The People's Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina

by Katherine Sobering

Overview

In 2001 Argentina experienced a massive economic crisis: businesses went bankrupt, unemployment spiked, and nearly half the population fell below the poverty line. In the midst of the crisis, Buenos Aires’s iconic twenty-story Hotel Bauen quietly closed its doors, forcing longtime hospitality workers out of their jobs. Rather than leaving the luxury hotel vacant, a group of former employees occupied the property and kept it open. In The People’s Hotel, Katherine Sobering recounts the history of the Hotel Bauen, detailing its transformation from a privately owned business into a worker cooperative—one where decisions were made democratically, jobs were rotated, and all members were paid equally. Combining ethnographic and archival research with her own experiences as a volunteer worker at the hotel, Sobering examines how the Bauen Cooperative grew and, against all odds, successfully kept the hotel open for nearly two decades. Highlighting successes and innovations alongside the many challenges that these workers faced, Sobering presents a vivid portrait of efforts to address inequality and reorganize work in a capitalist economy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478022862
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Katherine Sobering is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas and coauthor of The Ambivalent State: Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Recuperating the Hotel Bauen  19
2. Democracy at Work  47
3. Hospitality in Cooperation  73
4. Rotating Opportunity  96
5. The Politics of Equal Pay  120
6. The Activist Workplace  148
Conclusions  171
Epilogue: Surviving (Another) Crisis  181
Methodological Appendix  187
Notes  201
References  227
Index  253

What People are Saying About This

Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization behind the Burning Man Event - Katherine K. Chen

“Offering a fascinating window into organizing processes that most of us will never experience firsthand, Katherine Sobering draws on rich and extensive participant observation, interviews, and document analysis to delve into the efforts to tackle inequality through the organizing practices of a worker-recuperated business. This excellent study of contemporary collectivist-democratic organizing, labor, and inequality in Latin America has much to teach organizations and readers everywhere.”

Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina - Javier Auyero

“At Hotel Bauen, Katherine Sobering made beds, cleaned toilets, waited tables, swept floors, attended the reception desk day and night, and joined the workers who owned and ran the hotel in their many meetings as they attempted to build a more humane and just workplace. The result of this uniquely granular ethnography is an engaging and captivating narrative of a remarkable group of people who dared to dream that another world is possible—and fought tooth and nail for this collective project. There are many scholarly and political lessons packed in this extraordinary book.”

Editorial Reviews

"Sobering’s study ... restores, through analysis, the subjective dynamics behind the decision to self-manage a workspace and the desire to transform it into a cooperative space that can serve as a contagion vector for the production of urban counterpower."

-- Vincenzo Maria Di Mino Urban Studies

"Sobering’s The People’s Hotel is powerful, moving, and, I would argue, the best organizational ethnography to date on the inner workings of one of Argentina’s worker-recuperated companies. . . . Without doubt, The People’s Hotel is a landmark that serves to safeguard the legacy of the BAUEN workers and should become a much-cited study of organizational ethnography for years to come."
-- Marcelo Vieta American Journal of Sociology

"Sobering’s beautifully written and engaging ethnography will appeal to a variety of readers, including labor historians, scholars of social movements, and anyone interested in the history of efforts to forge more just and democratic workplaces."
-- Jennifer A Adair Journal of Social History

From the Publisher