article reflection
WHO GETS WHAT AND WHY?
As beneficiaries of a system that paid them way out of proportion to any effort or virtue of their own, the superrich are entitled to some of their wealth, but not all.
They should give a lot of it back.
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QUESTIONS
1. Why do the rich get rich in America? 2. Should the rich "give a lot of it back"?
CASES
CASE 5.1
Revolution Without Ideology
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows.
An extraordinary chapter in capitalist history is being written today in Argentina. Call it revolu- tion without ideology, or serendipitous employee ownership. Call it a reminder that property rights originate at the point of a gun. Whatever words we use cannot do justice to the remarkable events themselves. In Buenos Aires, every week brings news of a new worker occupation-a four-star hotel now run by its cleaning staff, a supermarket taken over by its clerks, a regional airline about to be turned into a cooperative by the pilots and attendants. In Trotskyist journals around the world, Argentina's occupied fact9ries are giddily hailed as the dawn of a socialist utopia, because workers have "seized the means of production." In The Economist, the worker-run factories are described as a threat to the sacred principle of private property. The truth lies in between.
Take the Brukman textile factory in Buenos Aires. Brukman has been producing men's suits for 50 years, and since December it's been doing it without managers. The means of production weren't seized-they were simply picked up after being abandoned by their owners. The factory had been in decline for years, with debts to utility companies piling up. Seamstresses had seen salaries slashed from 100 pesos a week to two pesos-not enough for bus fare.
In December 2002, the workers demanded a travel allowance. The owners, pleading poverty, told them to wait at the factory while they looked for the money. "We waited until night," said Brukman worker Celia Martinez. "No one came."
Getting the keys from the doorman, workers slept at the factory that night. They've been running it ever since. They've paid the outstanding bills, attracted new clients and-without profits and management salaries to worry about-paid themselves steady salaries. All these decisions have been made by vote
From Business Ethics, Summer 2003, p. 6. Reprinted by permission of Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc.
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in open assemblies of the 58 workers. "I don't know why the owners had such a hard time," Martinez says. "I don't know much about accounting, but for me it's easy: addition and subtraction."
Like other garment factories, Brukman is filled with women hunched over sewing machines, eyes straining and fingers flying. What makes Brukman different are the sounds. Along with the roar of machines is the Bolivian folk music, coming from a tape deck at the back of the room. And there are soft voices, as older workers show younger ones new stitches. "Before," says Martinez says, "they wouldn't let us get up from our workspaces or listen to music. But why not listen to music, to lift the spirits a bit?"
In dozens of cases like Brukman's, workers have been awarded legal expropriation by the courts- much like squatters allowed to claim ownership of occupied buildings. Lawyers of the Brukman workers argue that factory owners have violated principles of business by failing to pay employees and creditors, while collecting huge subsidies from the state. Why can't the state now insist that the indebted companies' assets continue to serve the public with steady jobs?
In Brukman's case, the argument hasn't worked. A federal judge has ordered the workers evicted, writing-in a remarkable statement-that "Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests." Property rights trump all other rights.
Those preeminent rights were enforced in April, when police carried out the judge's eviction order in the middle of the night. They turned the entire block into a military zone guarded by machine guns and attack dogs. Unable to get into the factory and complete an order for 3,000 pairs of dress trousers, the workers gathered a huge crowd of supporters
HONEST WORK
and announced it was time to go back to work. At 5 p.m., 50 middle-aged seamstresses in no-nonsense haircuts, sensible shoes, and blue smocks walked up to the police fence. Someone pushed, the fence fell. The Brukman women-unarmed and arm in arm- slowly walked through.
They had taken only a few steps when the police began shooting: tear gas, water cannons, rubber bul- lets, then lead. Dozens were injured-for the crime of trying to sew trousers. ·
"They are afraid of us because we have shown that, if we can manage a factory, we can also manage a country," Martinez said. "That's why this govern- ment decided to repress us." There may also be fear of the sheer magnitude of what is underway. In the past 18 months, almost 200 factories employing more than 10,000 nationwide have been taken over and run by workers.
It's a new kind of labor movement, based not on the power to stop working (the traditional union tac- tic) but on the dogged determination to keep working no matter what. It's a demand driven not by dogma but by realism: In a country where 58 percent of the population is in poverty, workers are a paycheck away from having to scavenge to surviv~. A revolu- tion may be underway, but it's not driven by ideology. The specter haunting Argentina's occupied factories is not communism, but indigence.
QUESTIONS
1. Did these women have a moral justification for taking over their factory?
2. Aside from the legal arguments, did the factory owners have a good moral argument for stopping the women from running the factory?