The Revival of Labour Movement Studies in Argentina: Old and Lost Agendas

Introduction

Argentina’s recent revival of sociological research on labour sits at the intersection of a number of unique combinations of structural and crises specific traits, offering thus a remarkable case to reflect on how socio-political conditions influence research. All through the 20th century the labour movement has often been central to local politics, as evidenced by the country’s empirically rich history of workers’ mobilization under civilian and military governments; by the trade unions’ organizational and financial strength and their privileged relationship with the state; by the legislation protecting workers’ rights and extending social welfare. However, the last decades have witnessed dramatic shifts in the achievements obtained by the insertion of the labour movement in the political and institutional scenario, with two rounds of neoliberal reforms, an unprecedented social and economic crisis in 2001 and a surprisingly quick recovery matched by centre-of-left policies known in the region as ‘Pink Tide’.

The intersections of variegated and conflicting state policies, different waves of resistance and socio-economic transformations have had a huge impact on the configuration of work and employment, producing shifts in the importance of trade unions compared to other forms of workers’ organizations and a wide range of results in the success of resistance strategies. As the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) ‘poster child’ of neoliberal reforms during the 1990s, Argentina’s unemployment and pauperization rates soared, as well as social movements’ resistance to them. At the end of the decade the country plumbed into a political and economic crisis that in December 2001 led to a financial crisis and mass demonstrations that overthrew the government. The 2001 crisis represented a unique moment in the recent social and economic history of Argentina, making visible to the world’s workers innovative methods of mobilization and resistance, such as roadblocks, the occupation of factories, social cooperatives or neighbourhood assemblies. In turn, this crisis was followed by a ‘Pink Tide’ of state led and employment based economic growth promoted by a self-defined ‘anti-neoliberal’ government. The following decade witnessed the demobilization of many of those social movements and a dramatic change of the face of the labour market with a steep increase in employment and a revitalization of trade unions. This was also accompanied by a growth in the investment in research and development, including labour studies within universities and state bureaucracy.

Considering this background of economic crisis and social conflict and the longstanding importance of the labour movement, a reflection on how labour sociologists in Argentina have interpreted recent changes constitutes an interesting case for broader international debates on contemporary work and workers’ struggles. Studies of conflict, control and cooperation in the labour process inspired by Burawoy’s (1979, 1985) work; of trade unions’ sociology using Hyman’s (1975, 2001) framework together with Kelly’s (1998) mobilization theory; and Silver’s (2003) longue durée comparative analysis of working classes mobilization, have influenced some of the most relevant book monographs of recent years (Ghigliani, 2010; Marticorena, 2014; Santella, 2016; Soul, 2014; Varela, 2015). The debate on union revitalization or renewal has also been used as a general frame of reference in various studies and edited books looking into institutional aspects of industrial relations (Etchemendy and Collier, 2007; Montes Cató and Delfini, 2015; Palomino and Trajtemberg, 2006; Senen Gonzalez and Del Bono, 2013; among others), as well as for studies investigating grassroots processes of workers’ organization and action (Atzeni and Ghigliani, 2013; D’Urso and Longo, 2017; Lenguita, 2011; Varela, 2015; Ventrici and Montes Cató, 2011). The latter studies fit closely with what can be considered a left approach to the revitalization debate concerned with the dynamics and factors influencing the construction of workplace power and the role of politics in this (Cohen, 2006; Darlington, 2009; Gall, 2013; Ness, 2014) and with unions’ democracy and identity (see the Capital and Class special issue on Hyman’s work, Gall and Darlington, 2012).

