Grassroots Labor Organizations in Metropolitan Buenos Aires,2003–2007

The Argentine Labor Movement in the 1990s

During the 1990s, the Argentine working class was hard-hit by the neoliberal offensive, which reversed many of the gains previously won. The economic, political, and social crisis, which reached its peak with the hyperinflation of 1989, culminated in a defeat for the working class that allowed the consolidation of Menemismo and its economic plan. Even after its struggles against privatization had been largely defeated, it continued to develop various types of struggle, including mass direct action to overturn provincial governments (from the Santiagueñazo of 1993 on), roadblocks in conjunction with the protests of unemployed workers, and general strikes. These measures were, however, incapable of impeding the development of the neoliberal project, and the 1990s saw a serious degradation of the living conditions of broad sectors of the working class, reflected by an increase in poverty and inequality as a consequence of unemployment and precarious or informal work.

For employed and unionized workers, the results of collective bargaining during that decade amounted to a setback for the working class. The main issue negotiated during those years was flexibility, introducing clauses that made possible the use of arrangements for a specified contract period, changes in the allocation of work schedules, and flexibility in the organization of work and in wages. Seventy-five percent of the accords negotiated contained at least one clause on flexibility (Novick, 2001). At the same time, the principal reasons for conflict were defensive, ranging from claims for wage recovery to demands originating from layoffs, suspensions, or payments owed (Davolos and Perelman, 2004). The union’s influence on the determination of wages and working diminished (Marshall, 2006).

2001: The End of an Era

The crisis of 2001 brought profound economic, social, and political changes that constituted a new framework for working-class struggles. On the one hand, the fall of Fernando de la Rúa’s government after December 19 and 20 was experienced by broad sectors as a triumph of mass action. The protests of workers and especially of the unemployed and the workers in recovered factories) and of broad sectors of the middle classes organized in people’s assemblies gained major political and social attention in a context that was more favorable for workers’ struggles than before. On the other hand, once the economic recovery began in 2002, unemployment began to decline, thus diminishing its disciplining effect on workers. Although the devaluation of the peso under the Eduardo Duhalde administration meant a substantial transfer of income from the workers to the dominant classes, benefiting mainly the large agrarian and industrial exporters (and to a lesser degree the nonmonopoly bourgeoisie), the new scheme allowed a new cycle of growth that quickly influenced job creation.

The employed working class was reconstituted in this new economic context (Castillo, 2007: 5):

The tendency toward the permanent decline of the industrial proletariat (which dates to the end of the 1970s, although with an important leap with the recession and crisis of 1998–2002) was halted. Workers returned to a level at the end of 2006 that was somewhat less than that of 1997, 800,000 workers, and today the manufacturing industries have some 1,300,000, while 700,000–800,000 work in construction. For the entire economy, the official figures show the creation of more than 3,500,000 new jobs beginning in April 2002.

All in all, the new political, economic, and social context after the crisis of 2001 created more favorable conditions for the development of labor conflicts.

According to a study by the Centro de Estudios Nueva Mayoría (Ovalles, 2006), 2001, with 358 conflicts, saw the highest levels of labor unrest since 1995. While this indicator declined in a context of high unemployment in the immediately following years (2002 and 2003), 2004 doubled the level registered the preceding year (249) and 2005 practically tripled the level of 2004 (820), registering the most labor conflicts since 1990.

At the same time, according to information provided by the Ministry of Work, Employment, and Social Security (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2005), 2004 marked a turning point characterized by the reactivation of collective bargaining. The number of collective conventions and agreements approved during that year was double the average of the preceding 10 years and 20 percent higher than the rate of 2003. In 2005, 63 percent more collective conventions and agreements were approved than in 2004 (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2006a). During the first trimester of 2006, 148 collective conventions and agreements were approved, an 80 percent increase over the same period in 2005 (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2006b). Similarly, 76 percent of negotiations carried out during 2004 dealt with wage increases, reversing the trend of the previous decade (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2005), and during the first trimester of 2006 this figure climbed to 92 percent (Ministerio de Trabajo, 2006b).

