Resumo

GARCES CORREA, Santiago; APONTE MORENO, Oscar; MOSQUERA VERA, Carolina  e  LOPEZ ZULUAGA, Santiago. Workers, recovery of factories, and neoliberalism in Colombia (1995-2015). Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2017, vol.40, n.2, pp.239-256. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v40n2.66394.

The article explores the experiences of Colombian factories that underwent diverse recovery processes. During the 1990s. Latin America went through a tough period of transition to neoliberalism, characterized by the implementation of economic changes aimed at achieving economic liberalization. In Colombia, the big economic groups took advantage of the economic diversification process implemented during the period of import substitution industrialization and partially withdrew from the manufacturing sector. In consequence, the industrial sector went through a deep reorganization and many industrial enterprises were forced to shut down their productive activities. In this context, the workers of some of those companies undertook productive recovery processes in order to protect the employees, outstanding labor obligations, and their salaries. The article seeks to expand the understanding of the reasons why and the manner in which the factory recovery process began, in order to preserve the legacy of those workers: experiences from a theoretical and political standpoint, and thus draw lessons that may be useful for their present and future struggles. Three cases of recovered factories were selected for the study: Croyfast, from the footwear industry; Comdistral, which produced capital goods in the metallurgy sector; and Empaques del Cauca, dedicated to the production of hemp sacks for the coffee sector. In each case, we carried out semi-structured interviews of union leaders and unskilled workers. We also visited Empaques del Cauca. From a configurational theoretical-methodological perspective, linked to labor sociology, we resorted to the concepts of sodo-technical configuration and business configuration to account for the work process of the companies under study and of the relationship to their environment. This made it possible to achieve an in-depth understanding of the recovered factories from the standpoint of the dispute over the control of the production process. Our conclusion regarding the factories studied was that all three of them featured a multifunctional, maquila-style Taylorist socio-technical configuration, as well as business configuration determined by hierarchical subcontracting. It was also found that the main difficulties faced by these factories had to do with the continued existence of a Taylorism that fostered job insecurity, hierarchical subcontracting, and the lack of management capabilities of workers organizations.

Palavras-chave : configurationism; de-industrialization; economic liberalization; neoliber-alism; recovered factories; workers' movement.

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