Counter-Hegemony at Work: Resistance, Contradiction and Emergent Culture Inside A Worker-Occupied Hotel

EVANS: COUNTER-HEGEMONY 33
Counter-Hegemony at Work: Resistance,

Contradiction and Emergent Culture Inside a
Worker-Occupied Hotel
William Todd Evans1
Abstract
This paper is an ethnographic account of the everyday practices and

contradictions that characterize workers’ efforts to build an egalitarian
and participatory-democratic workplace in one of Argentina’s recovered
enterprises, the Bauen Hotel. I argue that despite instances of exclusion
and inequality among workers, the everyday experiences of collective
resistance and formal equality that permeate daily work-life within the
hotel are facilitating the emergence of a workplace culture that is
fundamentally distinct from that found inside a traditional capitalist
enterprise. I contend that this emergent culture inside the Bauen is
characterized by both a latent assumption of equality among workers as
well as a shared oppositional identity between them vis-à-vis hostile
external actors. My analysis joins insights from the study of workplace
democracy with those from the study of social movements and culture to
show how establishing egalitarian and democratic social relations in
worker cooperatives can be both limited and facilitated through social
movement activity. Consistent with the work of other social movement
scholars, my research shows that while social structure imposes
constraints on how movements construct meaning, the interaction
between movement actors and social structural forces can be generative
of new, oppositional cultural forms.
Introduction
In 1978, ruled by military dictatorship, Argentina played host to

the World Cup soccer tournament. With U.S. secretary of state Henry
Kissinger as its invited guest of honor, the military junta used the
tournament as an opportunity to project an image of national unity and
1
Direct correspondence to William Todd Evans, Department of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts Amherst, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall, Amherst, MA 01003
(wtodd@soc.umass.edu). I want to thank the following people at the University of
Massachusetts for their support and helpful feedback on this paper at various stages of its
development: Millie Thayer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Robert Zussman, Randall Stokes, Dan
Clawson, Gerald Platt, Amy Loomis, Sofia Checa, Kathleen Hulton, Dustin Avent-Holt and
Yasser Munif. I am especially grateful to Esteban Magnani and Chuchi Guichal for
providing me with indispensable logistical support during my time in Buenos Aires and for
sharing their insightful perspectives on the recovered enterprises.
34 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
peace on the world stage during the height of its systematic repression of
the Argentine Left and anyone else it labeled as “subversive” (Taylor
1997: 113). In preparation for the event, the military government financed
the construction of a number of hotels to accommodate the influx of
foreign tourists. The Bauen Hotel, a 220-room hotel located in the heart
of downtown Buenos Aires, was one these buildings. As a result of its
connection to the military dictatorship, as well as its function as a
meeting space for Argentina’s political and economic elite during the 80s
and early 90s, many from the country’s marginalized classes saw the
Bauen as a symbol of an oppressive and corrupt past. However, like many
businesses in Argentina during the late 90s, the Bauen was not immune to
the effects of economic recession and eventually filed for bankruptcy in
2000. Since its closure in December 2001 though, the Bauen has been
acquiring a new kind of significance.
On March 21st, 2003, spurred by the need to survive in a

collapsed economy, a group of Bauen workers forcefully occupied the
boarded-up hotel. After fending off eviction threats and refurbishing the
dilapidated interior for over a year, these workers reopened the Bauen as
a cooperative in August of 2004. Today, despite an ongoing conflict with
the ex-owner to acquire a legal expropriation of the building, the Bauen is
operating at 80 percent capacity and has been able to hire approximately
80 additional workers. The hotel functions as a regular meeting space for
various political parties, trade unions, and progressive activists from
Argentina and abroad; members of the Venezuelan military and current
Bolivian president Evo Morales have been amongst the more notable of
the Bauen’s recent guests (Magnani, personal interview 2005). Collective
decision-making processes and an egalitarian ethos have formally
replaced the hierarchical and authoritarian forms of organization that
characterized work-life at the hotel in the past. Now, according to
workers, the Bauen is operating “sin jefes o patrones” (without bosses or
owners) where “everyone works, nobody orders.”1
The recovery of the Bauen has its origins in a wave of popular

resistance by Argentineans in 2001-2002 following the country’s
financial collapse, itself a product of neoliberal economic “reforms”
implemented in Argentina throughout the 1990s. Although the scale and
intensity of this popular revolt has since dissipated, some recovered
enterprises, like the Bauen, continue to struggle with former owners over
the future of the enterprises. It is my general contention that this context
of social movement struggle matters for the production of oppositional
cultural forms inside the Bauen, most importantly its collective and
horizontal decision-making processes. More specifically, I argue that the
everyday experiences of collective resistance and formal equality that
permeate daily work-life within the hotel are facilitating the emergence of
1
Interview with Vivica, Bauen worker, July 2, 2005.
a workplace culture that is fundamentally distinct from that found inside a
traditional capitalist enterprise. I contend that this emergent culture inside
the Bauen is characterized by both a latent assumption of equality among
workers as well as a shared oppositional identity between them vis-à-vis
hostile external actors. To understand theoretically the social processes
behind this production of oppositional culture within the hotel, my
analysis joins insights from the study of workplace democracy with those
from the study of social movements and culture.
While some of the English-language literature on worker

cooperatives has acknowledged the generative and sustaining influence of
social movement activity on democracy within cooperatives, this work
has provided neither a detailed nor a theoretically elaborated analysis of
how a cooperative’s expressed commitment to equality and democracy
are nurtured by existing within such a context (Fletcher 1976; Greenberg
1986; Rothschild and Whitt 1986). However, the work of social
movement scholars who examine how movement actors come to produce
new oppositional meanings and practices offers a number of theoretical
insights that allow us to gain a more nuanced understanding of this
relationship (Fantasia 1988; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995;
Steinberg 1999; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Klatch 2002; Reger 2002;
Robnett 2002; Whittier 2002; Polletta 2006). Their research shows us that
some of the qualities that scholars of workplace democracy cite as
important for creating egalitarian and democratic relations in
cooperatives—such as a shared culture and group solidarity—can be
generated and sustained through social movement activity (Gamson and
Levin 1984; Rothschild and Whitt 1986). Generally speaking, these social
movement scholars show how new cultural forms (collective identities,
movement discourses, institutional practices) arise out of the productive
tension that exists between the agency of social movement actors, on the
one hand, and the social structural forces in which movement actors are
embedded on the other. By bringing these scholar’s general insights to
bear on the Bauen, I intend to give a “multilayered view” of how
workplace democracy, and the production of oppositional culture more
generally, is both facilitated and constrained through social movement
activity (Whittier 2002: 289).
The Bauen workers’ effort to reconfigure social life within the

hotel is happening in two interrelated ways. On one level, there has been
a formal implementation of new, horizontal decision-making and
authority structures. However, on another level, there is a continuous
effort by workers and activists to imbue the recovered hotel and the new
forms of social interaction happening inside it with oppositional sets of
meaning; that is, with particular types of meaning that represent a critique
of the dominant culture (Fantasia 1988). This latter point was succinctly
illustrated by Alicia2, a housekeeper for over 25 years and one of the
2
I have replaced the real names of all Bauen workers with pseudonyms.
initial participants in the occupation of the Bauen. Around the time of our
conversation, Alicia discovered that a group of younger workers had
made a mess in one of the Bauen’s guest bathrooms and did not clean it
up. Using this example, Alicia passionately explained to me why she
continues to fight for the Bauen and take it upon herself to lecture
coworkers on the significance of the recovered hotel, particularly those
workers who may mistreat hotel property as if they were working for a
regular boss:
I like showing society that workers can work and maintain a

workplace, that is my greatest… it’s my pride, it’s my pride […] I
feel very proud to show these government sons of a thousand bitches
and that one great whore of a mother who gave them life (estos hijos
de mil putas del gobierno y toda la puta madre que los parió) that we
workers can! That is my pride! That is why I struggle so much and I
try to be understood [by fellow coworkers]. I don’t do it because I’m
annoying or because I’m proud or nothing. I want my colleagues to
understand that workers have to plow ahead, that we can, that we
don’t need some […] son-of-a-thousand-bitches capitalist keeping us
under his heel, trampling us and harming us and a whole lot of other
things like we’ve gone through before! (Personal interview. Emphasis
added)
Alicia’s remarks suggest that the process of creating a new

workplace culture in the Bauen not only requires a formal revamping of
old organizational structures, but also the creation and subjective
absorption of new shared meanings and ideas to govern desired forms of
behavior and social interaction (Forgacs 2000). By “culture” I mean the
totality of “symbolic vehicles” such as beliefs, language, and “rituals of
daily life” that embody and transmit a set of meanings collectively shared
by a social group (Swidler 1986: 273). Moreover, Alicia’s comments
illustrate how the process of building a new workplace culture at the
Bauen is shaped by the daily intervention and maintenance of individual
workers.
Outside the Bauen, the worker-controlled hotel has been

described as a “concrete experience in the fight against exploitation of
oppressed sectors [that] continues planting seeds for new social relations”
(Trigona 2005a:2). Within similar journalistic accounts, Bauen social life
has been characterized as “free from bosses and managers” where all
“105 employees vote to decide budgeting, staffing, and operational
decisions” (Raimbeau 2005:3; Freeman 2005:2). However, as I will
show, such depictions mute the internal tensions and real instances of
exclusion that characterize social life and decision-making processes
within the Bauen. At the same time, I argue that such external depictions
are themselves integral to the process of meaning-making and cultural
production occurring within the Bauen.
While the process of meaning-making and cultural production