New Internal Committees. Bodies of Delegates, and Antibureaucratic Union Lists

According to Fabián Bosoer and Santiago Senén González (2009: 291), since the crisis of December 2001 an opportunity has opened up to reframe the trade union model: “The political disorder was also expressed within the trade unions, making new trends possible and strengthening others.” As mentioned above, the working hypothesis of this article is that the 2001 crisis generated a questioning of the traditional union leadership and the development of democratic methods of decision making in the workplace.This hypothesis arises from a reconsideration of an important issue in the history of the Argentine labor movement in a new historical context. When union leaders find themselves alienated from the working classes (as has often happened in Argentine history), workers’ discontent is first expressed in grassroots organizations: bodies of delegates and internal committees. According to Adolfo Gilly (1986: 21–22), at the same time the great industrial unions were being formed in the 1940s, a cellular form of organization developed that,

because of its origin, reproduction, and operation, is refractory to assimilation into the institutions of capitalist society. In the factories and workplaces, reviving their old traditions of self-organization and independent of specific direction from any political force, much less from Perón himself, the workers designated delegates to represent them by department, section, or work group (“homogeneous groups,” in the Italian nomenclature), together with bodies of delegates that deliberated as internal parliaments and elected internal committees to constitute their permanent, central representation at the company level. . . . Their mode of operation and decision making places them at the organic core of a phenomenon that goes beyond the immediate conflict between capital and labor: the working class’s collective discussion and development of opinion and consensus about the policies of the country and the state.

Juan Carlos Torre (1983: 89) expressed much the same idea when he said, “The unions and the CGT [Confederación General de Trabajo] did not always manage to escape the impositions of governmental policy, but the internal committees guaranteed the workers a permanent presence in the work area and severely conditioned the exercise of management functions.”

Both Gilly and Torre were writing about another era in the Argentine labor movement. In the years of defeat that I have described, the role of grassroots labor organizations was different, but it remains true that the political disorder of the time “made new trends possible and strengthened others.” These new tendencies were expressed in the internal committees and bodies of delegates before they were apparent in unions or in federations.

During the period under consideration, new practices of collective action and organization developed in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area with regard to grassroots union representation. The new delegates employed strategies different from their predecessors’, strategies characterized by confrontation with the company or the state in negotiations over working conditions, dissent from the traditional union leadership, and the use of democratic methods in decision making. Some of the best-known examples are the body of delegates of the Buenos Aires subway, the internal board of the Hospital Garrahan, the internal committee of the Value Brand Company (formerly Federal Soap), and the body of delegates of LAN Argentina. The emergence of these organizations constituted a challenge to the traditional union leadership, which at the time was largely aligned with the government, beginning with the secretary general of the Confederación General de Trabajo (General Confederation of Labor—CGT), Hugo Moyano. The relationship of the grassroots organizations with the government and the CGT is fundamental to an understanding of the context of their development.

In the following pages I will attempt to delineate some of the main characteristics of these organizations, beginning with the conclusions I have drawn from the national newspapers Clarín, La Nación, and Página/12, two leftist newspapers, La Verdad Obrera and Prensa Obrera, and various union newsletters. I have divided the development of these organizations into two subperiods, one from the beginning of Néstor Kirchner’s administration to the first two months of 2005 and the other to the end of his term in 2007. The dividing line is based on a change in government and CGT policy with regard to labor conflict.

The Emergence of Dissident Grassroots Organizations

In a context of the end of the political crisis of 2001, the economic recovery, and the reactivation of collective bargaining, dissident grassroots union organizations began to emerge, especially in the service sector and, to a lesser degree, in industry. In the service sector there were organizations of this kind among Buenos Aires subway workers and telephone workers, the aeronautics workers of LAPA (the company that eventually became LAPSA and then LAN Argentina), the workers of various railway lines, and the workers of Transportes del Oeste. In industry the best-known instances were among the workers of food production companies such as Kraft-Terrabusi, Stani, Pepsico, and Parmalat and of Astillero Río Santiago.

