From failing factories to worker self-management
Stories of labor resistance in Italy and Greece
by Camilla Donzelli
In September 2008, the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered what would become the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. It was not an unforeseeable accident, but the direct result of decades of financial deregulation and unchecked speculation. When the bubble burst, governments stepped in swiftly to rescue banks and financial institutions. But saving financial capital came at a cost – and that cost was ultimately borne by the working class.
According to ISTAT’s annual report published in 2014, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal were among the European countries hit hardest by the crisis. Between 2008 and 2013, they collectively lost more than 6.1 million jobs.
In Italy, the overall employment rate fell to 55.6% in 2013, down three percentage points from 2008. Yet this figure conceals a stark regional divide, with Southern Italy bearing the brunt of the crisis and accounting for roughly 60% of all jobs lost nationwide.
Greece was hit even harder. Overall unemployment climbed to 28% in November 2013, while youth unemployment among people under 25 peaked at 61.4%. More than one-third of the population was living at or near the poverty line, and suicides linked to unemployment and financial hardship rose sharply.
These figures help convey the scale of the devastation wrought by the financial crisis, but it is essential to remember that behind every statistic lies a human story. Stories of workers, families, and sometimes entire communities that, almost overnight, found themselves stripped of both their livelihoods and any sense of a future.
Forced to find new ways to survive, some went on to create experiments that fundamentally redefined what work itself could mean.
Italcables and Vio.Me. are two significant examples of worker-managed factories in Europe, both born from the ashes of the economic crisis.
Italcables: the story of a factory taken over by its workers
Italcables is a company based in Caivano, near Naples, that manufactures steel cables for prestressed reinforced concrete, primarily used in the construction of large-scale infrastructure such as bridges, viaducts, and skyscrapers. In 2013, as a direct consequence of the economic crisis triggered by the financial crash, the company declared bankruptcy.
“At the end of 2012, we went on holiday already feeling uneasy because the factory had been through difficult times, including several rounds of layoffs,” Matteo Potenzieri, now president of the Italcables cooperative, told Miccia Mag. “It seemed like we were slowly finding a way out of the crisis, but then, in January 2013, production came to a halt.”
The company initially attempted to restructure its debt, but banks refused to provide financing. The only remaining option was liquidation, which meant selling off the factory piece by piece.
“We learned about the liquidation that summer,” Matteo recalled. “Those were devastating months. Several coworkers spent days protesting from the factory rooftop. People were desperate because factories were shutting down all over Italy at the time. The crisis affected the whole country, but here in the South it was even worse.” Official ISTAT figures reflect that reality: in 2013, the employment rate in Southern Italy stood at just 42%.
The workers opened talks with the local prefecture in an effort to buy time, asking officials to seek a buyer willing to purchase the factory as a whole and restart production. Meanwhile, they maintained a permanent presence inside the plant to prevent machinery from being stolen or vandalized.
“As it became clear that no solution was coming from the outside, and that no entrepreneur was interested in buying the factory and getting production back up and running, we started thinking that maybe we could build the solution ourselves,” Matteo said. “Every morning we met to discuss the everyday challenges of getting by, and we kept asking ourselves what we could do.
The idea of forming a cooperative and taking over the company ourselves felt like a dream, almost a utopia.”
Following a meeting with Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, however, that seemingly distant possibility began to take shape. The workers learned about the Marcora Law, legislation passed in 1985 to support the recovery of struggling businesses. Under the law, workers can access financing through the support of Cooperazione Finanza Impresa (CFI) and cooperative development organizations, combining those funds with their own capital, raised in part by receiving their unemployment benefits as a lump-sum advance.
“We started working with the various institutions involved and also brought Banca Etica into the process,” Matteo explained. “Once we knew the project was viable, we began organizing open assemblies for everyone. At each meeting we discussed what was essentially a draft program. Those who signed on would take part in the following assembly, where the discussion became more detailed. The process naturally narrowed the group: we started with 67 workers, and by the end 51 became founding members of the cooperative.”
To finance the project, the workers invested both the advance payment of their unemployment benefits and their personal savings, contributing roughly €25,000 each – for a total of more than €1 million.
“It was an incredibly difficult decision because it affected the livelihoods of entire families,” Matteo added. “We were putting everything we had into the cooperative, and if it failed, we would also have had to pay that money back.”
The cooperative was officially established in April 2015, and the workers returned to the factory later that summer under a lease-to-own agreement approved by the bankruptcy court. Italcables thus became the first workers buyout in Southern Italy’s steel industry.