occurring within the hotel is stimulated by the conscious, everyday efforts
of Bauen workers and activists, it is also a process shaped by the
particular cultural and political context in which the Bauen is embedded.
On the one hand, I argue that the meanings Bauen workers attribute to
their actions are influenced by the social climate that exists in Argentina
nationally following the country’s financial collapse and corresponding
crisis of legitimacy within its political system. On the other hand, the
production of oppositional cultural forms within the Bauen is both
constrained and facilitated through various symbolic and material
interventions made by the external actors involved in the workers’
struggle to expropriate the hotel, namely the hotel’s former owner, the
local government, and sympathetic journalists on the Left.
Workplace Democracy and Culture
Within capitalist societies, the democratic structure of many

worker cooperatives simultaneously embodies a critique of the dominant
organization of production found in most conventional enterprises, and
puts forth an “outline” of what an alternative society can look like
(Jackall and Levin 1984: 11). According to Robert Jackall and Henry
Levin (1984), this is why cooperatives “allow social thinkers to look two
ways at once” (11). Historically, however, worker cooperatives have
varied in the degree in which they represent a true critique of the existing
capitalist order and offer hope that a more egalitarian system of social
production is possible. In fact, it has been empirically demonstrated that a
good number of cooperatives begin to resemble capitalist enterprises over
time. From the early 20th century “democracies of producers” in England,
to the cooperative system of Mondragón, Spain, to bus cooperatives in
Israel—different scholars have detailed how the egalitarian impulses of
cooperative workers can be gradually undermined by various structural
and cultural factors that create obstacles to building participatory-
democratic workplaces (Webb 1920:29; Gamson and Levin 1984; Russell
1995; Kasmir 1996). As social theorists Sidney and Beatrice Webb
(1920) pessimistically saw it, all cooperatives were inevitably doomed to
degenerate into “associations of capitalists” as a consequence of the
“perpetual temptation” to profit induced by competing within a market
system (155, 156).
Some other scholars, however, argue that workers have agency

in establishing and protecting the egalitarian and democratic integrity of
cooperatives. As they see it, the internal culture of cooperatives and the
particular social, political, and economic context in which cooperatives
operate are key variables in determining whether their internal
organization retains a horizontal and participatory character (Gamson and
Levin 1984; Greenberg 1986; Rothschild and Whitt 1986). For instance,
sociologist Edward Greenberg argues that forms of worker self-
management “that arise in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval [are]
generally animated by the same forces that sustain the revolutionary
struggle itself” (1986: 160). Similarly, Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen

Whitt argue that participatory workplaces arising within the context of a
larger social movement are less likely to “displace” initial commitments
to equality and democracy as the organization grows in size or confronts
other potential obstacles to building a true participatory democracy
(1986: 128). In short, contrary to the structural pessimism of the Webb’s
and other early social theorists such as Robert Michels, the work of
Rothschild and Whitt, Greenberg, and others suggests that degenerating
into an oligarchic enterprise is not a structural inevitability confronting
worker cooperatives (Michels 1962). Rather, as Rothschild and Whitt put
it, workplace democracy is “conditional” (1986: 75). Taking this insight
as a point of departure, my analysis of the Bauen brings a cultural
approach to bear on understanding how participatory-democratic
workplaces are created and sustained. In particular, I will examine how
the presence of external conflict shapes this process.
Social movement scholars have shown how movement actors do

not construct new cultural forms out of thin-air or solely through their
own volition. Meaning-making, collective identities, and the creation of
new patterns of social interaction are not the willed products of
movement activists or “organic intellectuals,” but emerge out of a
complex of relational processes among movement actors themselves and
within the larger structural and discursive environments in which they are
embedded (Fantasia 1988; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995;
Steinberg 1999; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Klatch 2002; Reger 2002;
Robnett 2002; Whittier 2002; Polletta 2006). For instance, the work of
Marc Steinberg on 19th century English cotton-spinners shows how the
discursive material available to social movements in legitimizing their
claims can be limited by the particular discourses dominating the political
and economic context in which those movements exist (Steinberg 1999).
As Steinberg illustrates, while spinners exhibited agency in their
redefinition of appropriated ideas, particularly the labor theory of value
and notion of private property, the symbolic material available for
appropriation and manipulation was constrained by the dominant
discourses of liberalism and political economy defining the bounds of the
“hegemonic field” (1999: 762). As I will show later, this idea of
discursive “limits” is particularly useful for understanding why Bauen
workers characterize their efforts to recover the hotel as “apolitical” and
simply about “work.” While Steinberg’s work shows that social structure
imposes constraints on how movements construct meaning, it also
illustrates how the interaction between movement actors and social
structural forces can be generative of new, oppositional cultural forms.
In studying the effects of social conflict on group cohesion,

sociologists Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser were among the first to point
out the importance of relational processes for understanding cultural
production within collectivities (Simmel 1955; Coser 1956). Since then,
scholars studying how solidarity and collective identity emerge within
social movements have given us additional insights about the interactive
relationship between conflict, meaning-making, and culture (Fantasia
1988; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995; Klatch 2002). For
instance, in his analysis of the “lived experience of class,” sociologist
Rick Fantasia (1988) argues that working-class solidarity should be
understood as a set of cultural practices that emerge out of a process of
struggle between workers and hostile adversaries:
Cultures of solidarity are formed out of friction and opposition itself.

That is, solidarity is to a considerable degree formed and intensified
in interaction with the opposition itself. (14, 233)
More specifically, interaction with a hostile employer can generate new

collective practices among workers, such as unions, strikes, or
community support networks, which contain “active expressions of
worker solidarity” or, in other terms, shared oppositional meaning
(Fantasia 1988: 19). According to Fantasia, it is the social structural
relationship between workers and employers within capitalist society, that
is, the class struggle itself, which is generative of these new, oppositional
forms of culture among the working class. Notwithstanding the real
divisions and tensions that exist between workers in the Bauen, Fantasia’s
work allows us to see the Bauen workers’ practices of operating the hotel
on their own terms and collectively resisting attempts by authorities to
shut it down as acts that are simultaneously generative of worker
solidarity and “emergent in [their] embodiment of oppositional practices
and meanings” (1988: 11,17).
Social movement scholars looking at the relationship between

group identity formation and collective action have also focused their
analysis on the interactive processes between movement actors and
adversaries (Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995; Klatch 2002). In
their work on collective identity and lesbian feminist movements,
sociologists Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier (1992) point out that
collective identity formation begins with a marginalized group’s
appropriation and “reverse reaffirmation” of the “social, political,
economic, and cultural boundaries” that have been imposed on them by
more powerful groups (510). As Taylor and Whittier put it:
Boundary markers are central to the formation of collective identity

because they promote a heightened awareness of a group’s
commonalities and frame interaction between members of the in-
group and the out-group (510).
In the case of the Bauen, workers have explicitly rejected certain

categories imposed on them by the previous management, such as the
term “employee.” Within the recovered Bauen, the appropriated category
“worker” has been infused with oppositional meaning. Specifically, the
term is used by many workers to not only emphasize the absence of
formal hierarchy within the hotel, but also to delineate the commonalities
among Bauen workers vis-à-vis the ex-owner and other hostile outside
actors. As I show below in the case of inspections of the hotel by state
authorities, it is the constant interaction between workers and hostile
actors that continuously reinforces this collective identity among Bauen
workers.
The work of social movement scholars reminds us of the

importance of relational processes in understanding how movement
actors make meaning and produce new cultural forms. Far from
romanticizing the agency of marginalized groups, their work makes clear
that there is an interactive relationship between social structure and
human agency in the production of oppositional culture. With respect to
workplace democracy, the insights of social movement scholars provide
us with a theoretical platform on which to build an analysis of how
collective decision-making processes and egalitarian relations in
cooperatives can be both constrained and nurtured through social
movement activity.
Researching the Bauen Hotel
My analysis of the Bauen is informed by the daily observation of

life in the hotel over the course of three weeks in July 2005. While I spent
the latter two weeks of this period living at the Bauen, I commuted daily
to the hotel from a suburb in Greater Buenos Aires during the first week.
Most of my days at the hotel were spent talking to workers, eating in the
hotel’s restaurant and bar—which was often frequented by journalists and
activists from Argentina and abroad—and talking with other guests and
visitors to the hotel, including workers from other recovered enterprises.
Observing life at the hotel over these three weeks allowed me to
experience directly the day-to-day events and routines that characterize
work-life in the hotel, including how the workers’ external conflict
physically manifests within the hotel in the form of disruptive police
inspections and visits by city officials.
In addition to observation, I also conducted interviews with 16

workers and activists affiliated with the Bauen Hotel and Argentina’s
recovered enterprise movement. Most of my interviews were open-ended
and lasted for one hour, while a few of them lasted from 20 minutes to
over two hours. All interviews were conducted in Spanish with the aid of
an interpreter, with the exception of three that were conducted in English.
All interviews were digitally recorded and translated after I left the field.
I held in-depth, formal interviews with ten workers from the

Bauen Hotel. Nine of these were with workers who had participated in
the initial “take” of the hotel and/or participated in the subsequent
occupation and refurbishing of the hotel before its reopening. Of these
nine workers, one identified herself as a new worker and was not part of
the legal cooperative entity. I was able to interview one other new
worker, David, who did not begin working at the Bauen until after its
reopening.3 In addition to these ten interviews, I interviewed four
activists affiliated with various organizations that either worked closely
with the Bauen’s administration council and/or worked in the hotel on a
daily basis. These activists all regularly attended collective assembly
meetings.
My interviewees in the Bauen were strategically selected

informants. In particular, I chose informants who were best able to help
me reconstruct the hotel’s history and give me a more nuanced sense of
social life within the Bauen. During my first few days in the hotel I
sought out those workers who had been employees under the Bauen’s ex-
owner and who had actively participated in the initial occupation of the
building. While these particular workers made it a point to emphasize the
egalitarian and democratic character of social life in the new Bauen, some
of their remarks hinted at the existence of real tensions between groups of
workers in the hotel, especially in regard to relations between older and
newly hired workers. Specifically, these early interviews were often
characterized by conflicting information about the extent to which newly
hired workers could participate in the decision-making process.
Therefore, after these interviews I actively sought out newer workers,
activists, and other older workers willing to speak candidly about the
tensions between those workers who initially occupied and restored the
hotel and those hired later.
Outside of the Bauen, I interviewed Esteban Magnani, a

journalist actively involved with the movement, and Eduardo Murúa, the
president of the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas4
(M.N.E.R). Murúa is also a former worker at the aluminum factory,
IMPA, one of the first successful examples of the recovered enterprise
model in Argentina (Magnani personal interview 2003). The perspectives
of Magnani and Murúa made crucial contributions to my analysis of the
Bauen, especially their insights about the internal dilemmas facing other
recovered enterprises.
Lastly, it is important to point out that many of my interviews with