The telephone workers’ struggle took place in December 2004. After nine days of strikes, demonstrations, occupations of buildings, roadblocks, and grassroots assemblies, the workers achieved a 20 percent raise and a bonus of US$170. Their radical methods, especially the occupation of national transmission centers of the telephone companies Telefónica and Telecom, had nationwide repercussions for the power of workers. On December 6, the body of delegates of the telephone workers approved an agreement with the companies. According to Clarín (December 6, 2004),

After 3 PM, the workers who occupied the interconnection centers of Telefónica and Telecom left the area, which suggests that customer service and repairs will begin to function normally. “The plenary took place and approved the accord with the companies by a wide margin, and, from that moment, services will resume,” union spokespeople said.

On December 13 a general assembly of over 2,000 telephone workers also voted to accept the agreement. Although in this important conflict the union leadership remained in the hands of the traditional leaders, mostly of sectors allied with Hugo Moyano, it began to develop a new antibureaucratic list (Lista Violeta) made up of grassroots delegates in various Telefónica and Telecom locations. The country’s main media outlets declared a new framework for union activity. Newspaper headlines read “There Are Increasing Union Conflicts” (La Nación, December 5, 2004),” “Union Protests and Strikes Have Returned with Force” (Clarín, December 5, 2004), “Bidding for Income Returns” (Clarín, December 5, 2004), “Coexisting with Strikes” (Clarín, December 6, 2004),” “Visible Workers” (Página/12, December 8, 2004), and “The Government, between Wage Pressure and the Slow Decline of Unemployment” (Clarín, December 8, 2004).

One of the most important episodes in the subway workers’ struggle took place at almost the same time. Their collective bargaining agreement had expired in November 2001, and the reduction of the workday to six hours had become an issue. According to Celeste Rouspil (2007: 100), “In 2002 the workers held press conferences, work stoppages, mobilizations, roadblocks, and escraches [protests “outing” corrupt politicians] in the legislature, which in September of that year approved a law that was vetoed by the Buenos Aires executive under Aníbal Ibarra.” Since then the subway workers had directed their efforts toward repudiating the veto. In 2003 (Rouspil, 2007: 110) the union

signed an agreement with the company that allowed labor flexibilization and established a wage that was unsatisfactory to the workers, who responded with a strike. In September they granted six-hour workdays for workers in “areas classified as unhealthy in the subway,” including conductors, guards, tunnel and maintenance personnel, and Metrovías’s commitment not to use vending machines. The workers made clear their intention to keep fighting for the extension of the six-hour day to the subway workers who were not affected by the resolution. In April 2004, after four days of a difficult strike, the workers won the six-hour workday for all subway workers.

After this victory, the antibureaucratic delegates won the election in September, and this in turn led to the emergence of new demands. The outsourced subway cleaning workers were successful in achieving inclusion in the contract of the Unión Transviaria Argentina, doubling their wages and beginning to work six-hour days. At about the same time the subway workers, through new strikes, achieved a significant wage increase, averaging 43 percent. With this increase, the median salary of a subway worker became US$500, equivalent to the basic family food basket (the estimate of a family’s subsistence needs). The agreement was retroactive to January 1, 2004, and the workers were paid for days lost because of the conflict. This triumph had a strong impact. Clarín’s front-page headline on February 13 read “Wages: Seeking to Channel the Negotiations,” in the accompanying article it said, “Worried by the level that the subway labor conflicts reached last week, the government, the CGT, and the UIA [Unión Industrial Argentina, an industrial advocacy group] rush the signing of an agreement that puts an end to the wage discussion.”

These two conflicts, viewed retrospectively, could be identified as marking a turning point in labor union activity. The following year saw a record number of labor conflicts. In the case of the subway, which was used daily by hundreds of thousands of people, the strikes had a severe impact on the population that was often used by the media to feed political and ideological discourse.

The emergence of labor conflicts and particularly of new dissident leadership among the workers in the traditional unions called for coordination of forces and, for the national government, the UIA, and the CGT, new ways of controlling the situation.

