ERTE is the Spanish acronym for Expediente de Regulación Temporal de Empleo [Record of Temporary Employment Regulation], known in English as Temporary Redundancy Plan.

This Glossary was a first tool to define a shared, common terminological basis from which the Catalizadora [Catalyst] ERTE developed its work. At the same time, it stands as a compilation of terms and ideas for future reference, many of which are a review of understatements that went hand in hand with ERTE procedures in recent years, as a stopgap for the negative effects on companies and employment caused by the COVID-19 crisis.

Playing with time. Capital does not allow temporality of care. How can we turn this around and shape time and space?

Making a leap in scale. Emphasising scales and connections. Resignifying connections and making them visible. Using already existing networks.

Redistribution to promote practices based on reciprocity, in order to generate other forms of economy and other value systems. The element of reciprocity is not present in economic practices, though it should be. It is a positive element. Reciprocity as a way of organising productive work, as mutual aid and unpaid exchange.

Thinking about resizing certain economic practices is an important process. Emphasising scales and connections. Making a leap in scale. Subsistence production. Sometimes small initiatives considered to be below industrial production level feel trapped, since they are forced to transform their production process with dynamics unrelated to processes that sustain life.

Adjusting. Exploitation. Learning from scratch. Surviving thanks to the workforce. There are companies where employment is not possible and they cannot have access to the ERTE [Temporary Redundancy Plan] either. This is where transformation kicks off. Networking. There is no choice but getting together, not to defeat the monster, but to live with it and put up resistance from the collective sphere. It is not possible to do so from the individual sphere, as the monster is massive and takes advantage of it.

‘Producing x, reproducing community.’

We are told that we will be able to avoid the blow only thanks to the state, but this logic is merely intended to punish or to cease supporting emancipatory supply networks. Softening the blow has to do with a practice previous to the blow. The blow is always there. Softening the blow is to always work. Softening the blow has to do with resilient practices that understand economy in different ways in relation to care.

(Term also linked to the Emancipadoras-Emancipatory category)

Not reducing actually, segregating. Circular economy and knowledge. Bringing back stories swallowed by the modernising narrative that sanctions how to produce in relation to the market. How to operate in a short circuit?

ERTE procedures [Temporary Redundancy Plans] have focused on large corporations and have not promoted emancipatory initiatives, of self-managed or diverse scales, such as the pagès markets, organised by Catalan/Balearic peasant farmers known as pagesos/pageses.

(Term also linked to the Rebusque – Moonlighting category)

Focusing on what is essential. Resignifying simplification for emancipation. Being close to others and practicing attentive listening. Although it may be hard to use a language that can work and operate at different scales and in different communities, a broader scope is needed.

Recognition. Questioning one’s idea/framework of work in relation to a single type of economy. Resignifying other situated practices aware of our contexts and energies. Resignifying small acts and small gestures, practices and decisions that are taken for granted. We must use memory for this resignification. Resignification and restitution through the invocation of memory. Memory as selected by ourselves. Tactical memory making sense here and now. In order to know this tactical memory that is important/necessary right now, we should know the memory of the past, know how to discard and rescue, so as not to reproduce certain things without knowing why we do it.

Without uncertainty, sometimes initiatives are not activated. Crisis is a permanent state. Props to see partly cloudy. Foreseeing harsh weather conditions.