Bauen workers and activists were themselves used as “spaces” of
3
Because my paper addresses relations between the 38 or so workers who were part of
occupation process and the approximately 80 or so who were not, the fact that I was only
able to interview one worker who was not part of the occupation process is an obvious
limitation of my data. However, I do not believe that this limitation is significant or
undermines my analysis. A substantial part of my analysis relies on an interpretation of
significant events that have occurred within the hotel, such as newer workers’ inclusion in
assemblies, and not exclusively on my interviews with individual workers.
4
National Movement of Recovered Enterprises
meaning-making and political intervention in their struggle with the

hotel’s ex-owner (Auyero 2002:179). Sociologist Javier Auyero (2002)
argues that the ethnographic interview can be an opportunity for people to
“insert themselves into the public narratives in which they are not usually
allowed to have any presence” (176). Auyero’s insight was encapsulated
by a particular incident that happened during one of my early interviews.
On the day that I interviewed Stephan, an older worker, the Yurkoviches
took out a quarter page advertisement in the major Argentine newspaper,
La Nacion, to denounce workers’ recovery of the hotel. Referring to their
efforts as “illegitimate” and the workers themselves as “invaders,”
“illegitimate occupants,” and “occupiers,” the ad represents a concrete
attempt to influence public perceptions of the hotel (La Nacion, 6/28/05:
3). Stephan brought my attention to this ad after his colleague, Vivica,
walked into the office during our interview and asked Stephan,
suspiciously, who I was and why I was at the hotel. After assuring Vivica
that I was not a journalist with sinister intentions, our interview
proceeded and Stephan used it as an opportunity to refute claims made in
the ad and present evidence of why Marcello Yurkovich never legally
owned the property (Personal interview June 20, 2005). Many of the
interviews I conducted with Bauen workers were similarly used as
opportunities to refute particular characterizations of the hotel made by
adversaries and to offer alternative representations. This fact should
inform the reader’s interpretation of the inconsistencies that exist between
how some workers and activists ideally represent the Bauen, that is, as a
completely egalitarian and democratic space, and some of the actual
events and daily practices that characterize social relations within the
hotel. Seen within this context of symbolic struggle with the hotel’s ex-
owner, such idealized representations should not be read cynically as
manipulations of “the truth” about social life inside the Bauen, but as acts
of meaning-making deployed defensively against efforts by a more
powerful adversary to delegitimize workers’ recovery of the hotel.
The 90s, Argentine Social Movements, and the Crash: Situating the
Bauen Hotel
Neo-liberal restructuring of Argentina’s economy accelerated

during the early 1990s and began to impact workers and domestic
employers by the latter half of the decade. Implemented by then-president
Carlos Menem and his administration, so-called “structural adjustment”
policies included the increased privatization of publicly owned industries;
the shrinking of state loans to small and medium-sized companies
coupled with expanded market access for imported goods; and an
artificially induced “one-to-one” exchange rate between the Argentine
peso and U.S. dollar. As these policies took effect throughout the country,
many employers in small and medium-sized companies began to file for
bankruptcy and/or attempted to offset diminishing profits through a
variety of cost-cutting mechanisms, such as defaulting on workers’
pensions or slashing wages. In some cases, employers simply abandoned
their enterprises altogether (Pozzi 2000; Palomino 2003).
At the Bauen Hotel, owners began to lose money as tourism in

Argentina dwindled and the parity between the Argentine peso and the
U.S. dollar made the hotel’s nightly rate more expensive, especially for
those living in Argentina (Loren 2005; Stephan, Personal interview June
28, 2005). In 1997, Marcello Yurkovich allegedly sold the hotel to the
Chilean corporation, Solari. However, some workers describe the transfer
to Solari as just one of a number of elaborate schemes Yurkovich used to
pressure workers into accepting cuts to their wages and pensions:
Every two years, more or less, [Yurkovich] would have it sold and
the workers had to make do with 2.50 pesos. If you didn’t want to
work for that you would get fired. I only got the Solari [transfer], but
Vivica, Maritza and others here, they’ve been working here for seven,
eight, nine years. Vivica, I think, went through four corporation
changes and she’s been here for six years. She was very nervous for
two years because she was going to lose her accumulated benefits.
(Alicia, Personal interview, July 11, 2005)
In addition to wage cuts, many Bauen workers were simply

fired. By the time Solari declared bankruptcy and boarded up the hotel in
December of 2001, only 90 workers remained out of an initial workforce
of more than 200 (Joseph, Personal interview June 27, 2005).
Rise of Argentina’s Social Movements
Throughout the 1990s, structural adjustment policies and the

recession they induced propelled unemployed workers and poor
communities throughout Argentina to develop innovative strategies of
collective resistance toward the daily manifestations of poverty (Auyero
2002). For instance, poor and working class neighborhoods established
popular kitchens to feed local residents, while many poor and
unemployed workers organized and put pressure on state authorities to
provide more jobs and relief assistance to their communities. The
defining tactic of these piqueteros was the mobilization of mass picket
lines across major freeways, roads, and bridges in Buenos Aires and other
cities and towns throughout the country (Epstein 2003; Palomino 2003).
During the mid and late 90s, workers in some fledgling or

abandoned enterprises also fought to protect their sources of income by
forming cooperatives and taking over production themselves, while
petitioning the state to grant them a form of legal status to operate the
enterprise. In some cases workers made agreements to become
shareholders of the company (Palomino 2003; Eduardo Murúa, Personal
interview, July 13, 2005). However, in the latter half of the decade, some
workers began to forcefully occupy their workplaces and demand full
expropriations of the enterprises. In 2000, worker-representatives from

some of these and other worker-controlled enterprises met at the
aluminum factory IMPA in Buenos Aires to discuss the idea of linking
and consolidating these “recovered enterprises” into an organizational
structure that could provide resources and logistical support to workers in
other enterprises threatened with unemployment and looking for
alternatives. A loose organizational entity, the Movimiento Nacional de
Empresas Recuperadas (M.N.E.R.), formed out of this meeting (Magnani
2003; Eduardo Murúa, Personal interview, July 13, 2005).5
Following the financial collapse in December 2001, a reform in

the national bankruptcy law granted trustees of bankrupt enterprises the
power to allow workers in such businesses to restart production. While
this law allowed workers facing unemployment the option of continuing
production, it did not guarantee workers any priority in purchasing the
enterprise when it came up for auction, which was usually after two years
(Ranis 2005; 2006). However, along with the emerging coherence of
recovered enterprises into several loose support networks, such as the
M.N.E.R., this tepid assistance by the state made the recovery of bankrupt
or abandoned enterprises an attractive alternative for workers already
unemployed or threatened with unemployment during the crisis
(Palomino 2003; Magnani 2003).
To understand the explosive growth of the recovered enterprises,

and particularly the militant tone of tactics deployed by Argentine social
movements in general following the crisis of late December 2001 and
early 2002, it is necessary to illustrate the social and economic climate of
the period. In 1992, less than 15% of the Argentine population was
classified as living below the poverty line. Approximately ten years later,
in June of 2002, this number had grown to 51.4% (Petras and Veltmeyer
2003: 70). James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2003) point out that
unemployment levels during this period were as high as 60% in some
suburbs, and around 30% nationally (72). They also calculate that during
the first five months of 2002, the number of Argentine poor grew at a rate
of 25,000 per day (70). Of the nearly 14 million people living below the
poverty line in December 2001, an Observer article noted that “half
belonged to the country’s large middle class only five years [before]”
(Arie 2001:2). In describing the crisis, Petras and Veltmeyer argue that
the rapid “downward mobility and the impoverishment of the working
and middle classes [were] reminiscent of the worst years of the US
Depression of the 1930s and of Weimar Germany in the 1920s” (72).
5
The M.N.E.R. is one of a few different loosely organized federations under which some of
the recovered enterprises are grouped. However, it should be emphasized that these
federations do not exercise any direct control over the internal decision-making processes of
recovered enterprises.
The period of December 2001-02 was also a time of “hegemonic
crisis” for Argentina’s ruling classes (Hunt 1990: 314). That is, economic
collapse was coupled with such a profound popular disillusionment with
the political status quo that the country’s politicians could no longer
govern with the impunity they had enjoyed in the past. A decisive
majority of the country’s population now held Argentina’s politicians
responsible for the economic crisis, asserting that it was they who had put
the country into debt with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
sold off the country’s key industrial sectors and natural resources to the
highest bidder throughout the 90s. Shouting “que se vayan todos” (they
all must go!), mass protests in the streets of Buenos Aires beginning on
December 19th and 20th continued over the next two weeks and forcefully
removed four successive presidents, with one having to flee the
government house by helicopter (Magnani 2003; Petras and Veltmeyer
2003; Sitrin 2006). As Petras and Veltmeyer note, never before in
Argentina’s history had a collective revolt succeeded in ousting either an
“elected or dictatorial leader” (94). These mass protests were
complimented by an upsurge in the creation of neighborhood assemblies,
community kitchens, and other forms of popular mobilization within
many of Buenos Aires’ middle and working-class districts. In short, the
crisis had created a political and social climate that was receptive to new,
popular proposals for alleviating the country’s socioeconomic woes
(Magnani 2003; Petras and Veltmeyer 2003; Sitrin 2006). The model of
recovering bankrupt enterprises through worker control was another
proposal.
At the time of this research, the recovered enterprise movement