Attempts at Coordination from Below

Three main instances of coordination among workers from different unions, organizations of unemployed workers, students, youth, and leftist political parties can be observed in this subperiod. Attempts at coordination were incipient and discontinuous, culminating in a meeting on April 2005 and declining soon after. One of these instances took place on June 21 and 22, 2003, in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. The meeting involved organizations in solidarity with the struggle of workers of the Brukman recovered factory, who were fighting to regain control over it after having been evicted from there in April of that year. Besides the Brukman workers, there were delegations from Zanon, the miners of Río Turbio, Siderar, and the metallurgical and automotive factories of Greater Buenos Aires, along with teachers and workers from service companies such as LAPA and the railways. In addition, organizations of the unemployed, youth, people’s assemblies, and leftist parties such as the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (Socialist Workers’ Party—PTS) and and the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS) participated. The discussion addressed the necessity of coordination among the various struggles and establishing a classist current or a political movement of workers.

Another example of coordination took place on May 22 of 2004 in the Hotel Bauen, which had been recovered by its workers. This was a meeting called by the subway workers’ body of delegates to discuss the campaign for the six-hour workday. Around 300 workers participated in the meeting, among them workers from Zanon, Rubén Sobrero of the Unión Ferroviaria de Haedo, and Aurelio Vázquez of the Unión de Trabajaroras y Trabajadores de la Educación de Río Negro, students from the university’s Centro de Estudiantes de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, representatives of the various unemployed workers’ groups, and leftist parties such as the PTS, the MAS, the Partido Obrero (Worker’s Party—PO), and the Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers’ Movement—MST). In the meeting, a document proposed by the subway workers on the campaign for the six-hour workday was voted on, and it was agreed that more meetings would be held.

The most important meeting of workers’ grassroots organizations in this period took place on April 2, 2005. That day, around 1,000 workers gathered at the university’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. The workers from the subway and Zanon organized this meeting. Among the event’s participants, the most important were the following: from the service sector, the subway workers, the railway delegates, and workers from Sarmiento, Mitre, and Roca, 40 workers and delegates from LAFSA, and the telephone workers of Buenos Aires; from industry, the internal committee from Pepsico Snacks, delegates from Stani, workers from Kraft-Terrabusi and from Bagley of Villa Mercedes (San Luis), and steelworkers from Siderca-Campana, Siderar–San Nicolás, and Acindar–La Matanza; teacher delegations from Salta, Santa Fe, Bahía Blanca, Lomas de Zamora, General Sarmiento, La Plata, La Matanza, San Martín, and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires; state workers from the Instituto de Obra Médico Asistencial–La Plata and from numerous hospitals and state agencies of the City of Buenos Aires and Greater Buenos Aires; unemployed workers’ organizations such as the Corriente Clasista y Combativa, the Polo Obrero, the Movimiento Sin Trabajo, and Teresa Vive; and various leftist parties—the Partido Comunista Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Communist Party—PCR), the Partido Comunista, the PO, the PTS, the MAS, and the MST. The turnout exceeded the expectations of the organizers and overflowed the facilities provided for the meeting, which included panels on the national situation and the workers’ movement, state workers, private workers, the defense of democratic rights, the woman worker; and recovered factories.

The following were among the meeting’s main resolutions: support the struggle of LAFSA workers; push for an action at the Salta Provincial House in Buenos Aires repudiating the repression suffered by teachers in that province; support the plan for joint action by the organizations of unemployed workers; hold an action on May 1, International Workers’ Day, against the Kirchner government and imperialism; push for antibureaucratic lists in all unions; and coordinate with all the organizers to develop strategies and hold a further meeting in July. This meeting constituted the peak of coordination, and the July meeting was never held.

As we have seen, together with workers with no political party affiliation, various leftist political parties participated in these meetings and had considerable influence in the internal committees and bodies of delegates. Trotskyite parties such as the PTS, the PO, and the MAS, as well as the Maoist PCR, were active during this period. These organizations have historically been critical of the Peronist union leadership. They acted within the workers’ movement, the organizations of unemployed workers, and the student movement in addition to running candidates in national and provincial elections, sometimes as part of the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores or, in the case of he PCR, Hermes Binner’s Frente Amplio Progresista.

