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

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.