as a whole consists of approximately 170 recovered enterprises and
provides a source of income for over 10,000 workers, out of a total labor
force of around 18 million (Raimbeau 2005; World Bank 2005). Across
Argentina, the state’s relationship to the recovered enterprises has been
anything but uniform and consistent. While sympathetic and supportive in
some cases, it has been hostile and repressive in others (Itzigsohn
forthcoming). For example, in the province of Neuquén, the recovered
ceramics factory, Zanón, has fought off several aggressive attempts by
the provincial government to evict workers. However, in November 2004,
the Buenos Aires city council passed legislation in favor of the definitive
expropriation of 13 recovered enterprises within the city (Trigona 2005b;
Dangl 2005; Ranis 2005). Sociologist Jose Itzigsohn (forthcoming)
argues that such variance in the state’s behavior toward recovered
enterprises can be explained by several factors. In his view, the particular
composition of legislatures, the degree to which a previous owner
pressures courts to issue eviction orders, or even the political
philosophies of judges hearing expropriation cases, can all shape how the
state engages with particular enterprises.
Taking the Bauen
The initial “take”6 of the Bauen and workers’ subsequent efforts

over the following year to resist eviction and restore the building is an
important period for understanding some of the tensions shaping the
hotel’s internal politics. Moreover, the experiences of workers during this
period are pertinent to the development of a particular narrative about the
hotel that informs how many workers represent the Bauen and its recent
history, both to themselves and to visitors to the hotel.
“This isn’t about arms and sticks”
The logistics for taking the Bauen developed out of a series of

meetings between M.N.E.R. activists, including Eduardo Murúa, and a
small group of Bauen workers. Murúa and his colleagues provided
material support in the form of legal advice on how workers could
become legally associated as a cooperative, as well as fronted the 12
pesos per-person registration fee required to do so (Alicia, Interview wit h
author July 11, 2005). After organizing a group of approximately 80
people, workers forcefully entered the building on March 21st, 2003
(Freeman 2005). Although only 10 or so Bauen workers were among the
large group of movement organizers, students, and community members
who initially broke into the building, approximately twenty-five other
workers came to participate in the occupation over the next few days and
weeks. Hugo, a 60 year-old worker who was hired at the Bauen during
the late 90s, was one of them:
On Sunday I got here in the afternoon. It was dark, everything

covered…and it made me a little scared […] The only thing I felt was
that I could eventually have a steady job, nothing else, nothing else.
Because no matter how much hope and expectations you created, it
was still an abandoned place. You ask [yourself] ‘What can I do here?
I don’t have any money, I don’t have anything, so, what can I do
here?’ It’s asking a lot. (Personal interview, July 5, 2005)
Most workers who came to the Bauen at this time were either
desperate for work, or, like Hugo, tired of working part-time jobs with no
secure source of income. For this reason many workers characterize their
motivations as “apolitical.” In a Christian Science Monitor article written
one month after the building’s occupation, a Bauen worker collecting
coin donations from passersby proclaims: “But this movement isn’t
political; we are workers who are fighting because we don’t have jobs,
nothing more” (Byrnes 2003: 3). Similarly, in discussing how Bauen
workers still rely on the generosity of supporters, Maritza told me:
6
The expression “the take” is commonly used by workers and activists involved in
recovered enterprise movement to refer to the first phase of the process of occupation:
physically entering and occupying the enterprise in question.
The hotel is fixed about seventy to eighty percent; we still need to

repair more. That is why I always ask for help whenever we [have a
march] or a festival, whenever there is something. We are apolitical,
we don’t favor a specific party, we receive help from everybody
(Personal interview, June 25, 2005, emphasis added).
The notion that the Bauen, as well as other recovered

enterprises, are “apolitical” is a theme that permeates many workers and
activists’ representations of the recovered enterprise movement as a
whole (Briscoe 2002:1; Loren 2005; Sitrin 2006:4). As evidenced in my
interviews, this characterization of the Bauen is used to stress that
workers’ efforts to reclaim and operate the hotel are autonomous from the
influence of political parties and are not governed by some larger
ideological vision. As Anibal puts it: “This cooperative isn’t about arms
and sticks. We are here because of work [and] we don’t go with any
political party” (Personal interview, June 25, 2005. Emphasis added).
As workers describe it, the year of occupation before the

Bauen’s reopening in 2004 was one of intense personal hardship and
uncertainty. Maritza, a worker in her 60s, described conditions inside the
hotel during the first winter after the take:
Well, the winter came [and] it was very crude. It was amazing that
year. Almost all of us got sick [and] we didn’t have any medicine.
Each one of us gave three, five pesos to buy the medicines […] There
wasn’t a heater…we [didn’t have] gas, we [didn’t have] water,
nothing. We brought water in bottles that the bar next door gave to us.
We cooked with that. All the candles [we had] burned out because we
watched the hotel 24 hours a day so [no one] that didn’t belong to our
group entered in the hotel. Things stayed like that for a year or
more…I wouldn’t wish this on anybody (Personal interview, June 25,
2005).
While trying to obtain enough provisions to sustain themselves,

workers began the daunting task of cleaning and refurbishing the 20-story
structure. Shortly after entering the building workers were granted a
limited tenancy permit by the bankruptcy judge handling their case. This
permit allowed workers to legally operate the hotel’s first floor theatre
and several large meeting rooms, but it restricted their use of the building
beyond the first three floors. However, all of the meeting rooms were in
poor condition. Lacking the resources necessary to repair them, workers
traded access to these rooms in exchange for essential supplies: “The first
time we rented [a meeting room] was by trade. We got toilet paper,
detergent…things that were necessary to do the cleaning.” However, such
bartering was not restricted to cleaning supplies: “On another occasion
we traded with doctors because we needed medicines, but it was also
aberrant because they gave us a bag full of free samples” (Maritza,
Personal interview, June 25, 2005). During this period many workers also
took up permanent residence in the hotel’s empty guest rooms: “We had
about 40 rooms that people were living in” (Stephan, Personal interview,
June 28, 2005).7 Ultimately, workers ignored the parameters of their

limited tenancy permit and gradually began renting out the rest of the
hotel as the guest rooms were refurbished.
In addition to these forms of material deprivation, having to

spend a number of hours at the Bauen put a strain on workers personal
relationships outside the hotel:
Two years of resistance takes its toll on human beings. To get to this
point we had to make sacrifices with our family. We had to stop
certain family customs, having fixed schedules with our children.
There were a lot of things […] In the beginning it was awful. (Anibal,
Personal interview, June 25, 2005)
Although some of these workers have since been given vacation

time to make up for missed time with their families, others have not: “It’s
been two years since I have had a day off or a vacation. I’m here
continuously” (Anibal, Personal interview, June 25, 2005).
These descriptions of the hardships endured by workers and the

“apolitical” motivations behind the recovery are important for a few
reasons. First, they are two prominent themes within a larger “public
narrative”8 about the recovered hotel that many workers and activists
retell to inquisitive journalists, researchers, and other visitors to the hotel
(Somers 1994). Bauen workers deploy this narrative as a means of
legitimizing their efforts and asserting their identities as autonomous
workers capable of running the enterprise themselves. Such assertions
counter representations of Bauen workers by the Yurkovich’s as
“occupiers,” “illegitimate occupants,” “ex-employees,” and “invaders”
within the mainstream press (La Nacion 2005: 3). Moreover, I also argue
that specifically framing the occupation of the hotel as an act that is
“about jobs, not politics” is a legitimizing claim constructed from a
limited set of symbolic material available to Bauen workers within post-
crisis Argentina (Steinberg 1999).
As noted earlier, the financial crisis of 2001-2002 was

characterized by a widespread popular disillusionment with the Argentine
political system and the politicians who many Argentines blamed for the
country’s dire economic situation. In post-crisis Argentina, “politics” and
“politicians” are stigmatized categories and many Argentines, especially
those involved in social movement organizations, remain skeptical of
7
Although a few workers still live at the hotel, it was eventually decided after heated debate
that most workers had to move out: “I tried to explain [at an assembly] how much money
we lost because I couldn’t sell those rooms. Obviously it was like a civil war, but I won”
(Stephan, Personal interview, June 28, 2005).
8
Margaret Somers defines public narratives as “those narratives attached to cultural and
institutional formations larger than the individual, to intersubjective networks or institutions,
however local or grand” (Somers 1994:619). Such stories about organizations are accessible
and held in common by the members that constitute the organization.
politicians and political parties, both on the Right and the Left. Thus, I
argue that assertions by Bauen workers that the recovery of the hotel is
about “work,” and not about “politics,” are not simply expressions of the
“real” motivations behind worker’s efforts reclaim the hotel. They are
also meaningful constructions intended to mobilize wide support within a
cultural context where the claims of social movement actors acquire
greater legitimacy in the eyes of the public if they are perceived as being
distanced from “politics” and political parties (Petras and Veltmeyer
2003; Sitrin 2006). Moreover, I argue that the framing of the recovery of
the hotel in the benign language of needs and jobs also reflects the
hegemonic parameters of capitalist discourse, shaken but still dominant in
post-crisis Argentina. That is, while the Bauen may “indicate [a]
revolutionary transformation in property and social relations,” as Petras
and Veltmeyer (2003) put it in describing the recovered enterprises in
general, I contend that workers and activists affiliated with the hotel are
unable to characterize the significance of the hotel in such counter-
hegemonic terms and still mobilize the broad support they need for their
struggle against the ex-owner (99). It is in these ways, then, that the
symbolic material available to worker’s to construct certain types of
oppositional meaning around the Bauen is constrained by the larger
political and cultural context in which the hotel exists (Steinberg 1999).
Second, the Bauen’s public narrative is deployed internally as a