Attempts to Channel Labor Unrest

The official union leadership was forced to respond to the new union context. The CGT, which had been divided into an “official CGT” led by Rodolfo Daer of the food workers’ union and a “dissident CGT” led by Hugo Moyano of the truckers’ union, was reunified under the leadership of a triumvirate made up of Hugo Moyano, Susana Rueda of Sanidad, and José Luis Lingieri of Obras Sanitarias. This triumvirate led the CGT for a year, after which Hugo Moyano became its sole head. Under Moyano the CGT played an important role in the new union framework. In fact, its secretary general became one of the main allies of President Néstor Kirchner. During these years the CGT did not call any general strikes. The Central de Trabajadores de Argentina (Argentine Labor Central—CTA), which declared itself to be “neither official nor in opposition” during the first years of Kirchnerism), called a 24-hour strike on April 9, 2007, accompanied by only a one-hour work stoppage, to protest the murder of the teacher Carlos Fuentealba in the province of Neuquén.

The CGT leadership was part of the attempts to channel labor unrest. Página/12 (February 25, 2005) reported the efforts made in this regard:

The leadership of the Unión Industrial presented a proposal yesterday for a “social pact to consolidate the way out of default” to the main leaders of the CGT. The document, which Página/12 has obtained, proposed an agreement of five key points to channel labor negotiation between employers and unionists. Not only does it refer to the parameters for discussions about wage increases but also it suggests modifications to the current system of severance pay for private unemployment insurance, which guarantees two years’ income for the unemployed.

According to Clarín on the same day, Moyano declared “that he found ‘very good predisposition and will’ in the UIA to achieve the ‘necessary coincidences’ for wage recovery” and that “the employers also seemed to accept the meeting’s results.” Although these agreements were never signed, every year after 2005 there was an agreement or set of agreements that would serve as examples for wage agreements that many other unions would later sign. In this scenario, Moyano’s relationship with the national government played a central role.

This attempt to channel the negotiations often produced an official policy that was more intractable in dealing with labor conflicts outside of the framework established by the national government and the CGT, especially those led by dissidents from the traditional union leadership, and this affected the development of these organizations.

Grassroots Organizations Facing a New Context

The development of grassroots antibureaucratic union organizations during the second subperiod had some features that were absent in the first. One of the main differences was a result of a change in the context characterized by the attempt of the national government and the important unions and employers’ associations to establish ceilings on wage increases at the national level in a centralized way. Linked to this was a hardening of struggles that elicited major repression of workers by the state, employers, and the traditional union leadership. At the same time, various grassroots antibureaucratic union organizations raised new demands such as insistence on wages equal to the cost of the basic family food basket. Lastly, there was also a major development of antibureaucratic unionism in industry. In this context, labor conflicts sometimes lasted longer and had a higher level of confrontation than before.

A paradigmatic example of this type of conflict was that of the Hospital Garrahan workers, headed by an antibureaucratic leadership under Gustavo Lerer that employed democratic methods, mainly grassroots assemblies. The acuteness of this conflict had to do with the workers’ principal demand: an increase in the basic wage to the level of the basic family food basket, then 1,800 pesos. This demand went beyond the wage increases agreed to by the government and the main unions, and they responded harshly. The workers were supported by the antibureaucratic organizations that had participated in the April 2, 2005, meeting previously mentioned, but despite this support and the numerous work stoppages and demonstrations the wage increase that was achieved did not meet the workers’ demands.

Another example of the official police’s heavy hand in dealing with grassroots organizations is the repression suffered by workers of LAFSA in its struggle against the privatization of the company and its transformation into LAN Argentina. One early morning in April 2005 the aeronautic police and the army attacked the workers in the very hall of the metropolitan Aeroparque, leaving dozens injured and detaining two who were later released. Similar to the case of the Hospital Garrahan, the LAFSA workers immediately received solidarity from the organizations that participated in the April 2 meeting, with the subway workers conducting a half-hour work stoppage on the same day in protest of the repression. Another way in which struggles escalated during this subperiod is the greater use of street gangs against workers. At the Hospital Français, workers confronting the evacuation of the hospital were attacked by a gang, an event that was widely reported that day on television and radio and in the newspapers.

