Abstract
Institutionalist and corporatist interpretations of the business unionism strategy adopted by some unions in Argentina when faced with the 1990s market reforms are inadequate in that they consider unions as interest groups, play down the context of capitalist restructuring, and fail to account for the novelty of the strategy. These limitations can be overcome by reviving some ideas from Marxist analysis, such as the classist nature of unions and their participation in the historical dynamic of a capitalist social formation.
Interpretaciones institucionalistas y corporativistas de la estrategia del sindicalismo empresarial adoptada por algunos sindicatos en Argentina cuando se enfrentaron a las reformas del mercado en los años 1990 son inadecuadas en que consideran a los sindicatos como grupos de interés, minimizan el contexto de la reestructuración capitalista, y no logran dar cuenta de la novedad de la estrategia. Estas limitaciones pueden ser superadas mediante la reactivación de algunas ideas de análisis marxista, tales como el carácter clasista de los sindicatos y su participación en la dinámica histórica de una formación social capitalista.
During the administration of Carlos Menem (1989–1999), a series of neoliberal market reforms was implemented through the passage of laws on the economic emergency (23.697/89), government reform (23.696/89), and convertibility (23.928/91). The first repealed industrial, regional, and export-promotion regulations, removed the preference for domestically manufactured products in government purchases, dismissed public employees, and eliminated the privileged wage scales assigned to them. The second promoted privatization of state-owned companies (telephone, gas, electricity, etc.), and the third established the fixed exchange rate of one peso to one dollar, preventing the Argentine government from issuing money without an equivalent backing in dollars and thus tying the Argentina economy to international financial capital.
Many researchers have studied some of the consequences of these policies, such as the progressive concentration and transnationalization of capital and the fragmentation of the labor force. However, very few have dealt with their impact on unions, focusing instead on a crisis of union representation─a weakening of unions as organizations that protect and represent the working class (Zapata, 2004). This crisis was a result of the convergence of reforms producing the dismissal of workers and an increase in informal labor, eroding the foundations of union membership and the degree of representativeness of their organizations, and a wave of deregulatory measures aimed at relaxing conditions for hiring and jobs, the means of remuneration for work, and disciplinary procedures in the workplace, all of which resulted in a reduction of opportunities for union activity (Senén and Haidar, 2009).
In this context some unions, for example, those that brought together workers in commerce, electricity, or health, adopted a strategy of business unionism: they participated in various businesses enabled by the market reforms, becoming administrators of pension funds and insurers of work-related risk and purchasing stock in privatized companies. The objective of this article is to discuss the significance of this strategy.
The article is divided into two parts. In the first I will present the major interpretations of Argentine business unionism, grouped according to the way they conceive of the strategy—whether as an adaptation of corporate and bureaucratic unionism (de la Garza, 2001; Novick, 2001), as an innovative response resulting from negotiation with the government (Etchemendy, 2001; Etchemendy and Palermo, 1998; Murillo, 1997; 2001), or as a form of North American business unionism (Ranis, 1995; Palomino, 2005). In the second part I will point out the limitations of these readings and propose, using a set of concepts from the Marxist grid, another interpretative line that contributes to an understanding of the novelty of the strategy. Lastly, I will outline an analysis of the course of business unionism as part of the transformations that followed the December 2001 crisis.
Interpretations of Argentine Business Unionism
An Adaptation of Corporate and Bureaucratic Unionism
The first interpretation of Argentine business unionism stems from the assumption that in postwar Argentina under Juan Domingo Perón (1945–1955), the representation of functional interests, especially of unionism, was structured by state corporatism, a system that granted functionally differentiated categories recognized by the state a monopoly of representation in exchange for control over selection of their leaders and the articulation of their demands (Schmitter, 1992). State corporatism differs from societal corporatism or neocorporatism (characteristic of northern European countries) in that the structuring of interests is determined by the state and not by civil society. In other words, the intermediation of interests is subordinated to the state or directly created by it (Collier, 1995).