discursive mechanism used to meaningfully orient newly hired workers at
the hotel, most of whom are family members of those workers involved
in the initial occupation.9 Venting frustration about those newer workers
who just show up to work and leave at the end of the day, Joseph, the
president of the Bauen cooperative, put it this way: “We have to bring
this worker in and tell him our story. However many days, however much
time it takes. We have to find a way to make this worker conscious”
(Personal interview, June 27, 2005. Emphasis added). This public
narrative is also reproduced through conversations between family
members who work together in the hotel. David, a new worker, talks
about the occupation with his grandmother, Maritza: “As a matter of fact
I’m always the one who asks her how the occupation process was, how
[they took] it, how they restructured it, everything. It doesn’t come from
her to tell me, I ask her” (Personal interview, July 4, 2005). In short, the
Bauen’s public narrative is used within the hotel to cultivate an awareness
and sense of commitment in those workers who had no direct experience
of the initial occupation’s hardships.
9
In the Bauen, immediate relatives of members of the coop are given preferential
consideration in hiring decisions. When hiring new workers is necessary, such as after
the worker’s renovated and reopened the hotel’s bar, deciding whose relative will be
hired over another’s is the source of many disputes within the assemblies (Nicolas,
Personal interview, June 27, 2005,) This particular practice of hiring family members is
not unique to the Bauen but also characterizes hiring practices in other recovered
enterprises (Palomino 2003; Itzigsohn, forthcoming).
The accounts by older workers of the hardships they endured

during the initial occupation highlight the point that this group of workers
have put in a different amount of physical and emotional investment in
the current enterprise compared with newly hired workers. As I
demonstrate below, this fact has translated into marked differences in
decision-making power between the two groups. As a result, two distinct
collectivities of workers have developed within the hotel, which I have
been referring to as “older” and “new” workers.
This leads to my third point about the Bauen’s organizational

narrative. In addition to its external legitimizing function and its use as a
tool to orient newer workers, this narrative, particularly its theme of
sacrifice, is deployed to rationalize real differences in power and rewards
that exist between older and newer workers. In other words, it justifies
unequal distributions of decision-making power and rewards in a work
environment that is formally egalitarian and participatory-democratic.
The Bauen’s New Internal Organization
Since taking the Bauen, workers have attempted to restructure

daily-life within the hotel in an egalitarian and participatory-democratic
fashion. Such efforts are manifested in several different practices within
the hotel. However, since its reopening and the subsequent hiring of
approximately 80 new workers, impulses to restructure social life
horizontally have been undermined by concrete instances of exclusion
and flashes of authoritarian behavior. In this way, the Bauen should be
understood as a “culturally unsettled” social space where old habits and
worldviews coexist in tension with explicit attempts to cultivate new
habits of daily conduct (Swidler 1986:278).
“There is no gerente here”: Worker Assemblies and Coordinators
As in most recovered enterprises the Bauen’s main organ of

decision-making is the collective assembly, which occurs at least once
every 15 days. Workers point out that the assemblies are a space where
all major administrative issues as well as political questions related to the
Bauen’s struggle for expropriation are debated and determined by a
majority vote (Nicolas, Personal interview, July 2, 2005). An
administrative council comprised of an elected president, vice-president,
treasurer, and “sindico”10 is the primary day-to-day decision-making
entity under the assembly and is responsible for arbitrating small
10
The sindico’s main responsibility in the Bauen is to act as a liaison between the
administration council and other workers in the hotel, which involves fielding complaints,
grievances, and input from workers throughout the workday and bringing them before the
council for resolution or to put them on the agenda of the collective assembly (Itzigsohn,
forthcoming; David, Personal interview, July 4, 2005).
grievances that may arise between workers (Joseph, Personal interview,
July 27, 2005). The administration council is also responsible for putting
together the meeting agenda for each collective assembly. Smaller
decisions, such as what supplies to purchase for a section of the hotel or
minor problems requiring a quick resolution, are left up to sector
“coordinators” (Alicia, Personal interview, July 11, 2005).
Some workers and activists identify a few problems with the

nature of deliberation and decision-making within the Bauen’s collective
assemblies. David, a new worker, argues that resolving issues efficiently
through the assemblies is a consistent problem:
You establish ten points [in the agenda] and [by the time] we reach
the fourth or fifth point…arguments start and we never finish
addressing the ten points. They are left over for the next assembly,
and they get noted, and they get noted, and they become problems
that are never solved. (Personal interview, July 5, 2005)
Stephan, an older worker, asserts that the administration council

has too much power over shaping the outcomes of deliberation within the
assemblies:
People in the council have the time to [think and debate about issues]
that [workers who are not part of the council] do not have because we
are working hard. And sometimes they will [go around before an
assembly], for example, and say: ‘William, if we talk in the assembly
about this [issue], what about if you say No?’ And they go and talk to
Juan: ‘What about if you say no?’ And they talk to someone else:
‘What about if you say no?’ And when you come to the assembly,
most of the people will say ‘No’… (Personal interview, June 28,
2005)
When I brought up these complaints with Roberto, an activist

working in the hotel, he told me that there was some discussion about
how to address them, but that no changes had been implemented.
According to him, while possible solutions to these problems have been
proposed informally—such as forming smaller collective assemblies in
each sector of the hotel or finding ways to make important information
about the hotel more available and transparent to workers—actually
debating and deciding upon such proposals in the collective assembly is
constrained by the demands of the Bauen’s fight for an expropriation.
That is, instead of discussing concrete ways to resolve some of the
inevitable problems associated with collectively running an enterprise,
more time is spent at collective assemblies on issues related to the
workers’ legal fight with the ex-owner. In addition to dynamics within the
assemblies, another aspect of social life within the Bauen that can be a
source of tension is the relationship between sector coordinators and other
workers.
The role of coordinators is essentially to supervise work in each

of the Bauen’s six sectors. However, from the perspective of many
workers there is a clear distinction between a traditional boss and a
coordinator. According to them, coordinators are held more accountable
by virtue of the fact that they are elected, and can be recalled, by the
collective assembly. According to Christina, coordinators do not do more
work than anyone else: “The work is the same for everyone. Nobody
works more or less than the other workers […] everyone works because
we aren’t going to obey anyone’s orders” (Personal interview, July 2,
2005). Bauen workers also insist that coordinators do not engage in the
type of routine surveillance that characterizes the behavior of supervisors
and managers in traditional enterprises: “Before, with a boss, a lot more
was demanded. With a boss it’s harder because they are always watching
you and you have to be on your toes” (Antonio, Personal interview, June
28, 2005). However, while many workers insist that such an atmosphere
of surveillance is now absent, old habits persist.
During one workday a few weeks before my visit to the hotel, a

reception worker decided to take a break and visit his fellow coworker, a
musician playing in the hotel’s restaurant.11 After talking with his
coworker for a few moments, the reception worker picked up his friend’s
guitar and began to play it. About ten minutes later the lead coordinator
of the reception sector reproached the worker for being out of his area
and formally wrote him up, requesting that 10% of the workers’ wages
for that day be deducted from his weekly salary. In the opinion of
Roberto, the activist who told me about this incident, the reception
coordinator involved is the most qualified person for his position.
However, he is only interested in his job, not “understanding” the
cooperative:
He has an old system in his head. For him a chief is somebody who
looks after the workers, [making sure they’re] in their post; that they
don’t do anything he doesn‘t want them to do […] What we want in
here [is for] everyone [to be able to] run free around the hotel. People
have to do their work, but [they] can come [to the bar] and drink a
coffee [or] sit down with the musician and listen. (Roberto, Personal
interview, July 10, 2005)
Roberto’s remarks illustrate one way in which Bauen workers

and activists are attempting to reconfigure social interaction within the
hotel, that is, by formally removing restrictions on workers’ mobility
throughout the building.
The movement of workers throughout the Bauen was highly

restricted by management during the hotel’s days as a private enterprise.
As a result, social interaction between workers was stifled:
11
I have changed details of this incident to protect the identities of those involved.
We were only compañeros when we took the elevator to go up to
eat, or in the lunchroom. Today, the difference is marked […] we are
always together and not just in the elevators or only during lunch
hour. We are together 24 hours. We have long conversations. (Anibal,
Personal interview, June 25, 2005)
The regulation of social interaction is a common feature in most

conventional enterprises and is rooted in the capitalist’s need to maximize
the productivity of labor power by eliminating “all motions and energies
not directed to the increase of capital” (Braverman 1974: 214). In this
way, Bauen workers’ attempts to dismantle regulations on movement
should be seen as a counter-hegemonic act at the level of everyday
interaction. However, as Roberto’s frustration about the reception
coordinator demonstrates, such formal efforts at making the Bauen a less
oppressive environment run up against old commonsense conceptions
about what it means to be a supervisor. Like some other coordinators in
the hotel, the coordinator who reprimanded the worker playing the guitar
is in his 50s and had years of experience working at the Bauen when it
was a hierarchically structured enterprise. According to Roberto, the
reception coordinator has no interest in whatever political significance the
Bauen cooperative may have:
I’m talking to him once a week, because he gets angry if you tell him
what to do. I try to talk to him. He doesn’t understand the group he
works in is a team. He could come out as elected chief of that team
because he has the best capacity for it. But he doesn’t have the
capacity for a social movement. (Personal interview July 10, 2005)
Hugo is another coordinator whose sentiments about the

cooperative are similar to those of the reception coordinator. He is in his
60s and worked for a large North American hotel company in Buenos
Aires for over 20 years before coming to the Bauen in the late 90s.
Viewing the Bauen’s cooperative structure as a hindrance on the hotel’s
ability to compete, Hugo also expressed frustration about the practice of
collective decision-making in the workplace:
I’m used to the business that says: ‘Ok, here we need 10 [mechanics],
10 [receptionists], [and] 5 [valets].’ Human Resources [would then
give] me their resume, and I would approve it […] If I was wrong, the
stick would fall on me. Here it’s not like that. The one who gives
their opinion is generally the one who can’t give their opinion. In a
group of people the person to give their opinion has to be the one in
charge of the department. Not the one who is---not to disrespect
anyone---not the one who is washing clothes, the one who makes the
bed, the valet, no. Maybe to have some influence they raise their hand
(Personal interview, July 5, 2005. Emphasis added).
While there is no official hierarchy between workers in the

