicts in Argentina’s New Worker Co-operatives
Author: Denise Kasparian
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004468641

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In Co-operative Struggles, Denise Kasparian expands the theoretical horizons regarding labour unrest by proposing new categories to make visible and conceptualize conflicts in the new worker co-operativism of the twenty-first century in Argentina.

Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina

Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina
Author: Marcelo Vieta
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 680
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004268952

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In Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the history, consolidation, and socio-political dimensions of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises), a worker-led company occupation movement that has surged since the turn-of-the-millennium and the country’s neo-liberal crisis.

Digital Working Lives

Digital Working Lives
Author: Tim Christiaens
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2022-11-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1538173743

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Recent innovations in digital technologies are fundamentally transforming the world of work. A digital gig economy is emerging that threatens to displace traditional labour relations based on legally regulated labour contracts. Companies like Uber, Deliveroo, or Amazon Mechanical Turk rely increasingly on ‘independent contractors’ who earn piece-rate wages by completing tasks sent to them via their smartphones. This development understandably pushes workers to desire more autonomy, but what would workers’ autonomy mean in the digital age? This book argues that the digital gig economy undermines workers’ autonomy by putting digital technology in charge of workers’ surveillance, leading to exploitation, alienation, and exhaustion. To secure a more sustainable future of work, digital technologies should instead be transformed into tools that support human development instead of subordinating it to algorithmic control. The best guarantee for human autonomy is a politics that transforms digital platforms into convivial tools that obey the rhythm of human life.

Alternative Societies

Alternative Societies
Author: Luke Martell
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2023-02-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1529229677

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Bringing together a wide range of approaches and new strands of economic and social thinking from across the US, Asia, Mexico, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, this book critically assesses the alternatives to capitalism, learning lessons from them and shows the ways forward with a convincing argument of pluralist socialism.

Business and Society

Business and Society
Author: Sonya Scott
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2023-08-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1350357081

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Corporations dominate our worlds. They employ us, sell to us and influence how we think and who we vote for. All aspects of this relationship are explored, from an historical analysis of the spread of capitalism to the regulation, ethics and exclusionary implications of business in contemporary society. The book also examines how corporate power and capitalism might be resisted and outlines a range of alternatives, from the social economy through to new forms of open access or commons ownership. This second edition includes new chapters that explore how global crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate emergency have exposed tensions within and among national business systems. It also addresses the need for new ways of holding business accountable in the era of digital platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon, which use algorithmic personalization to exert private control over the infrastructure of our societies.

Working Democracies

Working Democracies
Author: Joan S. M. Meyers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1501763709

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In this inside look at worker cooperatives, Joan Meyers challenges long-held views and beliefs. From the outside, worker cooperatives all seem to offer alternatives to bad jobs and unequal treatment by giving workers democratic control and equitable ownership of their workplaces. Some contend, however, that such egalitarianism and self-management come at the cost of efficiency and stability, and are impractical in the long run. Working Democracies focuses on two worker cooperatives in business since the 1970s that transformed from small countercultural collectives into thriving multiracial and largely working-class firms. She shows how democratic worker ownership can provide stability and effective business management, but also shows that broad equality is not an inevitable outcome despite the best intentions of cooperative members. Working Democracies explores the interconnections between organizational structure and organizational culture under conditions of worker control, revealing not only the different effects of managerialism and "participatory bureaucracy," but also how each bureaucratic variation is facilitated by how workers are defined by at each cooperative. Both bureaucratic variation and worker meanings are, she shows, are consequential for the reduction or reproduction of class, gender, and ethnoracial inequalities. Offering a behind the scenes comparative look at an often invisible type of workplace, Working Democracies serves as a guidebook for the future of worker cooperatives.

The Emergence of the Empresas Recuperadas Por Sus Trabajadores

The Emergence of the Empresas Recuperadas Por Sus Trabajadores
Author: Marcelo Vieta
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

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The crisis of Argentina's neoliberal model that escalated throughout the 1990s, driven in part by the zealousness of how IMF-sanctioned structural reforms were implemented, would eventually culminate in the model's temporary implosion over the years spanning the turn of the millennium. For workers living through this crisis, traditional union tactics would prove unresponsive to the neoliberal juggernaut, while the state was on the defensive as business bankruptcy, informal work, unemployment, and poverty rates soared to unprecedented levels during this period. But the crisis of neoliberalism that so deeply affected the everyday lives of Argentina's working people and their families also proved to be, for some of them, an opening for experimenting with other possibilities for organizing production and economic life. As businesses increasingly failed, more and more workers from a broad cross-section of Argentina's urban-based economy began taking matters into their own hands by occupying and self-managing the troubled workplaces that had been employing them as worker cooperatives. Today throughout Argentina, almost 9,500 workers selfmanage over 200 empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERTs) in sectors as varied as printing and publishing, media, metallurgy, health provisioning, foodstuffs, shipbuilding, waste management, construction, education, tourism, and energy. The aim of this working paper is to provide a political economic and sociological overview of the rise and establishment of ERTs in Argentina over the past two decades. It does so in order to introduce ERTs to readers that might not be familiar with the Argentine experience of workplace conversions to worker cooperatives and their recent historical emergence. It also gives context to what is arguably, as I will detail in forthcoming research, a new form of hybrid social economy organization - a “solidarity worker cooperative/work integration social enterprise.” In this respect, ERTs are a type of hybrid labour-managed firm that uniquely formed, in the Argentine political economic and sociological context, from out of the takeover and conversion of a formerly investor-owned or proprietary business into a worker cooperative by workers themselves.

The Handbook of Diverse Economies

The Handbook of Diverse Economies
Author: J.K. Gibson-Graham
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788119967

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Economic diversity abounds in a more-than-capitalist world, from worker-recuperated cooperatives and anti-mafia social enterprises to caring labour and the work of Earth Others, from fair trade and social procurement to community land trusts, free universities and Islamic finance. The Handbook of Diverse Economies presents research that inventories economic difference as a prelude to building ethical ways of living on our dangerously degraded planet. With contributing authors from twenty countries, it presents new thinking around subjectivity and methodology as strategies for making other worlds possible.

Cooperatives at Work

Cooperatives at Work
Author: George Cheney
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2023-01-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1838678271

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Cooperatives at Work presents a range of success stories in employee ownership and worker cooperative enterprise, showcasing how such firms can embody important and highly contested ideals of democracy, equity, and social transformation.