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The People's Hotel

Working for Justice in Argentina

Katherine Sobering author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:9th Sep '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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The People's Hotel cover

In 2001 Argentina experienced a massive economic crisis: businesses went bankrupt, unemployment spiked, and nearly half the population fell below the poverty line. In the midst of the crisis, Buenos Aires’s iconic twenty-story Hotel Bauen quietly closed its doors, forcing longtime hospitality workers out of their jobs. Rather than leaving the luxury hotel vacant, a group of former employees occupied the property and kept it open. In The People’s Hotel, Katherine Sobering recounts the history of the Hotel Bauen, detailing its transformation from a privately owned business into a worker cooperative—one where decisions were made democratically, jobs were rotated, and all members were paid equally. Combining ethnographic and archival research with her own experiences as a volunteer worker at the hotel, Sobering examines how the Bauen Cooperative grew and, against all odds, successfully kept the hotel open for nearly two decades. Highlighting successes and innovations alongside the many challenges that these workers faced, Sobering presents a vivid portrait of efforts to address inequality and reorganize work in a capitalist economy.

"Sobering’s study ... restores, through analysis, the subjective dynamics behind the decision to self-manage a workspace and the desire to transform it into a cooperative space that can serve as a contagion vector for the production of urban counterpower." -- Vincenzo Maria Di Mino * Urban Studies *
"Sobering’s The People’s Hotel is powerful, moving, and, I would argue, the best organizational ethnography to date on the inner workings of one of Argentina’s worker-recuperated companies. . . . Without doubt, The People’s Hotel is a landmark that serves to safeguard the legacy of the BAUEN workers and should become a much-cited study of organizational ethnography for years to come." -- Marcelo Vieta * American Journal of Sociology *

ISBN: 9781478015635

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 499g

272 pages