What question did this study set out to answer?

The article aims to explore how the ERTs movement challenges traditional legal norms around the right to work and promotes collective actions from workers.

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April 13, 2026Open Access

Winning the right to work through solidarity: The Argentine workers’ self-management movement

Key Points

The article aims to explore how the ERTs movement challenges traditional legal norms around the right to work and promotes collective actions from workers.
Field research conducted in six worker-recovered enterprises (ERTs).
Interviews with academics involved in the Open Faculty Programme (PFA).
The ERTs link the struggle for the right to work with self-management practices.
The movement emphasizes the right to work as a social practice rather than just a legal right.
Findings indicate that worker solidarity can influence economic stability post-crisis.

Abstract

This article examines Argentina’s worker-recovered enterprises ( Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores , ERTs) movement, which emerged after the 2001 economic crisis, as a bottom-up construction of the right to work under neoliberalism. The ERTs uniquely link the struggle for the right to work with worker self-management amid widespread unemployment and precarity. Drawing on field research conducted in six ERTs and interviews with academics from the Open Faculty Programme ( Programa Facultad Abierta , PFA), the study argues that the right to work is not merely a legal norm but a collective social practice built from below.

Winning the right to work through solidarity: The Argentine workers’ self-management movement

Key Points

Abstract

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