Around the world, groups of workers have occupied their places of work, taking control and re-opening them as worker-managed cooperative businesses, or ERTs. ERTs employ various strategies to keep their occupations alive, but this thesis focuses on one specific strategy, la fábrica abierta, or the open factory. The open factory concept refers to the opening up of the workplace to the community for different cultural, political and educational events. This paper is the manuscript of a speech about the open factory concept given at the SURF conference at UC Berkeley in Summer 2014.
