By Katherine Sobering, Winter 2021 Contexts
In March 2003, Gisela approached a busy intersection in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city. She looked up at the nearby Hotel Bauen, a once-luxury hotel where she had worked as a seamstress for nearly twenty years. At the end of 2001, the property owners had declared bankruptcy, shutting down the hotel and firing long-time employees. Although Gisela was nearing retirement, the timing could not have been worse. The hotel closed as the country entered a severe economic and political crisis. Decades of political efforts to dismantle the welfare state, deregulate the economy, and roll back labor protections following neoliberal policy prescriptions had taken an extreme toll. As the economy tumbled into recession, business owners closed their doors, leaving nearly twenty percent of the population out of work. While assets could be sold and debts restructured or forgiven, jobs seemed to be gone for good. But Gisela and her co-workers had a different plan. After months of deliberation, and energized by a wave of popular mobilizations, they decided to illegally enter and occupy the hotel to fight for their jobs.
That March day, Gisela led former Bauen employees towards the shuttered hotel. From an underground parking garage, they broke in and followed the light shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby. “When we got there,” Gisela remembered years later, “we began to cry and hug… We never thought we would return to the hotel.” Although they did not realize it at the time, the Hotel Bauen would become one of the most iconic businesses to be “recuperated” (recuperada) by its workers. And Gisela, one of its most vocal advocates.
After occupying the property, the group formed a worker cooperative and eventually reopened the hotel without a boss. Until its closure in 2020 amid the global pandemic, the BAUEN Cooperative operated around-the-clock, providing overnight accommodations in guest rooms with sweeping downtown views, conference facilities in the seven ballrooms and theater, and casual fare in a street-side cafe that workers voted to name “Utopia.”
As a founding member of the cooperative, Gisela went back to her work repairing linens and bedding. I met her multiple times over the course of my long-term fieldwork in the BAUEN Cooperative, observing her everyday routines, interviewing her about her work history, and watching her speak to journalists and at public events. I reconstructed her story from these various encounters. After my first visit to the hotel in 2008, I spent eighteen months between 2010 and 2015 conducting participant observation, interviews, and archival research to understand how Gisela and her co-workers transformed the hotel into a cooperative.
Worker-recuperated businesses like the Hotel Bauen are organizations that were closed by their private owners, occupied by their workers, and restarted as cooperatives. As I learned over the course of my fieldwork, many were established not only to save jobs, but also to create better jobs. Studies of workplaces in the Global North often detail how workplace policies can lessen the degree or severity of unequal treatment. But some organizations guided by principles of democracy, justice, and self-management take a more radical approach: to actively promote equality at work.
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