This idea of corporatism, which assumes strong state intervention and scant union autonomy, has been linked to the notions of corporate unionism and bureaucratic unionism. Along this line, the term “corporate unionism” refers to a corporatist structuring of unions (Novick, 2001) characterized by the establishment of the union as a social agency that provides services to those it represents (health, recreation, etc.), centralized (national-level) collective bargaining agreements, discussion of wages and working conditions but not the work process, organization in terms of levels (Level 1 being the grassroots unions, Level 2 the federations that group unions by activity, and Level 3 the confederations that unite the federations), and a monopoly of representation for the union with the most members in each activity (for example, the legal status at the confederation level is held by the Confederación General del Trabajo de la República Argentina [Argentine General Labor Confederation—CGT-RA]).
According to this description, the union is a corporation or group that mediates the interests of workers and is subordinate to the state, since it is the latter that recognizes monopoly representation over the main institutions upon which the union model is based: collective bargaining and the administration of social services. In turn, under the logic of political exchange assumed by corporatism, the union guarantees containment of social conflict and, eventually, electoral support for the political force that ensures the exchange link.
In the 1960s the term “bureaucratic” was added to this characterization of unionism in Argentina. As examined by Daniel James (1999), after the period of Peronist resistance (which began with the military coup of 1955), repression of workers and unionists, and insecurity of working conditions, the Peronist unions—through negotiation, pragmatism, and acceptance of realpolitik─became part of the political and institutional system, forging a role for themselves as agents of power. The corollaries of this were bureaucratization and an increase in the use of autocratic methods to regulate the unions’ internal life. This corporatist and bureaucratic unionism, born under the Peronist government and reshaped after its fall, came to be considered traditional.
This interpretative line maintains that, in the face of the neoliberal reforms and with a new model of labor relations leading to job insecurity, the decentralization of collective bargaining (which until then had taken place at the operational level and shifted to the factory level in the 1990s), flexibility, deunionization, and the privatization of union social services, the general strategy of corporate unions consisted of trying to adapt and rebuild their old alliance with government, now the neoliberal state (de la Garza, 2001). In this regard, Novick (2001) points out that in the 1990s, confronted with the withdrawal of the state and the dismantling of the labor institutes, the identity of the union model of organization was altered and─in opposition to the value of unity that had reigned since the 1940s─a division produced four union confederations with different political beliefs and structural traits: the CGT (the only one with legal status), the Movimiento de Trabajadores Argentinos (Movement of Argentine Workers—MTA), the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (Argentine Workers’ Central—CTA), and the Corriente Clasista y Combativa (Classist and Combative Current—CCC). The unions that remained under the leadership of the CGT and embodied the traditional model reacted corporately and attempted to maintain their power and identity through the old mechanisms of dialogue, negotiation, and pragmatism. De la Garza (2001: 20) summarizes the situation as follows: “In Argentina the CGT’s corporate vocation was reborn in the early 1990s, with Menem’s first term.”
This interpretative current also emphasizes that the tendency toward bureaucratization led to the crystallization of bureaucratic structures in the 1990s, with tight control of the delegate committee by the leadership both through discipline and violence and through co-optation by offering jobs and new services (Martuccelli and Svampa, 1997). In response to the market reforms, the CGT unions took an adaptive conservative tack in which the crux of exchange and political negotiation by union delegates was the defense of their corporate prerogatives, perpetuating the gap between the union apparatus and the workers. In sum, under this interpretation business unionism was an ad hoc strategy in line with old styles and adaptive mechanisms, an updated version of corporate and bureaucratic unionism.
An Innovative Response Resulting from Negotiation with the Government
A second line based on the same assumptions as the first considers business unionism an innovative response resulting from negotiation with the government. The government strategy with regard to unions is called cooperation (concertación) (Etchemendy and Palermo, 1998), compensation (Etchemendy, 2001), or concessions (Murillo, 1997; 2001). These writers see the rationale of negotiation and exchange as having prime importance but new features. Etchemendy and Palermo (1998) indicate that in the labor reform during Menem’s first term (1989–1994) there was a new pattern of interaction between stakeholder associations (union and business) and government. While policy making was not agreed upon between the state and the stakeholders, with Caro Figueroa in the Ministry of Labor and the framework agreement 1 promoted by his office there were reforms directly negotiated between social actors and government and a state that showed a certain level of autonomy in organizing the space for cooperation among stakeholders.