From top-down management to shared responsibility
“The first few years were difficult, and we made a lot of sacrifices,” Matteo recalled. “Because we didn’t want to leave anyone behind, there wasn’t enough work for everyone. So we agreed on a kind of solidarity arrangement: we worked only three or four days a week and accepted lower wages.”
But the project stood the test of time. Production gradually picked up, allowing the workers to complete the purchase of the factory in 2018. Despite facing new challenges in the years that followed, the cooperative has largely remained financially sustainable.
According to Matteo, Italcables’ success is due in no small part to the organizational model the workers created for themselves.
“We’re a cooperative with a necessary internal structure, but its social base is made up of the workers themselves, who come together in assemblies,”
he explained. “What we’ve been through has completely changed the way we see things and the way we work. We hold regular informal assemblies to discuss the challenges we’re facing and work through solutions together.”
The transition, however, has not been without its difficulties. Many of them stem from deeply ingrained ideas about work – ideas shaped by rigid hierarchies and the pursuit of individual goals.
“Before, everything revolved around an employer-centered hierarchy built on authority,” Matteo said. “The real challenge is helping people who have spent 30 years as employees understand that everything now revolves around shared goals. We need people to see that when certain decisions are made, they’re made for everyone’s benefit, even if there’s no immediate personal reward. The goal is to build a workplace where everyone is part of a network of relationships, and where responsibility is shared.”
Vio.Me.: when a worker-managed factory becomes a political project
Before becoming what it is today, Vio.Me. was a subsidiary of Philkeram Johnson S.A., one of Europe’s leading ceramic tile manufacturers. Based in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, Philkeram Johnson employed around 400 people before the financial crisis.
In 2011, after mounting losses pushed the company deep into debt, its owners fled, leaving behind more than a million euros in unpaid wages. They did not even formally dismiss the workforce, effectively preventing workers from accessing unemployment benefits.
As longtime Vio.Me. worker Makis Anagnostou explains in the 2015 documentary Occupy, Resist, Produce, directed by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, by the time production came to a halt the factory already had a highly active workers’ collective, built through years of union organizing.
“The bosses controlled everything we did and everything we said, so it was extremely difficult,” he recalls. “But once we established the union, we did our best to organize it differently, making sure that everyone’s voice carried the same weight. Eventually, we extended that principle beyond union activity itself, and it ultimately led us to where Vio.Me. is today.”
After the owners fled, the workers and the local community entered a decision-making process that lasted nearly two years.
In 2012, with more than 90% voting in favor, the workers’ general assembly decided to occupy the factory and take control of both the means of production and the unsold inventory. A few months later, the Vio.Me. Solidarity Initiative was established, playing a crucial role in building a network of material support around workers who had suddenly been left without a livelihood.
On February 12, 2013, followed by a trail of journalists and activists, the collective re-entered part of the factory to take control of the premises. It marked the beginning of what would become Greece’s only worker-managed factory.
As Makis explains in Occupy, Resist, Produce, the occupation was never simply about restarting production. The Vio.Me. experiment rests on a far broader political vision: “Our proposal concerns society as a whole. If we, as the working class, have shown that we can manage a factory ourselves, then it means we can also govern our own lives. The factory is not a closed-off space, and we don’t see ourselves as an avant-garde. We believe that if the machinery of the working class starts turning, it can set other, smaller gears throughout society in motion. That’s how the whole mechanism can begin working again: people organize themselves through assemblies, neighborhoods, and collectives, making decisions together and managing their own affairs instead of delegating that power to others.”
Towards a new economy
The 2015 documentary Next Stop: Utopia, directed by Apostolos Karakasis, follows the workers through the process that led to the creation of the Vio.Me. cooperative – from the initial shock of being abandoned by the company’s owners to the long and often difficult journey toward self-management.
Throughout the many internal discussions captured in the film, one challenge emerges again and again: learning to rethink and renegotiate the very meaning of work. “We’re used to being told what to do and getting paid every two weeks. Now we’re navigating completely uncharted territory,” one worker remarks during a conversation featured in the documentary.
As the collective prepares to sign its founding charter, Makis captures the profound process of unlearning and rebuilding that lies at the heart of the Vio.Me. experiment: “We have to become conscious of what we’re about to do. We have to work on ourselves. We have to study, evolve, accept that what we used to be was wrong, and redefine ourselves.”
Crucial support came from people who had already walked a similar path. The Vio.Me. collective established an international dialogue with Zanon, the recovered factory in Argentina, drawing on its experience for practical guidance on how to organize production under workers’ control.
At the same time, the workers faced a fundamental question: what should they produce? Restarting the manufacture of ceramic tiles and construction materials would have required investments they simply could not afford. And even if production resumed, demand had collapsed alongside Greece’s construction sector. The answer ultimately emerged through discussions with the local community.
