Collective action spillover and alternative organizations: the influence of piquetero protest activity on worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina, 1998–2007

Abstract

This study examines the Argentine worker-recuperated businesses movement during the economic crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s—wherein workers preserved their jobs by taking control of failed businesses and managing them cooperatively—to understand how social movement activism spills over to work It is proposed that the cultural frames and tactics produced by other collective action campaigns provided the cultural tools that facilitated the recuperation of failed businesses by employees; time-series analyses test for the effect of collective action legacies (e.g. past labor protests involving workers’ occupation of businesses) and contemporaneous movement spillover (e.g. state-oriented ‘piquetero’ activism among unemployed workers) on yearly counts of worker-recuperated businesses. The findings carry implications for understanding the pathways by which social movement activism influences mobilizations within work organizations.