For these writers, government autonomy and cooperation are novel traits. Whereas corporatism is an overall structuring of stakeholders—a monopolistic, hierarchical organization of groups—cooperation is (according to Schmitter [1992] and Collier [1995]) a way of developing public policy in which stakeholder organizations prevail over the system of territorial representation and the parties. In other words, the operative interests have privileged and priority access to legislative deliberation and decision making.
Continuing along this line, Etchemendy (2001) argues that the state did not carry out the market reforms unilaterally but developed a coalition-building process based on compensation of the winners (certain producers and workers) for the cost of the reforms. The compensation took two forms: partial deregulation and direct allocation of income. Thus, in compensation for wage increases tied to productivity, unemployment, and new and more flexible collective bargaining agreements in private companies, the unions supposedly retained their monopoly and centralized negotiations, kept the old agreements (which remained valid even after their expiration), and achieved the partial deregulation of social services and a direct allocation of the income involved (participation in private retirement plans and in occupational risk insurance, stock in privatized companies such as electricity providers, railroad lines, etc.). Approaching an explanation of the idea of selective compensation, Etchemendy argues that the winners were those sectors that had increased their power in economic and organizational terms in the years prior to the reform and therefore represented a greater threat to the political sustainability of the process. In the case of the unions, the winners were those that had had centralized leadership when the reforms occurred.
Along this same line, Murillo (1997; 2001), drawing on the neocorporatist and neoinstitutionalist literature, begins with the assumption that, starting with Peronism, labor regulation in Argentina was corporatist, and this contributed to government control of union organization and allowed the unions to invest in the creation of institutions (political resources) to resolve industrial conflicts rather than depending on worker mobilization and conditions in the labor market (industrial resources). For Murillo the reforms of the 1990s dealt a blow to the system in which the unions operated, producing a decline in membership and a loss of capacity to mobilize the rank and file and influence the Justicialista Party (founded by Perón, to which Menem also belonged)—all of which meant a reduction in political resources. Given this situation, workers’ organizations turned to resistance, subordination, and organizational survival through the involvement of unions in business activities. This was not an automatic conservative adaptation by corporate and bureaucratic unions but an innovative strategy that sought to lessen their historical dependence on the state as a source of organizational resources and replace it with the market mechanisms promoted by the structural reforms. In this way the reduction in membership caused by unemployment and job insecurity would be compensated for by the increase in clients for the services that the unions began to provide to consumers in general.
Not all unions adopted this innovative option. While Etchemendy’s work indicates that the unions involved in business unionism were the larger ones with economic and organizational power, Murillo points out that there were different combinations of institutional legacies and organizational resources (since the industrial and political ones had diminished), providing the necessary conditions for union leaders to opt for varying strategies in the face of the same challenge. In the case of the organizations that opted for business unionism, the institutional legacies were a historical alliance with Peronism and a tradition of institutional pragmatism and the organizational resources for the provision of social services and other benefits in line with the image of the union as a service agent. This strategy signified a “strategic adaptation that, for the unions involved, reduced their direct dependence on a government in withdrawal through union participation in commercial activities that were revived by the market reforms themselves” (Murillo, 1997: 431).
A Form of North American Business Unionism
Lastly, a third and very widespread interpretation identifies Argentine business unionism with the North American business unionism in which the union broadens its sphere of activities to include clearly business roles (Ranis, 1995). The term “business unionism” has historically been used in different ways. As it was used by Hoxie in 1914, it referred to a type of North American union characterized by the predominance of a corporative rather than classist consciousness that made obtaining better wages and working conditions for those it represented its principal objective. It was expressed institutionally in collective bargaining and in practices associated with institutional pragmatism (Ghigliani, 2009). In these restrictive terms, “business unionism” was, as Flanders (1968) defined it, an organization whose main activity was negotiation, regulation, and control. The concept so defined proves limited for describing Argentine unionism as I have characterized it. 2 Broader uses of the term include functions such as the provision of services, and in this sense it could be likened to the type considered traditional in Argentina. Accordingly, the researchers that I assign to this category of interpretation consider Argentina business unionism as representing continuity and augmentation of the union function of provision of services.
