It was a hot July morning and there was no electricity at Viome, Greece’s only worker-managed factory. I had come to the outskirts of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest town, to see the plant first-hand roughly five years after the takeover. By the time I arrived, the morning worker assembly was over, and half a dozen people roamed around clutching glasses of frappe, the omnipresent cold instant coffee.

Sudden electricity cuts are frequent, and without power there wasn’t much to do. Still, no one thought of going home: someone has to be present at all times, since there is always risk of eviction.

In February 2013, some of these workers had broken into the then-abandoned factory, followed by TV cameras and activists. The occupation of a shuttered factory was a novelty in the crisis-ridden country, and particularly in a region marked by slow but steady deindustrialization: 25 percent of all factories in the Thessaloniki area had shut down and almost a third of its one million population was unemployed. The workers of Viome — an abbreviation for Viomichaniki Metaleutiki, or Industrial Minerals — had been jobless for around two years, and were by then involved in a lawsuit against Viome’s parent company, the Greek ceramic-tile multinational Philkeram Johnson.