At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome clocked
in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their parent
company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second city of
Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself: their
plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction industry, would
be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens of families would
be plunged into poverty. And seeing as Greece was in the midst of the
greatest economic depression ever seen in the EU, the workers’ chances
of getting another job were close to nil.
So they decided to occupy their own plant. Not only that, they turned it upside down.
For
a start, no one is boss. There is no hierarchy, and everyone is on the
same wage. Factories traditionally work according to a production-line
model, where each person does one- or two-minute tasks all day, every
day: you fit the screen, I fix the protector, she boxes up the iPhone.
Here, everyone gathers at 7am for a mud-black Greek coffee and a chat
about what needs to be done. Only then are the day’s tasks divvied up.
And, yes, they each take turns to clean the toilets.
When
the workers consulted the local community about what they should start
to produce, one request was to stop making building chemicals. They now
largely manufacture soap and eco-friendly household detergents: cleaner,
greener and easier on their neighbours’ noses.
Staff use the
building as an assembly point for local refugees, and I saw the offices
being turned over to medics for a weekly free neighbourhood clinic for
workers and locals. The Greek healthcare system has been shredded by
spending cuts, its handling of refugees sometimes atrocious; yet in both
cases, the workers at Viome are doing their best to offer substitutes.
Where
the state has collapsed, the market has come up short and the boss
class has literally fled, these 26 workers are attempting to fill the
gaps. These are people who have been failed by capitalism; now they
reject capitalism itself as a failure.
As cool as this is, thanks to union-busting in the US, this is considered theft and they’ll arrest you for it. Because anti-union sentiment means they’d rather have a building sitting empty than let people create jobs.
Idk what you think Greece is like, but occupying private property is actually illegal there too, surprisingly enough. In the linked article:
“And when night falls, one of the workers stays on to stand guard – just
in case the old owners come back. During the day, a line of empty
barrels acts as a barricade.“
The original owners want to seize the machinery and sell the property. The workers had to seek the help of the surrounding community and solidarity organizations around Greece to protect themselves from the cops, and as has been pointed out elsewhere in the replies, the state has recently cut off their power to try and drive them away - and there has been an outpouring of financial support for them from across the world in response
They were able to accomplish this because, rather than bemoaning how the authorities might not allow them to, they joined together in solidarity and just did it. They recognized that there’s power in organization and community
That can happen anywhere. And it has happened elsewhere, too. Stop complaining about how bad things are and start making them better yourself
On this day, 1 September 1911 during the Mexican revolution, peasant army leader Emiliano Zapata managed to escape from the military forces of Ambrosio Figueroa, the governor of Morelos. Troops, led by Federico Morales, arrived at Chinameca and stormed its front gate, but they failed to surround the property beforehand. So Zapata and many local residents who were fighting with him were able to slip out the back and escape through the sugarcane fields.
Books and more about Zapata here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/emiliano-zapata
Pictured: Zapata, seated centre, with some of his troops, 1914 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1516895368495608/?type=3
