Sorry, I see I posted to the wrong place again. I can't figure the site out at first glance. Forgive the intrusion. Hi Felix!
Anarcho - syndalicalists on Worker Buyouts
Hi Laure. What's up?
There's nothing nothing wrong with posting this here, although it's perhaps not the best place if you want a lot of replies.
Personally I think workers co-ops can play a role in the syndicalist movement, but I know that a lot of people would disagree, and see it as just self-management of capitalism.
I would look at the occupied factories movement in South America, which illustrates both the potential and problems of self-managed workplaces. Of course, most of these started as militant occupations, which has different dynamics than worker buyouts, but many have since been legalized in various forms. And in Venezuela, such worker co-ops and buyouts are part of government policy.
Hi! Yeah, I haven't figure this forum out yet - there's a lot of stuff and I don't like spending time on forums usually. 
I also think that workers coops can be just self-management of capitalism, but the fact is that we live in capitalism and if somebody has a choice between running their own collective business or working for a boss, I think the first is better. But for me it depends on several things like
- are they employing wage labour?
- are they charging fairly for good or services? what is the attitude towards the consumer or client?
- are they harming the environment
In general, they'd have to live up to the standards we'd set on any other company.
Hey there... an interesting person to contact Marie Trigona
(mtrigona@msn.com) http://blogs.zmag.org/blog/21
http://mujereslibres.blogspot.com/
http://www.agoratv.org/
Marie is covering (and has been) the various occupations and movements for workers control and self-magament in Argentina. She's very friendly to class struggle libertarian views. Perhaps she has some things to share about the Argentinian experiances.
--mitch
Hi laure - this is interesting stuff, I hadn't heard about this. But I agree with your point, we sometimes hear anarchist calls for workers to self-manage failing business here, like the peugeot-Ryton plant which closed for example. It seems obvious this would end badly since they're still subject to the market, and would still have to compete with chinese workers on $1 a day, etc.
Would you like me to move this into the main Thought forum laure?
East of Vienna it's proberbly a lot to do with the ex-Communist culture of corruption and control through fear. The guys at the top (East European Mafia excluded)are there not by effort but courtesy of the positions they held during the time when these countries you refer to were behind the Iron Curtain.
Fortunatly for the low paid East Europeans, at least the able ones are now free to emmigrate to countries like the UK without having to risk their lives by running the "gauntlet" to freedom. Once they are here after 12 months , as long as they don't say anything against another minority, they will remain free to draw generous welfare benefits and then bring their families over and jump the council housing que's.
Thanks for that Jen. From one fairly new poster to another, I feel I can say that so far your contributions to the libcom boards have been definitely enlightening.
We've learned that the BNP have 28,000 members ('and growing'), that it might be an idea for anarchists to start marching under the Union Jack, and that the Poles rule the dole. They told me libcom was a broad church, but who could've hoped for such ideological diversity!
Steggsie wrote:
We've learned that the BNP have 28,000 members ('and growing'), that it might be an idea for anarchists to start marching under the Union Jack, and that the Poles rule the dole. They told me libcom was a broad church, but who could've hoped for such ideological diversity!
All a bit suspect, really. Unless you're being strangely ironic Jen, I've the suspicion that you may actually be a BNP pimp.
THEY'RE SCROUNGING ALL OUR BENEFITS!!!!!!
East European Migrant workers = 133,000
Of those signing on = 21
Hello friends and comrades. I tried for the first time to submit something on the "thought" forum but had no feedback other than to make a summary, improve the format so it is less labour intensive and link to my article. So I'm doing on and hoping that somebody will have feedback on the topic.
SUMMARY
In the other Europe, less represented on forums like these for many reasons, many people are working for less than 200 euros a month. In some of these countries, workers are being fucked by schemes which are supposed to be enpowering them but fuck them over even more - in particular workers' buyouts during privatization and worker-management partnerships. In practice, these buyouts provide large shareholders, often ex-management, to acquire capital and legitimacy which they then use to liquidate the business and sell-over undervalued, amortized assets. Often workers have no idea that this is the goal and invest their life savings in these schemes thinking they are saving their jobs and their factories.
The anarcho-syndicalists in Poland may have their hearts in the right place, but some of them not their heads. Recently there was a situation like this --- but everybody missed the call. Last week people organized a big action for somebody to be reinstated to his job but almost nobody knew anything about the background to the case. Anarchists provided incorrect information for unknown reasons: we were told that Slawek was fired for making a union, for union activity, for fighting for health and safety conditions in his factory, for talking to the press or because somebody wanted to take over a worker-controlled factory.
In reality was different: that there was a worker-management buyout of a company in bankruptcy with lots off devalued assets. Some former workers participated in the buyout, but at the time of the firing, lots of wage labourers were employed there. Essentially, a member of the former management and an economist exploited the naivity to the workers and by increasing the share capital, acquired a majority stake in the company.
It's not clear they did this in a legal way two and a half years ago - but if they acted illegally then, there was a chance to overturn this and even force them out of positions of authority - then. Problem is that there was only misinformation. It's not clear why.
One possibility is that people don't know the difference between a worker-run collective and a worker-management buyout run on capitalist terms. (Although I think it's only part of the picture of how people were not completely informed.) I think that if we want to help workers out, it's important to know this and to be able to warn others to avoid the mistakes to workers like Slawek and his colleagues at Uniontex, and to avoid the mistakes of the anarchists who ultimately did not take the most effective action. It's not much help if we are just naively cheering the takeover of Uniontex by workers (which is basically how it was presented) and don't understand that it's a scam, that there are possibilities for the accumulation of more shares and voting rights, that there can in fact be a majority of non-shareholder workers who have no voting rights. And then in the end the best we can do is bus everybody to under the factory gate to demand that Slawek get his 200 euro a month job back.
In the last two days I talked to some people who have experience in privatization about this and it confirmed what I thought based on other situations - that in Eastern Europe, a great deal, if not the majority of these worker buyouts end badly for the workers. In most cases they don't lose their initial investments, but sometimes even that happens.
So I was wondering if other people had experience with this area or know of any cases.
If you have time and energy to read through the case of Uniontex, I have it in the "thought" forum in bad format, or in more reader-friendly form here: http://cia.bzzz.net/worker_buyouts_and_the_story_of_uniontex