Along this line, Palomino (2005) maintains that the participation of unions in businesses made possible by the privatization of companies (pensions and work-related accident insurance) was a concession granted by the government in exchange for support and reinforced the existing gap between the union apparatus and the workers. He emphasizes that union leaders used representation to sell services to their own members, who became a captive population in this regard and were redefined as clients.
Those who view Argentina business unionism as a form of North American business unionism consider it an attempt to strengthen the service-provision function colored by an instrumental and economic relation between unions and their members. In fact this reading assumes that one of the principal features of the corporatist union model was the image of the union as an agency that provided services to its members and that benefits through social services, tourism, and recreational activities constituted its main links with them. In this context the inference is that business unionism is the continuation and strengthening of a union identity specifically associated with the notion of the union as a social agency providing services to those it represents.
The Limitations of These Interpretations and an Alternative Proposal
On a theoretical level, these interpretations have managed to develop a test of Schmitter’s (1992) theory of corporatism, creating typical categories that transcend the description in order to add heuristic value to the Argentine case. At the same time, they allow us to deal with the long-standing problem of state-union relations from the perspective of corporatist theory. In addition, these predominantly political science interpretations, in contrast to analyses conducted in other disciplines, call attention to the intervention of unions in the political arena. Without underestimating these contributions, however, I consider them insufficient for understanding unions as working-class organizations in general and the strategy of business unionism adopted in the 1990s in particular.
All these approaches are based on the corporatist idea that unions are interest groups that depend on the state and pressure it to obtain benefits. The clearest example of this position is the work of Etchemendy (2001), for whom the direct allocation of income is compensation negotiated by the unions with the government for the costs of the market reform, parallel to stockholders’ participation (also as the result of negotiation with the government) in the privatization of certain producers. Unions and business groups receive the same analytical treatment, being considered interest groups that, because of the reforms, obtained identical compensation. This and the other interpretations of business unionism stress the fact that, as interest groups within the corporatist system, unions seek to defend their corporate benefits─such as the monopoly on representation, management of social services, and union dues─and to expand them, for example, by purchasing companies. On this reading, the principal goal of Argentine unions is their own survival.
The first problem presented by these approaches is that in analyzing unions as interest groups, corporations, and/or bureaucratic structures participating in a politico-institutional exchange system, they tend to obscure their class character. Along this line, in the mid-1980s Offe and Wiesenthal (1985) demonstrated with collective-action theory that the concept of the interest group as a natural product of non-class-specific collective action and a neutral form that can be filled by dissimilar interests equalizes the unequal and obscures the category of social class.
At the same time, their failure to recognize that the union is a working-class organization participating in a capitalist social formation causes these approaches to undervalue other class determinations and to play down the influence of capitalist restructurings on union action throughout history. As Hyman (1982: 69) points out, “to treat unions as ‘formal organisations’ wrenched from their social context, is to ignore the impact of the environing institutions of power with which trade unions constantly interact.” To put it another way, the researchers who see union organizations as corporations/interest groups read union activity from a logic of politico-institutional exchange with the state, weighing the strategic options of the actors in terms of their politico-institutional resources, since in these analyses the unions’ principal power resource is their relation to the state.
The institutionalist and synchronized nature of these approaches prevents them from questioning unexplored aspects such as the mechanisms of physical reproduction of unions, tracing historically the material conditions that made the emergence of business unionism possible and revealing the novelty of the phenomenon.Therefore, to understand the importance of this strategy it is necessary to retrieve some basic ideas from the Marxist grid—to begin by defining a union as a class organization formed through a partnership of solidarity among workers for their own defense and fulfillment of social needs and limited by external restrictions produced by capitalist social relations that are reformulated throughout history.
