The week in labor history

Hotel Bauen, marches, evictions and other happenings

NoC News

In this month in 2003, former employees of the closed-down Hotel Bauen, located in the Argentinian city of Buenos Aires, reclaimed the rundown building and began making repairs. The space is now run collectively by its workers as a hotel, free meeting space for labor groups, and residence for (some) of its workers.

The story of Hotel Bauen dates back to the mid-70s, when capitalist Marcelo Iurkovich secured easy government loans to construct the four-star hotel in downtown Buenos Aires. Iurkovich was looking to cash in on the projected tourist influx that would hit the Argentinian coastal city when it hosted the 1978 World Cup. Sold in 1998 to some Chilean capitalists after Iurkovich sucked enough profit out of it to open two more hotels (though, curiously, not enough money to pay off his initial loans), the Bauen closed in 2001, leaving a number of workers jobless and forcing many into the streets, in the midst of Argentina’s great economic collapse.

Two years later in 2003, some of the hotel’s former workers took matters into their own hands when they illegally entered the dilapidated building, began to fix it up themselves and started running it as a worker collective. As the writer/filmmaker Sammy Loren observed in 2005, without an owner to get in the way of progress and suck out all the profits for himself, the workers repaired all the broken and wrecked living areas, fixed the dysfunctional bathrooms, and revived the ugly 70s interior design before finally accommodating guests–all while providing better wages and working conditions for the people running it. Currently the worker-run hotel has 150 workers, a street-side cafe selling many products produced by other worker-owned shops, and  over 200 renovated hotel rooms for happy guests.

The worker-reclamation of the Hotel Bauen is but a small part of the larger story of worker power that has swept through Argentina since the mid-1990s, when pro-corporate privatization policies were instituted throughout the country (and enthusiastically supported by the U.S. government). These austerity policies resulted in thousands of people getting laid off, sharp cuts in wages and pensions for all workers, and slashed social services.  (In other words, what we are in the process of experiencing here in the United States.)

The result in statistics? According to the writer Marina Sitrin, by 2001 industrial production had fallen by 25 percent; official poverty grew to 44 percent (with the unofficial rate much higher), and the formerly docile middle class de-classed to the lower classes.

Since 2001, unemployed workers movements in Argentina have responded to the top-down corporate policies championed by its own government (and its U.S. overseer). These groups have have reclaimed a number of formerly closed-up workplaces, fixed them up and run  them collectively and profitably in a manner similar to the Hotel Bauen.

And like the workers at the reclaimed Hotel Bauen, the fruits of these worker reclamations of shut-down industry continue to be challenged in court by the former owners who cut town at the first sight of waning profits. In the Hotel Bauen’s case, workers continue to struggle to keep Iurkovich’s kin from claiming the now-profitable hotel as their own.

In other labor news this week:

On March 11 in 1930, Gandhi began his Salt March to Delhi.

On March 12 in 1982, thee-hundred women workers staged a slow-down at Control Data in Seoul, South Korea, to protest the firing of their union president.

On March 14 in 1991, government workers from Brazil, who had been unpaid since November, seized control of the governor’s palace.

On March 15 in 1877, Ben Fletcher was born. Fletcher was an organizer for the International Workers of the World (IWW) who organized longshoremen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Finally, on March 18 in 1937, New York police evicted retail clerks who were occupying a Woolworth’s and agitating for a 40-hour work week.

Information comes from Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 2010 calendar. Supplemental information came from Marina Sitrin’s Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and Sammy Loren’s online article, “Argentina’s Worker-Run Hotel Bauren,” found at http://www.upsidedownworld.org