Bauen, traces of a capitalist commonsense persist. Specifically, Hugo’s
remarks show that some workers still hold onto the subjective perceptions
that a worker’s task and position within the hotel should determine their
level of participation in decision-making processes. What is also notable
about Hugo’s remark is the personal frustration it conveys: while his

particular position on workplace authority would likely go unchallenged
within a conventional capitalist enterprise, such a position is no longer
commonsense within the Bauen and, in some instances, openly
contested.12 Indeed, Hugo’s frustration with the assemblies can be read as
both an expression of authoritarian impulses, but also as an indicator of
the level of participation by rank-and-file workers in the collective
decision-making process.
Within the recovered Bauen, the behavior displayed by the

reception coordinator as well as the views expressed by Hugo are actively
discouraged. Although such behavior exists, it is stigmatized within a
work environment where formal equality between workers is not only
embodied within new relations of power between supervisors and rank-
and-file workers, but also in efforts to remove restrictions on movement
and social interaction during the workday. Such efforts are reinforced by
the existence of egalitarian discourse within the hotel that is reproduced
in a number of ways, including through a conscious attempt to restructure
linguistic practices within the hotel.
“We Must Change the Language”
Along with efforts to replace previous organizational structures

that legitimized hierarchy and unilateral power, a new vocabulary of
equality has formally replaced hierarchical designators of workers’
positions. This new linguistic environment rhetorically imposes an
equality of status on social relations in the hotel and is consciously
deployed and maintained by some Bauen workers.
The notion that the Bauen is “without bosses” (sin jefes) and
“without owners” (sin patrones) informs this effort to establish a new
linguistic infrastructure. There are only “workers.” The word that Bauen
workers commonly use to refer to each other is “compañero/a,” which in
this context is best translated into English as “workmate.” Terms such as
“empleado/a” (employee) and “jefes” (bosses), while they may still be
used, are seen as illegitimate and actively discouraged within the Bauen.
According to Vivica, a member of the cooperative who has worked at the
Bauen for 12 years, such hierarchical labels have been replaced with new
terms such as “obreros auto-gestionados” (self-managed workers) or
“obreros-libres” (free-workers) (Personal interview July 12, 2005). But,
as she put it, transforming the vocabulary workers use to refer to each
other requires intervention:
We must change the language. The language that we use daily, the
language of the common people, so that we don’t have ‘bosses’
12
I want to thank Robert Zussman for this insight.
(jefes)… Every 15 days we have assemblies and there is a discussion:
[mocking assembly]: ‘The sector bosses (jefes de sectores)…’ And I
raise my hand [to correct them]: “The responsible fellow workers
(companeros)…’ And there it is, always, everyday, reaffirming the
word: ‘workmate’ (companero). Everyday, always, we have to be
reaffirming. (Personal interview, July 12, 2005)
Like Roberto’s efforts to talk to the reception coordinator about

his relationship with other workers in his sector, Vivica’s remarks
illustrate how some workers and activists actively intervene against
perceived remnants of a hierarchical past and attempt to cultivate new
habits of interaction. In a Gramscian sense, their actions can be
understood as attempts to construct a new type of workplace hegemony,
one that is structured by commonsense conceptions of equality,
cooperation, and solidarity between workers.
This dominant egalitarian discourse within the hotel is also

reinforced through the consistent reproduction of a particular
organizational narrative about the Bauen. A core theme within this
narrative is the idea that social life and decision-making in the Bauen was
unequal and hierarchical before its recovery by workers, but is now
completely equal and democratic. As I showed in the introduction, this
theme of equality and democracy is consistently reproduced externally in
many English-language journalistic articles about the Bauen. Specifically,
such articles depict Bauen workers’ salaries as equal (which they are not)
and/or that all workers participate in the decision-making process (Balch
2005; Dangl 2005; Freeman 2005; Raimbeau 2005; Trigona 2005a;
2006). Such representations, I argue, are instrumental in mobilizing
support for the Bauen and other recovered enterprises and in motivating
researchers, activists, and others to visit them. In the case of the Bauen,
some workers consciously reproduce the theme of equality and
democracy to such visitors. My own experiences as a researcher in the
hotel are a case in point. During my first interview at the Bauen, which
was with Maritza, I was told that:
Nowadays we are completely organized; we have a council where the

projects are presented. That council organizes assemblies composed
by all the workers and we decide everything by majority vote…Every
important decision is made by gathering in an assembly. (Personal
interview, June 25, 2005)
Similarly, in an early interview with the cooperative president, I

was told that “everyone, everyone” has a vote in the assemblies and that
“here we are equal, and this is what motivates us” (Joseph, Personal
interview, June 27, 2005). Later, during a conversation about worker
assemblies, Oscar, an activist working in the hotel stressed to me:
Everyone participates and everyone is heard: that is very important.

There are those who agree and disagree on things but when it comes
to the concept of everyone participating, there is full consensus. It is a
participatory democracy, a true democracy. There are steps, but that
is what we have come to: a democracy in which all participate (June

28, 2005).
It is my contention that many Bauen workers and activists are

aware of the fact that the collective decision-making structure of the hotel
is a feature of workers’ efforts that appeals strongly to many of their
allies in the struggle to expropriate the hotel, specifically on the Left.
Thus, I argue that such egalitarian depictions of the Bauen aimed at
visitors to the hotel are, in part, conscious attempts to mobilize legitimacy
for workers’ efforts and consolidate support. At the same time, however, I
also contend that such strategic depictions have consequences for equality
and democracy within the hotel.
Bauen workers, activists, sympathetic journalists, and curious

visitors to the hotel are all participants in the consistent reproduction and
solidification of an egalitarian discourse that permeates social life within
the hotel. This egalitarian discourse, like the collective assembly
structure, should be conceived of as a cultural artifact within the hotel
that is produced and stimulated through workers’ efforts to recover the
hotel and obtain a definitive expropriation. Moreover, as I argue below, it
is a discursive characteristic of the recovered Bauen that has a
constraining effect on concrete practices of exclusion and hierarchy
within the hotel.
“It’s a shame to have to leave like that”: Dilemmas of Inclusion
While the Bauen is often depicted as an all-inclusive space of

equality and democracy, the question of access and inclusion in worker
assemblies remains a highly contentious issue within the hotel. In
discussing some of the internal contradictions that arise within recovered
enterprises, M.N.E.R. president Eduardo Murúa pointed out that:
There is always a certain friction between the workers that took over
the business and the new workers. The older workers feel that they
have earned certain rights because of the fight they have been in for
so long. (Personal interview, July 13, 2005)
The Bauen is no exception. While new workers can now attend most
assemblies, this was a relatively recent development at the time of my
research. “It’s been more or less seven or eight months they have
participated in the assemblies” (Alicia, Personal interview, July 11,
2005). Christina, a new worker, described how this happened:
We always said that we wanted to enter the assembly and were told
that we could go or we couldn’t go…we went in many times without
permission and had to leave. It’s a shame to have to leave like that.
But later they (members of the cooperative) started realizing how
much we did for them and that we did quality work and carried
ourselves well, so they let us in the assemblies. And a little while ago
we were given a voice and a vote [in the assemblies]. (Personal
interview, July 2, 2005)
However, at the time of this research, new workers were still

excluded from certain assemblies, particularly when they are called to
address sensitive issues regarding members of the cooperative.
During my stay at the hotel, an assembly was to be held to

debate whether to fire a member of the legal cooperative who was
accused of stealing money. There was disagreement among older workers
about whether or not to let new workers attend and participate in this
particular assembly meeting, where evidence showing the alleged guilt of
this worker was to be presented.13 At the time of my interview with
Alicia, the question of whether to open up this particular assembly to new
workers had not been decided upon. I asked her whether she thought new
workers should attend:
Look, in my opinion, not yet; because they are not ready yet. They
came in and found…we suffered cold here, not hunger---because
thank god we had noodles and fried tortilla to eat. But when we came
in here, this [place was a mess], there was nothing here, the bats
passed us by and gave us a ride to congress and brought us back; the
rats, we had so many you could throw them up in the sky, so then we
suffered a lot here… (Personal interview, July 11, 2005. Emphasis
added).
What is worth noting about Alicia’s remarks is that she does not
explain what she means by new workers “not being ready yet,” but
instead abruptly shifts into a description of the particular hardships of the
occupation endured by older workers. Alicia’s comments illustrate how a
narrative of sacrifice about the initial occupation serves to justify
differences in power that exist between new and older workers. One new
worker, David, also invoked the sacrifice of older workers when I asked
him why members of the legal cooperative enjoy greater decision-making
power and other rights:
They have decision-making (rights) and they have power because

some of those members were the founding members of this co-op.
They’re the ones who took over the hotel, they cleaned it up again,
they got it working, and because they gave the job to the other
colleagues. (Personal interview, July 4, 2005)
Alicia and David’s comments both show how the experiences of older
workers during the occupation of the hotel are deployed to rationalize the
13
Different details of this issue were conveyed to me in some of my interviews, but it was
not brought up at all in my initial interviews with the president of the cooperative and a few
other member-workers.
unequal distribution of power and rewards14 between older and new

