STATEMENT OF THE GATHERING OF THE WORKERS‘ ECONOMY IN VIEW OF THE MILEI GOVERNMENT’S OFFENSIVE AGAINST COOPERATIVES IN ARGENTINA
From the Encuentro Economía de los Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (Gathering of the Workers’ Economy), formed by recuperated and self-managed enterprises, worker cooperatives, trade unions and organizations of the social, solidarity and popular economy, we reject and repudiate the statements of Argentina’s presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni, which are full of ideological prejudices and lies about the cooperatives, and announcing measures that, if implemented, would represent one more blow to the daily subsistence capacity of our cooperative workers and the very existence of our organizations. It is worth remembering (something that Adorni ignores or prefers to ignore) that most of our cooperatives are the organized response of our working class to the abuses and failures of the „free market“ that has been imposed through different governments since the implementation of the civil-military dictatorship that the president and his vice president insist on vindicating. Argentina’s cooperatives have generated, via self-management, tens of thousands of jobs where formal employment ceased to exist and where labor precariousness has led to hyper-exploitation. Our cooperatives and self-managed enterprises are the expression of the dignity of the working people that Milei’s government denies with its measures day after day.
Within these infamous statements appears a big lie: that cooperatives are a „fund“ that „Argentine people finance“. This statement shows that, in the first place, Adorni and Milei do not know that a cooperative is, by definition, an autonomous economic organization, an associated collective of people to generate a productive or service activity and, in the case of worker cooperatives, through cooperation among working people. The State does not finance cooperatives, beyond potential subsidies or programs that they might be given; cooperatives live from our work. In the case of the Potenciar Trabajo plans of recent years, they are individual subsidies which, in many cases, are received by cooperative workers, thus complementing their income and contributing to their recovery in the face of the critical economic situation we are going through and which, in no way, is the responsibility of any cooperative or any worker. Milei and Adorni should look beyond the manuals of the Austrian Economics school they consume to find ample economic evidence that underscores the potential of cooperatives as viable and effective economic organizations based on association and solidarity – although it would be much simpler to approach any of Argentina’s cooperative organizations to see it for themselves.
What is notorious in this case is that, once again, the statements of the presidential spokesman are not consistent with the measure actually taken by INAES (Argentina’s public agency overseeing the registration of and policies for cooperatives and social and solidarity economy organizations), which also deserves our most energetic repudiation. Resolutions 878 and 879/2024, voted by the Board of Directors of the agency, suspends more than 11,000 cooperatives under the pretext of lack of documentation or non-compliance with regulations. They justify these resolutions on alleged continued financing in the years after Macri’s administration of cooperatives that had been suspended by a similar provision of, not by chance, the then president of the agency, Marcelo Collomb. Instead of investigating if there are irregularities, which is one of the functions of INAES, or to try to solve the problems of documentation that the cooperatives may have, INAES adopts the „chainsaw“ attitude characteristic of this government and suspends, without prior notice, thousands of cooperatives, most of them worker cooperatives. This aggressive measure should also be explained by INAES – the representatives of cooperativism and mutualism – and their Board of Directors, starting with Ariel Guarco, who is also current president of the International Cooperative Alliance.
Despite Adorni’s statements, this punitive measure is still far from his announcements of March 27 to cancel all cooperatives created from 2020 to 2022 (and to hold a „special review” of those created in 2023), putting a blanket of suspicion on all our cooperative organizations as living at the expense of public funding, when precisely what we demand is more and better public policies for the development of our form of economy which is the best contribution that the working class can make for the welfare of society as a whole. Adorni lies even in the scope of his announcements, and for those measures, totally illegal and illegitimate in our view, that are yet to come.
For all the above mentioned, we demand the public retraction by the presidential spokesman of the lies and fallacies stated in his press conference of March 27th. We reject any advance of the intended measures against worker cooperativism. We demand the restitution of the programs and measures of cooperative promotion and support to the workers of our sector. And, we demand INAES to comply with its function of promotion and control of cooperatives and mutuals without taking punitive measures such as the above-mentioned resolutions, which must be immediately repealed.
We call on all self-managed workers; workers of cooperativism; and workers of the social, solidarity, and popular economy to mobilize to confront these measures. We also demand that the institutions of cooperativism and mutualism that make up the board of INAES explain their position and not be part of the anti-popular offensive of this government and repeal the resolution they have approved. We also call for strengthening the ties between the self-managed working class and the rest of the working class, especially with all trade union organizations and their centrals, to urgently launch a plan of struggle to defeat this project.
