Brukman had sewn men's suits in the Balvanera barrio for half a century. By the late 1990s it was failing along with the country. Argentina's long economic crisis, deepening from recession in 1998 toward outright collapse, had hollowed the business out. Sales fell, debts mounted, and the workforce shrank from some 300 employees to a fraction of that. Wages were slashed until they would not cover a worker's daily commute, and rumors spread that the owners were preparing to shut the doors for good. The fifty who gathered that December day were not making a political statement. They were trying to hold on to the jobs that kept their families fed.

What began as a desperate sit-in became something none of them had planned. With the owners gone, the workers simply kept producing. They organized themselves into an assembly, found new clients, and slowly paid down the company's debts. They voted on a fair wage and set it themselves. Within months they had not only stabilized the operation but raised their own pay and hired ten more people. The factory had a new name behind the old one — the cooperative called itself 18 de Diciembre, after the night it all began. The work was the same as it had always been: cloth, thread, and dress trousers stitched to order. Only now the people doing it answered to no one but each other.

The owners sought to reclaim the building, and the courts obliged. The final eviction order came from Judge Jorge Rimondi, and at midnight on 18 April 2003 more than 300 federal police forced the workers out. They did not go quietly into defeat. By dawn, 3,000 supporters had gathered around the factory — neighbors, members of local assemblies, and piqueteros — and the workers set up camp on the sidewalk outside. In one image that came to define the struggle, the Brukman seamstresses, unarmed and arm in arm, walked toward the police fence to reclaim what they had built; when it gave way, they walked through. They simply wanted to return to work.

Brukman was never alone. When the eviction came, the workers of the Zanon ceramics factory in distant Neuquén — another recovered plant run by its employees — blocked a national highway in solidarity. On 21 April, provincial police attacked demonstrators outside Brukman, leaving twenty wounded and around a hundred arrested. But the pressure held, and in the end the workers regained control of their factory, which still runs as a cooperative today. Their fight became one of the defining stories of Argentina's recovered-factory movement, captured in the 2004 documentary The Take by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein. The graffiti near the building said it plainly: Brukman belongs to the workers.