Overview

In the months following 25 April 1974, Portugal experienced an outbreak of self-management experiences in the manufacturing sector. Unemployed, militants committed to the socialist revolution, and workers struggling to maintain their jobs, promoted self-management initiatives of a diverse nature and, in most cases, of ephemeral existence. This seminar will discuss the processes that brought these experiences to life and the factors that led to their premature disappearance. It will also analyse a rare success story, which illustrates the challenges and potentialities of self-management in Portugal today.

Bio note

Andrés Spognardi is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Social Studies (CES). He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Political Economy from the University of Mar del Plata (Argentina), a Master's Degree in Cooperative Economics from the University of Bologna (Italy), and a PhD in Political Science from the Italian Institute of Human Sciences (Italy). He has been a research trainee at the Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies (Italy), and a visiting scholar at Columbia University (USA) and at the University of Valencia (Spain). His research interests centre on the socioeconomic and political determinants of worker ownership, with a particular focus on industrial worker co-operatives. His current research project is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and aims to uncover the factors that account for the divergent paths of worker ownership in Portugal and Spain.