The factory opened in the early 1980s as Zanon, owned by businessman Luis Zanon, during the years Argentina was ruled by a military dictatorship. According to the workers' union, it was built on public land with public money from the national and provincial governments, loans that, the union says, were never repaid. At the inaugural parade, Zanon is said to have thanked the military government for keeping Argentina safe for investment. Through the 1990s the company grew on the strength of more state loans, helped along by Zanon's friendships with the country's president and the governor of Neuquen. For the workers on the line, those were lean years; labor law offered them little protection, and the plant's own union, they later charged, had been captured by people working hand in glove with the owners.

In 2000 the workers won back control of their union and began to ask for better conditions. The owner's answer was to start letting people go, and then, in 2001, to lock the gates entirely, hoping to reopen one day with a more obedient workforce. The timing landed in the middle of Argentina's catastrophic 2001 economic crisis, when the whole country seemed to be coming apart. Owed months of back pay and afraid the plant would be stripped of its assets, the workers refused to disappear. They camped outside the shuttered factory for months with no wages at all. On October 2, 2001, they voted to stay. The following March, 240 of them walked back in and switched the kilns on themselves, producing tiles for the first time with no manager in sight.

Self-management could have been a brief, doomed gesture. Instead it worked. After Argentina abandoned its one-to-one peso-dollar peg in 2002, the recovered factory became profitable again, and the workers expanded it, hiring more than 170 new people and roughly doubling production. They organized horizontally, through open worker assemblies where decisions were made collectively, a deliberate break from the top-down, bureaucratic unionism that dominated Argentine labor. None of it came easily. The former owner pressed in the courts to reclaim the plant and to have the workers evicted, and the cooperative endured threats and violence, including the kidnapping and torture of a woman worker in 2005. They kept the kilns burning anyway, even while paying full price for the gas and electricity their predecessor had received at a fraction of the cost.

What set FaSinPat apart was where it pointed its success. From the beginning the cooperative gave tiles to community centers and hospitals, opened its floor for cultural events, and sent monthly donations to soup kitchens. In 2005 the workers voted to build a health clinic in the poor neighborhood of Nueva Espana, something residents had begged the provincial government to provide for twenty years. The factory built it in three months. That solidarity was returned: community support helped shield the plant through years of legal and physical pressure. In August 2009 the provincial legislature finally voted, 26 to 9, to expropriate the factory and hand it permanently to the cooperative. A plant built in the name of a dictatorship's friends had become a factory that belonged, in fact and in law, to the people who worked it.