Offe and Wiesenthal (1985) developed the thesis that the structural differences between labor and capital lead to differences between them in power in the rationales of collective action and therefore they cannot both be treated as interest groups. While organizations of capital are a result of incorporating predefined individual interests, workers’ organizations must identify, in addition to shared immediate interests (for example, around wages), a collective identity that is neither individualist nor utilitarian. Unions therefore constitute a mixed case in which the logics of individualist action coexist with others in solidarity, generating tensions in their organizational practices. Therefore, in principle, business unionism cannot be seen as simply the result of a logic of negotiation/concession/compensation identical with that of capital and free of contradictions.
Second, acknowledging the union’s class nature forces consideration of the impact of the power structure with which it interacts, since the decision-making system must be studied in the framework of the power relations that limit its goals and activities. The goals of unions under capitalism have been the topic of lengthy discussion in the field of socialist theory and practice (Hyman, 1978). From an optimistic viewpoint (such as that of Marx and Engels in their early writings), unionism has revolutionary potential and can direct its actions toward that end. From a pessimistic viewpoint (such as that of Lenin, Michels, and Trotsky in their theses of integration, oligarchy, and incorporation, respectively), acting within the confines of capitalism unions invariably end up transforming means (collective bargaining) into ends and reproducing the operational logic of capitalism. However, even if we recognize the integrating role that unionism can play within capitalism, to reduce the analysis of union action to this matrix is to risk becoming trapped in the view that all union activity is an adaptation to the restrictions imposed by capital.
Therefore, although capital exerts an influence on the actions and interests of workers in terms of immediate demands, viewing unions as workers’ organizations in a dynamic system of capitalist social relations obliges us to deal historically with the restructuring of union strategy, assuming that a dialectical relation exists between unionism and capitalist restructuring and that unions are active subjects in this relationship (Silver, 2005). It is crucial to recover the historical dimension in the treatment of social relations that are essentially dynamic and to study business unionism as a strategy adopted in response to capitalist restructuring that in the 1990s took the form of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization of markets. At the same time, and equally important for distancing ourselves from interpretations that perceive the phenomenon as an expression of continuity with corporate and bureaucratic unionism, it is necessary to consider other motivations, such as the mechanisms of physical reproduction, in historical perspective. This requires examining and reconstructing the dynamic that has led certain unions—class organizations that have their origin in a workers’ partnership of solidarity for their self-defense and fulfillment of social needs—to personify capital. Thus transformations in the mechanisms of physical reproduction of unions, which are not taken into account by the predominant interpretations, become key to understanding not the (supposed) continuity but the novelty of business unionism.
Campione (2002) proposes that Menemism was a phase of intensification of the process of capitalist reconversion that began in 1975. Recovering the profitability of capital demanded dispersing the working class in order to subject it to lower wages and job instability as part of a business reorganization based on the reduction of labor costs and the redisciplining of workers. These economic imperatives required political conditions that would guarantee their enforcement. The previous pressure-negotiation dialectic had become unacceptable to big business, and there was no room for granting economic-corporate benefits even to a union that did not resist the process. This strategy was embodied in the economic emergency, state reform, and convertibility laws as the foundation of a politico-legal platform that also included limitations on the free negotiation of wages (Decree 1.334/91), restrictions on the right to strike in essential services and public employment (Decree 2.184/90), and labor flexibilization (Decrees 24.013/91 and 24.467/95, among others). All this translated directly into an increase in unemployment, underemployment, and insecurity and to what many researchers of labor relations called a crisis of the unions, expressed in a decline in membership, collective bargaining, and labor conflicts.
It was in response to all this that a group of unions, some from the private sector (such as health) and others representing workers in public enterprises that had been privatized (railroads, power and light, oil), participated actively in the market reforms, buying stock in privatized companies and establishing their own companies for administering occupational risk or retirement funds—the material foundations of the so-called business unionism. Those who followed this strategy were the largest unions in the postwar state-centric model, with institutional legacies and highly developed organizational resources.
