Cooperatives successfully combat unemployment in Argentina
By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES: Cooperatives in Argentina have successfully taken on the daunting task of drawing chronically unemployed men and impoverished women who have never worked outside the home into the world of work. “We thought the solution to unemployment was creating sources of work, but the question is much more complex than that,” Carlos Chile, the head of the Territorial Liberation Movement, told IPS.
His group started out as a housing cooperative and evolved into an efficient construction company that now wins tenders for public projects. “Reinserting an unskilled unemployed person, or someone who has been without work for 10 years, is a task that takes at least six months,” Chile told an auditorium full of activists from different civil society groups meeting this week in Buenos Aires in the First Permanent Forum for Social Housing.
“Your typical unemployed man lacks discipline,” said Chile. “He watches TV late into the night, gets up late, sleeps in the daytime. We’re talking about people who are poorly fed, who are not in shape for physically taxing jobs, and in their zeal when they begin to work again, they fall sick or get injured more often.” Four years of recession that culminated in a late 2001 economic collapse left 54 per cent of Argentina’s 37 million people submerged in poverty and 24 per cent of the economically active population unemployed. Since the economy began to get back on its feet, poverty has fallen to 38 per cent and unemployment to 12 per cent this year.
However, the latest statistics indicate that although economic growth has remained steady, the poverty rate has begun to decline at a slower pace. Most of the government’s development programmes do not include the poorest of the poor or the chronically unemployed, and social policies have largely been welfare-based. “We would like to know if the state would be willing to finance the six months that are required for reinsertion” into the labour market and society, said Chile, issuing a challenge in the forum, which was also attended by representatives of the centre-left government of President Néstor Kichner.
Chile’s observations arose from his Movement’s experience in creating the Emetele Cooperative of Housing, Credit and Consumption. The cooperative is now completing construction of 11 apartment buildings on the south side of the Argentine capital, on a lot purchased with a loan from the City of Buenos Aires Housing Institute. The complex is being built by 250 formerly unemployed people, all of whom are in line for one of the apartments once they are completed. But in order to qualify for one of the units, they must be able to prove that they are able to pay off a mortgage. In the cafeteria, where they take their breaks, the workers receive healthy, abundant food.
“I would like to ask the bank employees how they felt the first time the workers from the cooperative went to withdraw their wages. I’m sure they were trembling. Since our guys didn’t know how to get their money out, they felt like kicking open the automatic teller machines, with which they were completely unfamiliar,” said Chile with a smile. The wages drawn by the members of the cooperative are in line with the going rate, and almost seven times the small monthly stipend that the state extends to unemployed heads of households. In addition, women hold 40 per cent of the jobs, working not only in the cafeteria, but also as bricklayers and electricians. —Dawn/Inter-Press News Service