workers.
The history of exclusion of new workers from collective

assemblies is a striking contradiction to the utopian images of the hotel
described above. It must be noted that older workers are themselves
divided over the extent to which new workers should have decision-
making power within the hotel. Two reasons explain the persistent
reluctance of some older workers to completely include new workers in
decision-making processes. On the one hand, there is a subjective
perception among some older workers that they have a greater emotional
and physical investment in the recovered hotel. On the other hand, there
is an anxiety about the distribution of power. That is, since new workers
comprise a majority of the Bauen’s workforce, there is a perception
among some older workers that giving new workers equal decision-
making power could threaten the stability and survival of the hotel by
allowing worker’s with bad intentions and/or no sense of investment in
the hotel to have more control than those workers who were responsible
for initially occupying and refurbishing the hotel (Alicia, Personal
interview, July 11, 2005).
The Fight for Definitive Expropriation
As the Bauen’s ongoing struggle for expropriation consistently

demands investments of time and personal risk by both older and new
workers, it’s becoming more difficult to sustain and justify discrepancies
of power between the two. At the time of this research, the B.A.U.E.N.
cooperative had a bill before the Buenos Aires city government to obtain
a two-year expropriation. Ultimately, however, workers are fighting for a
definitive expropriation of the building. Although Marcello Yurkovich
himself died in 2003, his sons are actively opposing worker’s efforts to
expropriate the building and have filed a lawsuit to retake control of the
hotel. Yurkovich’s sons argue that they are the legal owners of the hotel
since it was their father who received the initial loan in 1978. However,
because this loan was never repaid to the state, Bauen workers argue that
the hotel still belongs to the government and that, therefore, the
Yurkovichs’s claim has no legitimacy. If granted an expropriation, Bauen
workers have promised to repay the public loan (Loren 2005; Freeman
2005; Roberto, Personal interview, July 10, 2005).
14
Contrary to many English-language articles about the hotel, Bauen workers did not have
equal salaries at the time of this research (Raimbeau 2005; Balch 2005; Trigona 2006).
According to workers I spoke with, newly hired workers in the hotel made $600 pesos a
month while most member workers made a salary of $800 pesos. Members of the Bauen’s
administration council, the president, vice-president, and treasurer, all made a salary of
$1000 pesos. Most sector coordinators earned $900 pesos (Maritza, Personal interview, June
25, 2005). Moreover, it should also be pointed out that in many other recovered enterprises
salaries are equal across all workers (Palomino 2003).
In their fight to persuade and pressure city authorities to grant

them a definitive expropriation, Bauen workers consistently organize
demonstrations and marches to the Buenos Aires City Hall and other
buildings housing local officials (“Nation at a Glance” 2005). They also
have to resist various state authorities and police who frequently come to
the hotel to deliver eviction notices or carry out harassing safety
inspections usually initiated by complaints from the Yurkovich’s. These
visits occur in the midst of day-to-day operations and create a palpable
tension among workers and the guests who happen to witness them. In
the three-week span of this research, I witnessed two such events. During
one visit the bankruptcy judge hearing the Bauen’s case came to the hotel
escorted by police and other officials to inspect the hotel’s compliance
with safety code regulations. Before her visit, workers received notice of
the inspection, which allowed maintenance workers to hurriedly put up
fire exit signs in certain parts of the building.15 When the bankruptcy
judge arrived with her escort, workers from many areas of the hotel
flooded the lobby, including housekeepers and maintenance workers
whom I never saw in the lobby area during more “normal” periods of my
visit (fieldnotes June 27, 2005).
“We are all part of the cooperative”: Emerging Identity
The visit by the bankruptcy judge did not result in an eviction

that day. However, the collective response by workers to the visit was a
clear effort to convey to the judge that workers would not make shutting
down the hotel easy for state authorities. After witnessing the visit by the
bankruptcy judge, I asked several workers what they thought would
happen if state authorities did attempt to forcefully evict workers from the
building. David, a worker who had been at the hotel for four months at
the time of my research, responded:
We won’t allow it. However much they strike us, do whatever they
do with us, we won’t allow it. Luckily, every time there was an
eviction attempt […] the hotel was tipped off [and] we the employees
at the hotel always took measures for that. (Personal interview, July
4, 2005. Emphasis added)
Similar to David, Christina, another new worker, answered: “We

would fight […] Everyone. Nobody is going to let them do that. We are
very strong” (Personal interview, July 2, 2005. Emphasis added). What is
important about David and Christina’s comments is that they both convey
a strong collective identity in relation to state authorities. Moreover, as I
will show, both Christina and David clearly identify themselves as “new
15
Workers assert that the lack of exit signs and other possible safety hazards are not the
fault of the current workers, but the ex-owner who let the Bauen decay gradually as the
hotel struggled through the 90s recession.
workers” and were at times strongly critical of older workers during our
conversations.
The work of social movement scholars reminds us that collective

identities emerge out of relational processes (Taylor and Whittier 1992;
Melucci 1995; Reger 2002; Klatch 2002; Robnett 2002). As Alberto
Melucci (1995) argues, collective identities are not a necessary derivative
of some shared structural or geographical location among actors, but the
outcome of a process of a group’s interaction with their “external
environment” that has resulted in the “formation of a ‘we’” (43). Melucci
also points out that “a certain degree of emotional investment is required”
in this process (43). Workers’ collective response to eviction attempts and
harassing inspections such as the one described above, as well as their
marches and demonstrations, are active expressions of class solidarity
(Fantasia 1988). However, such responses also produce and reinforce a
shared sense of “emotional investment” among both older and newer
workers over the future of the hotel. As a result, such moments are
facilitating the emergence of an oppositional identity that is shared by
both groups of workers vis-à-vis the Bauen’s ex-owner and hostile state
authorities (Fantasia 1988). I contend that this emerging collective
identity can be discerned in recent events in the hotel surrounding new
workers’ resistance to exclusion from collective assemblies.
“We made demands”: Internal Resistance to Exclusion
At the Bauen, there is a trial period for newly hired workers,

during which time they are not incorporated into the legal cooperative
entity nor given decision-making power within assemblies. At the time of
my research, there were approximately 38 members of the legal
cooperative and around 80 new workers who were not yet incorporated
into the cooperative. Of these 80 new workers, some have been working
at the Bauen for over two years, while some have been working in the
hotel for as little as four months. While these 80 workers are not officially
incorporated into the legal cooperative, they now have the option of
attending most assemblies and participating in decision-making (Alicia,
Personal interview, July 11, 2005). However, as mentioned above,
participation by this group of new workers in all decisions, specifically
those that affect member workers, remains a contentious issue within the
hotel. Based on interviews with both older and new workers, the decision
to open the collective assemblies to new workers was in part a response
to the latter’s assertions of equality with member workers.
Christina identifies herself as a new worker although she came

to the hotel during the early days of the occupation to spend time with her
husband, Rudy, who was part of the group that initially broke into the
hotel. Rudy is a member of the legal cooperative and worked at the Bauen
before its bankruptcy, while Christina is a non-member and began work
after the occupation. She described how new workers came to be allowed
into the assemblies (note her use of the word “we” in discussing the
actions of new workers):
We were able to enter because one day we decided to stand up (for

ourselves) and say that we also want to participate and have an
opinion because we work here too…We made demands […] we
stated that we work a lot and sometimes more than them [those
allowed in the assembly] (Personal interview, July 2, 2005. Emphasis
added).
Christina’s comments suggest that some new workers’ claims

for inclusion were framed by an assumption of equality with older
workers by virtue of the fact that they perform labor within in the hotel.
Because they also work in the hotel, new workers should also have a
direct say in decision-making. I argue that it is precisely this kind of
assumption that makes the Bauen’s emergent work culture fundamentally
different from a traditional capitalist workplace, where presumed
inequality between rank-and-file workers and those in power is an
element of workplace commonsense.
New workers’ demands for inclusion in assemblies were also

motivated by their involvement in the struggle for expropriation.
Specifically, some newer workers began to point out the contradiction to
member workers between their active participation in the fight for the
cooperative and simultaneous exclusion from participating in important
decisions. Alicia put it this way:
You know what happens is that in [this kind of] struggle, you cannot
separate because we are all together in the struggle. We are all
together in the fight, so you can’t really have people around for the
struggle, and then when you have to decide something have them [not
be there]…it’s kind of contradictory. Because the first thing [the
newer workers] will tell you is ‘How is it that when there’s a fight we
all stand together and then when decisions have to be made about the
workplace we are apart?’…and sometimes you have to admit they are
right (Personal interview, July 11, 2005)
While some older workers may have felt morally obliged to

open up assemblies to newer workers, putting themselves at personal risk
for the sake of “the cooperative,” instrumental reasons were also a factor.
Stephan, an older worker, described the dilemma:
For example, when we had to march to the legislatura, or wherever,

we used them (newer workers). And we need them because [then]
we’ll have more. The problem was that when [decisions were made]
they were not there. [The newer workers] said ‘You use us when you
need us, and then throw us away.’ [We] decided to make assemblies
open [to] older and newer workers (Personal interview, June 28,
2005)
Indeed the threat of new workers refusing to participate in future

collective actions was a concern of Alicia’s when considering whether
they should be allowed to attend the particular assembly about the older
worker accused of stealing money: “If we leave them outside of the
assembly, whenever we have a march, I don’t think they’ll come”
(Personal interview, July 11, 2005).
These accounts of how assemblies were widened to include

newly hired workers show that the Bauen’s external conflict with state
authorities and the hotel’s ex-owner has a positive impact on collective
decision-making processes within the hotel. The conflict creates
experiences in which the collective mobilization of a majority of workers
in the hotel is necessary for success. As newly hired workers are drawn
into the struggle for an expropriation and increasingly invest greater
amounts of physical and emotional energy into the fight over the hotel’s
future, the contradiction between their continued exclusion from certain
decision-making processes and their participation in collective struggle
becomes more strikingly obvious and unacceptable to some in the hotel.
This is one way that the Bauen workers’ resistance against external forces
engenders internal resistance to exclusion and manifestations of
hierarchy.
The Democratic Consequences of Struggle
Esteban Magnani is an Argentine journalist and activist who

