"I'm making enough to eat meat at home about once a week," said Ruben Massias, who builds and maintains the plant's new glass ovens. "But before this, I was just doing odd jobs, and now I think I have a future."
If Argentina's economy recovers, the owners of plants taken over by workers may mount legal battles to reassert property rights, said Daniel Funes de Rioja, a lawyer who represents corporations.
And the takeovers will only continue as long as Argentina's economy remains in the doldrums, said Luis de Lucio, a corporate restructuring expert at Alvarez & Marsal in New York.
"You know that shareholders and banks are going to come back when the economy gets better and say, `That company is ours,'" he said.
Leiva said his cooperative will fight in the courts to keep the glass factory, insisting the owners and their creditors had their chance to sell the factory or reorganize.
The cooperative also has its own ideas. For decades, Cristalux was known for producing a line of table glassware famous in Argentina because it was virtually unbreakable.
But the workers must first make enough money selling the cheaper glass so they can invest in repairs the plant's damaged machinery and obtain licensing rights to produce the brand.
"That's our dream," Leiva said.
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