How Mexican Workers Won Ownership of a Tire Plant Jane Slaughter - CounterPunch.org
go to original April 4, 2013

“If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.” When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up - and usually dies.

The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and once in business, the new worker-owners face all the pressures that helped the company go bankrupt in the first place. Most worker-owned co-ops are small, such as a taxi collective in Madison or a bakery in San Francisco.

But in Mexico a giant-sized worker cooperative has been building tires since 2005. The factory competes on the world market, employs 1,050 co-owners, and pays the best wages and pensions of any Mexican tire plant.

Aware that this unusual victory is virtually unknown in the U.S., friends in Guadalajara urged me to come down and see how the TRADOC cooperative is working.

Its president - who was union president when the plant was owned by Continental Tire - spoke in a workshop at the 2010 Labor Notes Conference. Jesus “Chuy” Torres is one of the more impressive unionists I’ve met - though he’s no longer officially a unionist. Still, “our class is the working class,” he told me.

Far from indulging in a “we’ve got ours” mentality, the TRADOC workers are intent on maintaining solidarity with workers still cursed with a boss.

It’s hard to decide which is more remarkable - how the Continental workers turned a plant closing into worker ownership through a determined 1,141-day campaign, or how they’ve managed to survive and thrive since then.

In any case, we need to celebrate such victories. I’ll tell the tale in two parts.

Read the rest at Counterpunch

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