Book Review: Unemployment and the Popular Sectors’ Pursuit of Inclusion

Writing as a political scientist with a wide-ranging and comprehensive knowledge of social movements, popular organizations, and politics in Argentina, Federico Rossi provides an insightful review of “the second incorporation,” the period from 2001 till 2008 in which the piqueteros had a major impact on Argentine politics and public policy. Argentina’s piquetero (picketer) movement consists of dozens of different organizations, some emerging from union federations, some from political parties, some from radical Catholic (liberation theology) movements, and many representing provincial, municipal, and local interests. They continue as significant participants in Argentine politics, and Rossi provides some information on post-2008 changes, but his main focus is on events and transformations leading up to 2008.

The unifying anathema of the piquetero movement is unemployment, the loss of jobs associated with 1980s and 1990s neoliberalism, automation, outsourcing, and Argentina’s peripheral status in the global economy. The primary objective of the movement is to combat the local, national, and international trends that encourage job loss and to mobilize support for the unemployed and their dependents. But Argentina’s piquetero movement goes far beyond those who lost their jobs and careers as a result of deindustrialization, privatization, and government austerity measures. The movement that Rossi describes includes not just unemployed ex-workers and new entrants to the labor market who cannot find work but also millions of people in precarious casual, part-time, seasonal, and day-laboring occupations, micro-entrepreneurs with little capital and no job security, public sector workers who undergo long periods without pay, and elderly and retired workers seeking pensions and other benefits. They are united in their sense of deprivation, injustice, and marginality, in their demand for recognition, benefits, and reforms, and in their belief that they have, have had, or deserve “real jobs”—jobs characterized by security, safety, lifelong benefits, and wages capable of sustaining families with middle-class lifestyles.

Without citing global evidence, Rossi ambitiously claims that Argentina’s piquetero movement is “the main movement of unemployed people of the contemporary world” (xii), and he goes to considerable lengths both to anchor his analysis in the international social science literature and to compare the piquetero with other contemporary movements in Bolivia and Brazil. He describes an Argentina that for most of its history has been ruled by elites who have effectively marginalized the masses but that has had two periods of mass-incorporation—the first through Peronist corporatism between 1945 and 1955 and the second in the early 2000s in response to the piquetero movement. Each period of incorporation was preceded by several years in which key preconditions were laid, and the intervening period of disincorporation (1955–1995) included widespread resistance, including the establishment of many of the organizations that contributed to the emerging piquetero movement.

Rossi provides a thorough analysis and typology of the numerous piquetero organizations, including a detailed glossary of the acronyms commonly used to identify these groups and an account of their links to different unions, labor confederations, political parties and movements, religious groups, and local, occupational, and territorial movements. The piquetero organizations all display outrage at the status quo, but they frequently split and realign over how to achieve change. Radical Catholic, socialist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, anarchist, environmentalist, and populist movements are all represented, together with mainstream political parties including the various branches of Peronism. Thus, some piquetero leaders seek election to potential governing parties, some campaign in opposition, and others advocate boycotting the political process. Nevertheless, Rossi portrays the piqueteros as a nationally identified body of social movements with a coherent repertoire of strategies to build membership, to protest, and to change public policies, with territorial concentrations in some neighborhoods of the city and province of Buenos Aires and in the provinces of Neuquén, Salta, Jujuy, Córdoba, Mendoza, and Río Negro. He also identifies their “stock of legacies,” the examples drawn from all over the world, such as the Palestinian Intifada and the Zapatista Uprising, that are used to rationalize different approaches to protest, political participation, and influencing policy.

In the short term, piquetero demands focus on seeking the removal of corrupt and repressive officials, on ensuring that workers and pensioners are promptly paid what they have earned, and on obtaining national, provincial, and local governmental benefits for the poor and unemployed. The range of possible benefits includes cash transfers, food subsidies, access to affordable housing, free medical attention, and employment in labor-intensive government projects. In the longer term, some supporters of the piquetero movement seek entry to an idealized formal economy with the national government guaranteeing full employment and social justice to all workers and their families, while others, following the ideas of scholars like John Holloway and Antonio Negri, envision a world of local autonomy based on communal and cooperative principles. Their ongoing protests, expressed through rallies, marches, petitions, roadblocks, soup kitchens, land invasions, cacerolazos (cooking-pot banging), puebladas (mass protest and civil disobedience), and the occupation of public spaces and buildings, are against the perceived greed and corruption of elites, corporate employers, government employers, and local authorities.

For researchers focusing on Latin America’s informal economies, Rossi’s monograph is of considerable interest, providing a large body of information on political organization and social mobilization. Its conclusions parallel those of other researchers whose work is included in this issue of Latin American Perspectives, emphasizing how important political mobilization against neoliberal policies was in securing some limited but broad-based government services and income transfers to retirees, the unemployed, and low-income households. These services and income transfers were granted by governments anxious to broaden their political base, win votes, and avoid protests. Funding was available, especially in the early 2000s, because government revenues were temporarily increased by the boom in commodity prices and exports experienced by most of the principal Latin American economies. Since then, however, dramatic changes have occurred, notably the oil price fall and the global financial crisis of 2008, the rightward shift in Argentina since the election of Mauricio Macri in November 2015, and the parallel rightward shift in Brazil since the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in August 2016. More research is needed not only on Argentina’s piquetero movement since 2008 but also on parallel developments in labor markets, income distribution, government benefits, and other forms of social and political mobilization. Ideally, within a few years Federico Rossi will write a successor volume to fill this gap!