Industrial enterprises managed by workers

Abstract

After the 25^th April 1974 some hundreds - they are more than 600 today - of small industrial enterprises managed by workers appeared in Portugal, coming, for the most part, from private enterprises previously existing, and where workers' representative organs took power. In fact, in more than one hundred enterprises under these conditions, the workers' management is made after an agreement established with the former employers, being considered a «non-litigious» management. In the whole it is an extremely interesting experience, even under the sociological point of view, specially in the case of those enterprises already existing before April '74 and where workers' management substituted for the employers' or the managers' one. It is a phenomenon for which it is not easy, rigorqusly, to find a parallel in other countries. By its origin, it distinguishes itself, for the most part, from the experience of the classic workers' production cooperatives. Time is submitting this «innovation» to a pitiless series of tests of economic and social viability. Nevertheless, in a general way, one may say that management by workers, in the cases where it came after management by employers, has been run at least as well as the latter. On the other side, one does not see, in a clear way, any trend to the equalitarianism, what might, at medium term, expel the best technicians from the workers' cooperatives. All this contributes to face the future of the most part of these enterprises with optimism.