Cooperativa de Trabajo Textiles Pigüé

The Cooperativa de Trabajo Textiles Pigüé is one of the largest of the empresas recuperadas organized in Argentina in the early 2000s. The former company rose as a national economic anchor in the 1980s, producing for brands like Adidas, and providing jobs to small towns like Pigüé, six hours outside of Buenos Aires. But as trade rules loosened in the 1990s the company became inconsistent in paying wages. They filed for creditor protections in 2001 and then ceased production in 2003. 

93 workers occupied the factory and kept the machines running for almost a year as they organized their legal challenge. In 2004 they were evicted by 300 police officers, but a few months later the government reversed course and allowed them back in. For years the founders worked with little pay to build back operations, but by 2024 they had doubled in size to 180 workers. The story of their first 10 years is detailed in the 2014 book Cooperativa Textiles Pigüé: historia de la recuperación de una fábrica de Gatic.

The emerging cooperative faced a challenge common among the recuperated factories. They had become disowned from the former company’s vertically integrated supply chain, and had to build new relationships with customers and suppliers. Workers had low or no pay through 2008. Some members of the community circulated a petition against the co-op, believing a larger corporate investor would be more likely to create jobs. Other local shopkeepers extended credit to co-op members through the lean years. 

After their initial eviction the group had support from the government of president Néstor Kirchner, including awarding the co-op stewardship of the machines to keep them functioning (and their asset value intact) during the lengthy bankruptcy proceedings, subsidizing workers’ pay when it was below minimum wage, and finally in 2014 settling creditor debts and expropriating the factory for the workers. This  pivotal moment assured customers that there would not be another eviction, and gave the cooperative real estate collateral on which they could borrow to modernize the facility.  

By 2024 operations had significantly improved.  The cooperative had new contracts and even launched their own brands Fibra and Sanitex. They installed a childcare facility, improved wastewater environmental quality, and even purchased a large plot of land to build worker housing, recognizing that 70% were not homeowners. However, production has fallen steeply in the context of president Javier Milei’s economic “shock therapy.”   

Cooperativa Textiles Pigüé wasn’t the only Gatic factory that became a cooperative.  Closer to Buenos Aires, ex-Gatic workers recuperated another factory to create Cooperativa Unidos por el Calzado.

2020s

2010s

2000s