What needs to happen here.

posted by The Vidiot @ 12:05 PM Permalink

You may not have heard that factory workers in Chicago have decided to occupy their closing factory until they get assurances that they will get their severance and vacation pay.

"We're going to stay here until we win justice," said Blanca Funes, 55, of Chicago, after occupying the building for several hours. Speaking in Spanish, Funes said she fears losing her home without the wages she feels she's owed. A 13-year employee of Republic, she estimated her family can make do for three months without her paycheck. Most of the factory's workers are Hispanic.

Laudable, yes, but it falls short of what they REALLY need to do. They figured it out in Argentina though.

Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. It is an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers: "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

Read the whole thing. It's worth it.

Once again, South America shows us the way when it comes to social movements.

Labels: argentina, corporate greed