Recovery! Recreation!
A Conversation about Argentina’s Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement with Eduardo Murúa

Saturday, June 3, 2006
4pm – 7pm
Ideal Coffee
Ossignton Ave., 2 blocks south of Dundas St.

Much of today’s global Left sees in Latin America inspiring instances of creative resistance to the neoliberal emergency. “Recovery! Recreation!” is a public conversation about a living experiment in Laboratory Latin America: Argentina’s movement of worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERTs (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores).

Since 1998, in response to economic and political crisis in Argentina, the ERT movement has been reclaiming spaces of production in a struggle against social precarity and humiliating experiences of work. Not limited to the recovery of jobs, recuperated enterprises are reconfiguring workplaces along more participatory lines, are developing into a horizontal network, and are often doubling as alternative schools, art galleries, community centres, or free medical clinics.

Join us for a conversation with Eduardo Murúa, president of Argentina’s Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (MNER, National Movement of Recovered Enterprises), facilitated by local labour activist Jorge Garcia-Orgales. With Eduardo and Jorge, we ask: What is being recovered? What is being created? What challenges does the ERT movement face? What lessons might the movement yield for struggles to democratize workplaces and communities locally? What lines of affinity exist, or might yet be invented, between Canadian labour groups and Argentina’s newest workers’ movements?

Guests:
Eduardo Murúa, President, Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas de Argentina
Jorge Garcia-Orgales, Researcher, United Steelworkers of America, Toronto