Greek Factory Becomes Worker Utopia

In these sorry times, if a news story sounds too good to be true … I’ll take it anyway. At a factory in Thessaloniki called Viome that was shut down following the Greek economic crisis in 2011, the workforce has purportedly taken their workplace and their livelihoods into their own hands—creating what sounds like a utopian commune in this report by Aditya Chakrabortty.

After the factory closing, the workers refused to leave their posts. Their entire community joined to form a human chain around the plant when officials came to reclaim the industrial machinery. A group of former employees stayed on, determined to run the factory themselves. But instead of producing chemicals as they had formerly done, at the request of locals they changed the output to eco-friendly detergents and cleaning products. Self-run and sustainable!

And then there’s the way they’re running the place. Horizontal power structure, communal governance. Community meetings. Rotating chores. They even use the factory as a meeting point for newly arriving refugees. The size of the employee group is a tenth its former size, but the ones that stayed are managing to earn about what they’d receive from government unemployment funds if they didn’t work at all.

This is a giddily optimistic story about what happens when people are left to their own devices. It’s not a solution and it’s not scalable; its very strength is in its small and local nature. But it’s a case study, it’s proof, and it’s hope. It’s strength in (small) numbers.