Laura is 13 years old when she starts working in a textile workshop. She goes to school following shift, noon. At 18, she finishes high school. That hinge year for her, her father dies and her mother leaves: Laura is left in charge of four younger siblings. In a short time they are on the street. They sleep in a square for a week, until a relative helps them and finds them a new roof. But they still have to eat, and so Laura starts working full time in the workshop.
It is a shoe factory that pays for production, “at two pesos fifty a pair.” Here there is no way to make ends meet if it is not working 10 to 12 hour shifts. “In those workshops you can’t get up from the machine, except to go to the bathroom; and in the cutting sector, where work is done standing up, you can’t sit down, you can’t talk either so as not to get distracted”, he describes.
Still, learn the trade. In fact, it is moving to larger workshops. It deals with complex tasks such as design. Until one morning in 2018, when she arrives at the place where she has worked for the last five years, the door is closed. The owner went bankrupt.
In Santa Rita, a neighborhood of Lomas de Zamora, it is not difficult to find similar stories. We are behind La Salada, the great outlet for clothing and footwear sales in the suburbs. It is a fertile territory for textile manufactures, which have just gone through one of the worst droughts in its history.
Between 2015 and 2019, the textile activity was one of the most affected by the Cambiemos economic program. The combo of opening imports and falling domestic consumption caused the national manufacture of clothing and footwear to drop by 26 percent. They were four years in which thousands of jobs were lost.
Laura started selling clothes. Others went on to cardboard, to clean houses, to prepare food for fairs, to street vending.
Now, in 2022, in these months of economic recovery, textile production has been reactivated. Shops are getting back to using their machines.
But recovery does not imply creation of work with rights.
“In the neighborhood everything is in black”, they define here. And that informality has different forms. For example, companies outsource their production to workshops, but there are also neighbors who have a machine and work at home. There is the one who at some point was able to buy three machines and has a place where he lives, and then subcontracts to others.
And there is the one who was knocked out and does not want more. When Laura began to put together the project that this note talks regarding, she looked for her former workshop facilitator. But he wasn’t at her house. “Now he’s driving an Uber.”
go out on the pitch
The popular economy is born at this point. Laura today is responsible for the first shoe factory of the Darío Santillán Popular Front, a cooperative with 11 workers who are self-managing out on the field.
The factory arose as an idea of the Front to organize comrades who live in the neighborhoods of Lomas, where the social organization has a historic job, for many years. Neighbors with a trade in footwear and who were already within the Empower plan signed up for the project.
The eleven workers of the cooperative accumulate, for the most part, more than 5 years in the military. They entered the movement in search of work: I work with a social plan.
Caterina wears her hair braided and dyed gray, tied in a ponytail. She says that her first assignment in the Darío Santillán Front was to make security in the mobilizations.
“For me, there was nothing better than getting to the center with my companions and blocking the street,” he says, and in the sparkle in his eyes there is celebration and defiance.
During the pandemic, she went to work as a kitchen assistant in a soup kitchen and later was on a street sweeping crew, always in the FPDS.
Did you have experience in textile workshops? Yes, from the age of 16. She is now 27, and she is the mother of two children. “I mightn’t continue in a workshop, 12 hours away from home”, she started cleaning by the hour. Sometimes, in a skipped way, they call her to attend a store. And she entered the Empower plan.
His colleagues from the shoe factory also come from working continuously in the Darío Santillán Front. For example, in neighborhood improvement works. They also do odd jobs when they come out. Today they are playing for the shoe factory to work.
propositional
The popular economy is a great topic of debate within the movements. Some references such as Juan Grabois warn regarding the danger of romanticizing it. “Pretending that the popular economy has a portion of the market is not understanding the problem. Or to think that this is a solution”, says Grabois in the book What is popular economy, published by Editorial El Colectivo. For Grabois, “we must assume that it is a subsystem, which will never be able to compete, at least in terms of the contemporary capitalist economy” and with a neoliberal State. .
But at the same time, it is clear that it is necessary for organizations to be proactive, to show what is possible to build: hence the commitment to create experiences of decent work and production of goods for the popular sectors. The shoe factory is part of that: a construction effort that is supported by more than one actor.
The 11 people who formed the cooperative were not enough to create it. The factory exists because it is supported by a Movement that brought people together, processed the project so that the Ministry of Social Development would provide them with some of the machines, agreed with a neighborhood club to rent the space where the workshop was installed.
The FPDS also has a productive area, a group of militants who accompany and try to solve the problems that appear in the start-up. And, finally, it has an alternative marketer, -the Mecopo- that sells the shoes in its popular stores and fairs.
Says Eva Verde, a member of the FPDS and coordinator of the Mercados Solidarios program at the Ministry of Social Development. “It is difficult to drive productive. It takes a whole effort of organization,
a lot of resources… it’s not just getting the machines, because you also have to consolidate the work group, make sure that what you manufacture turns out well. And once production is underway, there needs to be a demand. We make shoes, first of all, for ourselves, for our sector, but we need more demand. How to get it? I think the state should assume a role. If the municipalities, for example, use the state purchase, it will be easier to sustain production.” That issue -the state purchase- is still pending.
“I see this as an opportunity,” Brian tells Page 12 in the shoe factory. At 19 years old, he is one of the youth of the cooperative. He has finished high school, he is enrolled in the CBC to enter the university. “I would never have been able to have these machines, nor even think regarding this project. I like the cooperative, the companions. I learned a lot making the first batch of shoes…including the pairs we had to throw away, until we got the hang of it!”
Laura also has faith in the factory. “I am convinced that she will walk.” Right now they make slippers and sandals that Mecopo sells at a promotional price, and they are taking orders for March, for businesses and organizations. In addition, they began with the first tests to make safety boots.