works with an NGO that provides no-interest loans to recovered
enterprises. In his view, one of the biggest obstacles confronting
recovered enterprises is the subjective accumulation of competitive and
selfish habits in workers who have spent their entire lives within capitalist
workplaces:
Some people say neoliberalism is everywhere, and it’s inside workers

as well. That’s one of the worst enemies and one of the most
complicated enemies. The [recovered enterprises] who can’t beat this,
or at least control this enemy, probably won’t be able to start
producing…because this can’t be a project of one person. Democracy
is embedded in the requirements (Personal interview, June 30, 2005)
According to Esteban, however, the particular nature of the

struggle to reclaim an enterprise can help combat this “complicated
enemy.” Echoing Francesca Polletta’s (2002) insight that direct-
democracy makes strategic sense for social movements, Magnani
suggests that there is a positive correlation between the intensity of the
conflict workers have endured to recover their enterprise, and the level of
involvement and sense of commitment among workers involved:
I haven’t seen it very often [but] I think there is some kind of

evolutionary [process] there. The factories that actually manage to
recover the plants were the ones who had more solidarity and more
horizontality in decision-making. The whole process tends to make
the [systems with the most solidarity] be the ones to actually succeed
[…] Because you need people, you need work, and it’s a very hard
struggle […] so you need lots of commitment. The only way to have
people so committed is by making them feel responsible for their own
future, to feel part of the process (Personal interview).
As mentioned earlier, the question of how to meaningfully

integrate newcomers is a dilemma that confronts workers and activists in
many recovered enterprises, especially those that have gone through an
intense fight to get to where they are (Magnani, Personal interview, June
30, 2005 and Murúa, personal interview, July 13, 2005). However, the
particular composition of the Bauen’s current workforce makes the
problem even more urgent and acute for the minority group of workers
who initially took the hotel:
And the struggle of the non-members is precisely that: There is a

larger number of non-members than there are members [of the legal
cooperative]. And well, we want to be given more importance. I think
we [will become members in the future] because the need to make us
members is going to become evident. (David, Personal interview, July
4, 2005. Emphasis added)
I argue that new workers’ demands for inclusion into the

assemblies are also facilitated by the egalitarian and participatory-
democratic discourse that saturates social life within the Bauen. This
discourse, anchored in the Bauen’s organizational narrative, provides a
culturally available repository of meanings within the hotel that can be
used to give legitimacy to claims against exclusion and manifestations of
hierarchy. In short, the existence of this discourse makes it easier for
aggrieved workers to resist instances of authoritarian and exclusionary
behavior. As suggested by David’s comment and recent acts of resistance
by new workers against their exclusion from assemblies, the Bauen’s
ongoing struggle for expropriation will necessarily demand a further
democratization of internal decision-making processes.
Conclusion
Antonio, an activist with the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas

Recuperadas (M.N.E.R.), characterizes the political and economic threat
posed by the Bauen and other recovered enterprises this way:
We are a grain of sand. We are one of 200 companies in the whole

country. The importance of this, economically, doesn’t carry a great
weight in the (overall) GNP. What does have weight is the discourse
that one establishes in society and [the idea that] even without an
owner the endeavor can still be run. This is the central discussion.
(Personal interview, June 27, 2005. Emphasis added)
M.N.E.R. president Eduardo Murúa puts it similarly when he says:

Even if we are not an important economic factor, we are important

symbolically […] We (the recovered enterprises) have shown that we
can work without having bosses, that it is a lie that this country needs
investments to create jobs (Personal interview, July 13, 2005)
Both Antonio and Murúa’s respective comments make the argument that
the Bauen and other recovered enterprises are contributing to a counter-
hegemonic discourse within the wider culture about the nature of work in
capitalist society and how to solve the country’s economic problems.
Similar references to this symbolic significance of the Bauen and other
enterprises were also made in various ways by many of the workers I
interviewed at the hotel. While the Bauen and Argentina’s recovered
enterprises may indeed have broadened the range of alternatives that
people consider as possibilities to solving the socioeconomic problems
brought on Argentina and other countries by neoliberalism, it is beyond
the capacity and purpose of my research to empirically illustrate this.
However, by bringing a cultural analysis to bear on the issue of how
equality and democracy can be achieved and sustained within the
workplace, this paper has shown that the effort to create such a
potentially counter-hegemonic symbol is an active, ongoing, and
contradictory process.
As Marx might put it, Bauen workers exhibit agency in imbuing

the recovered hotel with their own meaning and in producing new types
of social relationships, but they do not do so within conditions of their
own choosing. Bauen workers’ agency occurs within limits imposed by
the cultural and political context in which the hotel operates. As I have
shown, meaningful characterizations of the recovered Bauen by workers
as “apolitical” and about “jobs” not only reflect the reality of material
deprivation spurring the recovery, but are also characterizations necessary
for mobilizing widespread support and legitimacy in post-crisis
(capitalist) Argentina.
Moreover, Bauen workers’ struggle to expropriate the building

encourages interventions by actors outside the hotel that influence the
production of new cultural forms within the hotel in different ways. The
demands of the workers’ legal case for expropriation divert worker-
activist’s energies and resources away from overcoming some of the
inevitable obstacles to building a participatory-democratic workplace. At
the same time, consistent visits to the hotel by police and state authorities
create tense moments of interaction that help forge a shared oppositional
identity among both older and newer Bauen workers. As I have shown,
these shared experiences facilitate the widening of collective decision-
making structures by stoking claims from newer workers for inclusion
into the collective assemblies.
However, such demands by new workers are also encouraged
and given legitimacy by the egalitarian discourse that permeates daily life
within the hotel. This egalitarian discourse is generated and reinforced
through 1) the creation of a new non-hierarchical daily vocabulary within
the hotel and 2) the repetition of an organizational narrative that stresses
the egalitarian and democratic nature of life within the new Bauen.
Furthermore, this internal discourse is reproduced externally by
sympathetic journalists who depict the Bauen as completely egalitarian
and democratic in their representations of the hotel. These external
representations, I argue, are instrumental in attracting inquisitive visitors
to the hotel from abroad eager to talk to Bauen workers and see a real-life
experiment of participatory-democracy in the workplace. In this way,
then, sympathetic interventions by journalists and visitors help reinforce
the sets of egalitarian meanings that are culturally available to workers
within the hotel.
But while the Bauen has been imbued strongly with egalitarian
symbols and other oppositional meaning, both by its workers and others,
daily life in the hotel is fraught with concrete instances of exclusion and
hierarchy. However, with the formal establishment of collective-decision
making structures and an emerging sense of equality between all workers
within the hotel, the Bauen workers’ ongoing fight to win a legal
expropriation is creating conditions that are helping workers overcome
these contradictions and produce a more participatory-democratic
workplace in practice.
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EVANS: COUNTER-HEGEMONY 33

Counter-Hegemony at Work: Resistance,

William Todd Evans1

This paper is an ethnographic account of the everyday practices and

In 1978, ruled by military dictatorship, Argentina played host to

On March 21st, 2003, spurred by the need to survive in a

The recovery of the Bauen has its origins in a wave of popular

While some of the English-language literature on worker

The Bauen workers’ effort to reconfigure social life within the

I like showing society that workers can work and maintain a

Alicia’s remarks suggest that the process of creating a new

Outside the Bauen, the worker-controlled hotel has been

While the process of meaning-making and cultural production

Workplace Democracy and Culture

Within capitalist societies, the democratic structure of many

Some other scholars, however, argue that workers have agency

struggle itself” (1986: 160). Similarly, Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen

Social movement scholars have shown how movement actors do

In studying the effects of social conflict on group cohesion,

Cultures of solidarity are formed out of friction and opposition itself.

More specifically, interaction with a hostile employer can generate new

Social movement scholars looking at the relationship between

Boundary markers are central to the formation of collective identity

In the case of the Bauen, workers have explicitly rejected certain

The work of social movement scholars reminds us of the

Researching the Bauen Hotel

My analysis of the Bauen is informed by the daily observation of

In addition to observation, I also conducted interviews with 16

I held in-depth, formal interviews with ten workers from the

My interviewees in the Bauen were strategically selected

Outside of the Bauen, I interviewed Esteban Magnani, a

Lastly, it is important to point out that many of my interviews with

meaning-making and political intervention in their struggle with the

Neo-liberal restructuring of Argentina’s economy accelerated

At the Bauen Hotel, owners began to lose money as tourism in

In addition to wage cuts, many Bauen workers were simply

Rise of Argentina’s Social Movements

Throughout the 1990s, structural adjustment policies and the

During the mid and late 90s, workers in some fledgling or

expropriations of the enterprises. In 2000, worker-representatives from

Following the financial collapse in December 2001, a reform in

To understand the explosive growth of the recovered enterprises,

At the time of this research, the recovered enterprise movement

Taking the Bauen

The initial “take”6 of the Bauen and workers’ subsequent efforts

“This isn’t about arms and sticks”

The logistics for taking the Bauen developed out of a series of

On Sunday I got here in the afternoon. It was dark, everything

The hotel is fixed about seventy to eighty percent; we still need to

The notion that the Bauen, as well as other recovered

As workers describe it, the year of occupation before the

While trying to obtain enough provisions to sustain themselves,

June 28, 2005).7 Ultimately, workers ignored the parameters of their

In addition to these forms of material deprivation, having to

Although some of these workers have since been given vacation

These descriptions of the hardships endured by workers and the

As noted earlier, the financial crisis of 2001-2002 was

Second, the Bauen’s public narrative is deployed internally as a

The accounts by older workers of the hardships they endured

This leads to my third point about the Bauen’s organizational

The Bauen’s New Internal Organization

Since taking the Bauen, workers have attempted to restructure