In the postwar period, under a program of expansion of accruals that signified a distributionist strategy, the wage struggle was the crux of the confrontation between capital and labor, and unions participated in this arrangement as organizations that fought to reduce the extraction of surplus value (for higher wages and better working conditions). Unions in general and those with the most members and therefore greater economic resources (mainly those in state enterprises) in particular devoted themselves to meeting historically determined needs (health, housing, recreation) through structures created for this purpose (social services and cooperatives) that allowed them to reproduce the labor force and the organization itself. However, with the capital offensive initiated in the mid-1970s and intensified in the 1990s, unions, especially those that represented workers in public enterprises characterized by weak exposure to market forces and high levels of employment (Goldín, 2001), saw their mechanisms of physical reproduction threatened, along with their membership base and sphere of action. With the drastic drop in employment and the multiplication of types of insecure hiring, the economic resources provided by membership dues and employer contributions to the unions, which were used to maintain their wealth and provide services to their members, also declined. To survive institutionally, economically, and in patrimony, unions that had not only institutional legacies or experience in management but also adequate material conditions used their accrued resources to participate in businesses opened up by the reforms. Rather than continuity, this marked a break with the logic of operation of previous structures such as social services or the cooperatives.
In other words, if the system of union social services can be understood as a product of a workers’ solidarity fund or a “diversion of a portion of the surplus value” (Piva, 2006) for the reproduction of the labor force (through meeting its growing social needs) and the organization, then business unionism defined as union participation in businesses created by the market reforms means not simply the administration and circulation of income but also the personification of capital to obtain profit. Along this line, as Ghigliani (2009) indicates, the role assumed by the union as an economic agent that seeks profit expresses a qualitative difference rather than one of degree. Although unions historically endeavored to obtain rights to the enjoyment of income, they did not directly seek to personify capital.
Final Reflections
During the 1990s a series of market reforms was implemented in Argentina that had an impact on the labor sphere and on unions. Studies of labor relations declared a crisis of unionism, pointing to the decline in membership, collective bargaining, and labor conflicts, and therefore ignored it as an object of investigation in favor of the emergence of work cooperatives and companies recovered by their workers. In this context a group of unions adopted business unionism as a strategy, participating in various businesses made possible by the reforms.
Very few researchers studied this phenomenon, but those who did produced a series of interpretations that I have grouped into three currents. The first highlights the corporate and bureaucratic nature of the response, the second its most innovative component (negotiation in terms of concessions), and the third the unions’ tradition of providing social services. These three currents all see unions as interest groups that depend on the state and pressure it to obtain benefits, and all three see more points of continuity than breaks in the strategy.
While these lines constitute important contributions to the study of Argentine unionism in the 1990s, they have limitations for attempting to answer questions such as What are the conditions that led some unions to adopt this strategy? How are the strategy and capitalist restructuring related? How do these terms affect the unions’ mechanisms of physical reproduction? To answer these questions it is important to reestablish the class nature of unions within a capitalist formation that is being restructured and to adopt a historical perspective on the mechanisms of their physical reproduction.
With these new guidelines in mind, I have suggested that business unionism was a strategy that—confronted with the offensive of capital, which was an assault on unions’ mechanisms of physical reproduction—allowed unions to broaden these mechanisms with structures created with the funds they had previously used to meet the social needs of their members. For the first time in their history, unions came to personify capital by becoming entrepreneurs, directly tapping the labor force and ultimately collecting capitalist profits. Interpretations that conceive of unions as interest groups participating in a logic of politico-institutional exchange cannot appreciate this.
This unprecedented experience reached its limits after the 2001 crisis and the repeal of convertibility under a political proposal that managed to recreate the conditions for the accumulation of capital with greater government autonomy. From that moment on, and with greater force since 2003 with the Kirchner government, economic and political changes have created a framework in which unions can overcome the crisis of the 1990s through a process of revitalization. Strictly speaking, revitalization refers to innovative strategies such as those adopted by the labor movement in the United States and Britain (including recruitment of new members, democratization of union structures, popular demonstrations, and the building of alliances with civil society organizations), along the lines of what Kim Moody (1997) called “social movement unionism.” More broadly defined, revitalization is an increase in union activism that is expressed through various strategies (the building of alliances being only one of many, including the more traditional social pact) depending on the availability of politico-institutional resources (Senén and Haidar, 2009).