The Vio.Me. Solidarity Initiative proposed shifting production to affordable, environmentally friendly household cleaning products. The workers embraced the idea and implemented it almost immediately, later expanding their range to include personal care products.
The decision to reorganize production around a need identified by the community was far from accidental.
“We like to say, ‘Factories to the workers, production to society,’”
Vio.Me. worker Kostas Charitakis explained in a 2016 interview with Fair Trade Hellas. “The approach we advocate is based on the idea that factories and the means of production should be under the direct control of workers, because they are the real producers of social wealth. At the same time, we believe production itself should be guided by society.”
“Vio.Me.’s struggle isn’t only about solidarity economy,” Makis added in the same interview. “We prefer the term cooperative economy. We don’t talk about selling products, but about distributing them. Our products reach people directly, without intermediaries, through solidarity distribution networks. But beyond that, we want to transform the relationship between producers and consumers, creating a circular process in which people help determine what should be produced based on real social needs.”
Vio.Me.’s day-to-day operations fully reflect this vision. Every morning, the workers gather in a general assembly to decide what to produce, how much to produce, and how to collectively address any logistical challenges that arise. Yet decision-making extends well beyond the factory floor. Broader community assemblies are held regularly to discuss issues that go beyond production itself, including long-term strategies for collective resistance and economic survival.
One of the most significant initiatives to emerge from this ongoing dialogue with the community was the creation of a grassroots health clinic inside the factory, providing free, holistic healthcare to anyone in need, regardless of their legal status or health insurance coverage. Over time, the factory itself has evolved into a broader political and social hub, hosting concerts, public debates, a self-organized Pride event, and international conferences on labor struggles.
During the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, Vio.Me. also opened its warehouses to store essential supplies for asylum seekers and refugees. In doing so, the collective demonstrated that managing a factory under workers’ control is about far more than reclaiming a workplace – it is about building an actual political infrastructure.
A struggle still unfinished
Over the years, Vio.Me. has made repeated attempts to overcome the legal and bureaucratic obstacles of operating in an occupied factory. In 2014, the collective formalized its status by establishing itself as a social cooperative, after authorities indicated that doing so would pave the way for the official allocation of the section of the factory the workers had occupied. Yet despite years of appeals to the Ministry of Labour, no government – regardless of its political orientation – has ever shown the will to find a solution.
Meanwhile, the legal process to auction off the factory continued. For years, the collective managed to disrupt the proceedings by physically intervening in auctions held at the Thessaloniki Courthouse. In February 2023, however, the workers discovered that the land on which the factory stands had been quietly sold through an online auction to the South African investment company Acsion Limited.
The news immediately sparked a wave of mobilization. Within days, dozens of cooperatives and grassroots collectives rallied in solidarity with Vio.Me., while a large demonstration marched through the streets of central Thessaloniki.
Following an intense internal debate, the workers’ assembly decided to leave the section of the factory they had occupied and relocate to an adjacent plot of land that is still part of the former Philkeram Johnson industrial site. It was a troubled decision, one that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Vio.Me. Solidarity Initiative and the closure of the self-managed health clinic.
“At the moment, the facility is being dismantled,” Thodoris, who works at Vio.Me.’s distribution center in Athens, told Miccia Mag in April 2026. “Because chemicals were handled there, dismantling the site requires specific procedures and takes time. But our assumption is that the investment fund that bought the property is simply buying time so it can eventually profit from reselling both the buildings and the land.”
Despite the uncertainty, Vio.Me. continues to look ahead, focusing on two priorities. “On the one hand, we’re working to build and expand autonomous circular economy networks that connect local and international initiatives, as a strategy to become self-sufficient in a way that’s both effective and sustainable,” Thodoris explained. “On the other hand, we’re going through a gradual process of passing the Vio.Me. project on to a new generation, since most of the founding members are now around 60 years old. This isn’t simply about bringing in new workers – it’s about integrating them into the horizontal, mutual aid practices that define the collective, so the project can continue long into the future.”
During a visit to the factory in the summer of 2013, writer and activist Naomi Klein urged those engaged in struggle not to stop at resistance alone. Saying “no” matters, she argued, but it must be accompanied by alternatives that people can also say “yes” to.
Italcables and Vio.Me. show that worker self-management is not a utopian dream. It is an imperfect practice that demands constant negotiation and adaptation, yet one that can exist here and now. From Caivano to Thessaloniki, theirs is a living “yes” – one that continues to reinvent itself in order to imagine a different way of existing.