Also characteristic of this subperiod was an increase in struggles against precarious working conditions. As we have seen, a large proportion of the agreements approved during the 1990s were aimed at labor flexibilization. During this subperiod workers confronted one of these forms of flexibilization, outsourcing. One example is the long struggle of the workers of Telefónica’s Atento call center to be included in the contract of the rest of the company’s workers and in the union. Despite numerous mobilizations and actions such as the occupation of buildings, the workers were defeated. In contrast to the outsourced subway workers, who were supported by the antibureaucratic body of delegates, the Atento workers had no support from the union leadership.

Whereas the development of grassroots antibureaucratic union organizations originated mainly in the service sector, during this second subperiod there was significant labor unrest in industry, with internal committees dissenting from the traditional union leadership. In this context, there were even conflicts in industry of great relevance to society. One of the most important of these, that of the mechanics of the Sindicato de Mecánicos y Afines del Transporte Automotor (SMATA). The workers in various automotive plants called for a wage increase in 2005, with actions including factory assemblies, noncollaboration, work to rule, a meeting of delegates from Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, and Mercedes Benz to determine what steps to take, staggered work stoppages, demonstrations, and finally, an important roadblock of the Panamerican Highway that received wide media coverage. Página/12 thus reported this event on June 7, 2005:

Some thousand workers from the automotive plants of Ford, Volkswagen, and Daimler-Chrysler blocked the Panamerican Highway yesterday for three hours. The protest took place in Pacheco, at the intersection of the Panamerican with Henry Ford Avenue, the main street where the factories of Ford and Volkswagen converge. The workers, organized in SMATA, the mechanics’ union, demanded a raise in the basic wage. The protest began at 7 a.m. and ended at 10. The drivers, predictably, got angry. Until recently, the roadblock seemed to involve only unemployed workers. However, the latest conflicts—like yesterday’s in Pacheco, a demonstration by secondary workers—shows that the picket has turned into an expression of “transversal” protest.

According to Clarín (June 7, 2005), the issue generated so much concern that the national government had to make a decision, given that the stoppage by the mechanics coincided with that of unemployed workers on that same day: “Aníbal Fernández referred to the controversial issue of the pickets today and asserted that ‘the government should try to take the bull by the horns to guarantee to the people that they can get to work.”

In this context of heightened industrial labor conflict, new antibureaucratic grassroots organizations developed in industrial plants. Among these were the internal committees of the Value Brand Company, Donnelley (formerly Atlántida), Crónica, Fresenius, Emfer, and Argentine Acetates and the interim committee of Coca-Cola’s Pompeya plant. Another important factory in the northern area of Greater Buenos Aires, the tire manufacturer Fate, saw the formation of a new internal committee in the San Fernando chapter of the tire workers’ Sindicato Único de Trabajadores del Neumático y Afines. At the same time, important antibureaucratic organizing continued in three important food factories, Kraft-Terrabusi, Pepsico Snacks, and Stani, as previously mentioned, and significant conflict continued at Parmalat.

One of the problems that led to grassroots trade organization in industry was the struggle to obtain representation in the plant. The experience of the internal committee at the Value Brand Company is representative of a widespread problem of the working class. At the beginning, this was a struggle to obtain union representation at the plant, since, along with almost nine out of ten establishments in Argentina, this factory had no shop-floor delegates. This instance showed the employers’ stiff opposition to the development of these grassroots organizations when they take a course independent course of that of the traditional union leadership. It led to prolonged conflict in 2006 that ended with almost 20 workers laid off, although the internal committee remained at the plant and the antibureaucratic list was reelected. In other factories, such as the Coca-Cola plant in Pompeya, the lack of shop-floor delegates also led to grassroots organization.

By Way of Conclusion

The research presented here suggests lines of further inquiry on the development of grassroots labor organizations in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area in 2003–2007. In particular, the impact of the 2001 crisis on union structures is a starting point for thinking about the development of grassroots organizations dissenting from the traditional union leadership, which became possible with the decline of unemployment and the associated reactivation of union activity. Pursuit of these lines of inquiry will be indispensable for examining the continuity of the phenomenon during Cristina Fernández’s administration.