In the Argentine literature revitalization is measured by increases in membership, collective bargaining, and conflict. During the 1990s union membership declined as a result of unemployment and lack of job security; collective bargaining diminished both quantitatively and qualitatively, given that the opportunities for negotiation were frozen and when negotiations occurred it was downward; and unions lost their leading role to new expressions such as the cooperatives formed to operate factories recovered by their workers. In summary, unions were in a defensive position because of the market reforms. Since the 2001 crisis, the indicators of a crisis of unionism have been reversed in the new context characterized by the end of the neoliberal consensus, the increase in production and employment rates driven by favorable international conditions for the Argentine economy, the steady recovery of labor regulation to the workers’ advantage, and the strengthening of the Ministry of Labor. As employment and job security increased, the levels of union affiliation rose. Both the quantity and the quality of collective bargaining grew, with wage levels and labor conditions prior to the reforms of the 1990s steadily recovering and labor conflicts resuming their leading role in overall social conflict.
The dominant political science approaches interpret union activity in the new context in terms of the classic patterns of corporatism. Etchemendy and Collier (2008) note that after a period in which unionism was on the defensive it reappeared as a significant force representing the working class in the formal sector. They refer to the union resurgence in terms of “segmented neocorporatism,” seen as a new model of high-level tripartite negotiations in which unions with a monopoly on representation, business associations, and the government agree on sectoral wages on the basis of inflation goals and a minimum wage that is applied to a substantial minority of the workforce, formal workers (creating their segmented character). These writers hold that unions are managing distribution in the context of a government open to its demands, achieving wage increases compatible with the inflationary goals and the organizational and individual benefits destined for the largest unions. According to them, the large unions united in the CGT, which include the business unions, having greater organizational resources, can direct their efforts at increasing their influence in the labor market instead of recruiting new members or building coalitions with other social groups. Once again, adaptation according to the availability of organizational resources, linked to the capacity for negotiation with government agencies, is the historical constant that explains the different strategies and positions adopted by the major Argentine unions throughout history. At the same time, these investigations say nothing about the methods of business unionism.
My own view is that, to understand how this strategy came about, we must look at the transformations in the mechanisms of physical reproduction of the unions under the new conditions prevailing after the 2001 crisis. If the 1990s signified an erosion of the logic of pressure-negotiation established under the state-centric model, the recent growth of formal employment and reactivation of the distributive struggle reinstate that logic. Along with this, unions began to recover the main sources of resources for their physical reproduction and the provision of services to workers. With the increase in employment, membership increased, and so did income from management contributions and membership dues. At the same time, collective bargaining for wage increases and company contributions meant more resources for the organization. The business unionism that developed as a new mechanism for physical reproduction in response to the erosion of the traditional mechanisms can be expected to be abandoned in a return to the original sources.
Added to this, the pesification of taxes after convertibility meant that certain businesses in which the unions had invested in the 1990s were no longer profitable. When the rates of electric companies were pesified and frozen, for example, the Argentine Federation of Electricity Workers begin to sell its electric-company stock. At the same time, the return to government ownership of pension funds and the disappearance of the private entities that administered them necessarily led to unions’ divesting themselves of those structures. Lastly, the big unions that had embarked on businesses created by the market reforms had not necessarily been successful. A number of these businesses had failed. Therefore, the recovery of traditional sources of physical reproduction, structural changes, and the failure of the unions’ new businesses contributed to business unionism’s reaching its limits in a new context of economic reactivation and state intervention.
Footnotes
Notes
Julieta Haidar is a doctoral candidate in social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a member of the research team on union revitalization in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay at the university’s Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani. She thanks Pablo Ghigliani for his comments and suggestions on this research problem. Victoria J. Furio is a translator living in New York City.
References
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