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In this article we analyse different processes known as “factory and enterprise recovering” by their workers, which have been taking place in Argentina’s recent past. These processes have involved the development of a collective production pattern oriented towards a guarantee of the productive continuity of companies in situations of bankruptcy or financial crisis. Therefore in this paper we seek to place these recovering processes in a historical perspective and in the context of economic, political and social crisis of the early 2000s, based on the results of a research project on cases of recovering in Buenos Aires city and its surroundings. We seek to understand the relationships established among State, workers’, and social organisations, around this employment demand. Finally, by evoking the statements made by workers to justify their action, we analyse how recovering processes became an alternative – and a legitimate one – to categorization as “unemployed” and to the social policies related to this category.