Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to gain a perspective on the breakdown of the Fordist social contract by examining the temporalities of work, its absence — unemployment — and its renewed presence as a more politicized, yet also more precarious, human activity among members of an Italian "recovered enterprise".

Paper long abstract:

A recovered enterprise is a business that went bankrupt and was reopened by its workers without (and often against) the involvement of its previous owners and the authorities. The phenomenon is best known as one aspect of the economic crisis that hit Argentina in 2001. While the Argentine case is widely known and studied, after the global recession of 2008 similar cases have been reported in many European countries, from Spain and France to Greece and Italy. By examining the case of an automotive factory near Milan that has been repurposed for new uses, this paper argues that time is an important element of a worker's moral economy. Fordism and the Keynesian social contract produced a certain kind of time structure, which spanned from the short-term experience of days divided into units determined by the factory clock, to the long-term experience of social reproduction and the sense that life for one's family was improving. Unemployment and precarity, which characterize life for many under austerity, cause instead an extreme rupture in this time structure, which begins with losing your job and "staying at home" and ends with losing hope for the future. Changes in the perception of time are thus an important aspect of the crisis in social reproduction brought about by the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial way of life. The paper documents how workers might try to resist this crisis through grassroots forms of activism and politics based on mutualistic values, specifically by creating a recovered enterprise.