The common denominator of the Argentine labour studies in the post-2001 decade is the return to dominance of a trade union-centred focus. Beyond the field of labour and social history, Argentina’s long tradition of studies concerned with trade unions and the labour movement had been interrupted during the 1980s and 1990s, as a consequence of the structural transformations of the labour market inaugurated in the mid-1970s. During these decades labour studies were more concerned with politics and state policies and with alternative non-workplace based forms of organization, including social movements, communal organizations, unemployed workers and land squatting. Thus, the ‘return of the trade unions’ constitutes a novel tendency. How can we explain and assess this shift in focus? Have the productive structures and the composition of the Argentinean working class fundamentally changed in the decade following the 2001 crisis? What are the structural bases that justify the return to centrality of trade unions in labour sociological analysis? What insights can the recent Argentinian experience provide for the sociological research on workers and the labour movement?

These questions guide the following survey, divided in four sections. First, we provide a brief overview of the differences between the dominant macroeconomic contexts in Argentina before and after the 2001 crisis and of their consequences for working people and class composition. In the second part, we critically review the main lines of inquiry followed in studies of the labour movement in the last decade in order to establish the rationale of our argument. In the third part, we briefly assess the reasons behind the institutional and workplace revitalization of trade unions in Argentina. Despite high levels of precarious and informal work, the trade union remains in Argentina, for historical and structural factors, the working class organizational form par excellence. This is quite an exceptional case of resilience by international standards and partly explains the continued focus on trade unions by the current labour movement sociology in Argentina. Nevertheless, we show that to understand the possibilities of workers’ organization within the current reconfiguration of work, a fruitful agenda for sociological research on the labour movement and social conflict should go beyond the study of the union form per se (in Argentina and beyond) and systematically include other dimensions of analysis. In the fourth and final part of the article we consider two of them: the relation with the community and with the cycles of capital accumulation.

Crisis and shifting context

After 2002 Argentina joined the ‘Pink Tide’, the group of Latin American centre-of-left governments advocating a redistributive and populist version of neoliberalism. These political experiences and economic models seem now exhausted, but represented a significant shift from the previous decade creating enormous economic growth and employment. In Argentina this shift started with the political and economic crisis of neoliberal domination that exploded during 2001–2002 (Grigera, 2006). The default on external debt and a massive devaluation of the currency sparked a cycle of inflation with a regressive impact on the distribution of income but helped to re-establish conditions of profitability. This happened concurrently with the beginning of an unprecedented boom in the commodity prices that meant a sharp improvement in the terms of trade for Argentina, historically integrated to the world market as exporter of primary products. The following years were characterized by a sustained economic recovery, with an average 4% of total annual GDP growth, the creation of more than 4 million new jobs, an 80% increase in the minimum wage and a timid recovery of real wages. Politically the new government presented itself as post- or anti-neoliberal, resorted to a populist discourse and proclaimed the need to reconstruct the state and reindustrialize the country (Piva, 2015). In line with the Pink Tide in the region, the government thus established a ‘variegated form’ of neoliberal capitalism (Brenner et al., 2010; Grigera, forthcoming) that used the resources stemming from the commodity boom for redistributive policies and employment creation.

These broad tendencies were accompanied with a set of specific changes in state/labour relations and conflict. From 2006 onwards, labour conflicts began a steep increase and pattern shift outnumbering other forms of social protest, a qualitative change in the demands and a substantial increase in formal collective bargaining. Informal employment levels where still high at the end of this process, with an estimate of 40% of employment beyond the reach of labour legislation and formal trade unions’ representation. In other words, Argentinian workers and scholars witnessed a massive recovery of the job market and a shift in the agenda from the 1990s that was dominated by the ‘end of work’, unemployment and social protest everywhere but in the workplace. In what follows, we survey the changes in the field of labour studies that accompanied these socio-economic transformations.

An overview and critique of the main lines of inquiry

Despite the vast, diversified and interdisciplinary production in the field of the sociology of work and industrial relations in Argentina (for a recent overview see Del Bono and Neffa, 2016), the research on workers’ organization and the labour movement has been the most dynamic one, reflecting not just the exponential increase of labour conflicts and collective bargaining, but also a more generalized politicization of the Argentine social sciences post-2001.

This production has been predominantly dominated by case studies, privileging the analysis of processes of collective formation over institutional arrangements and producing often rich in-depth monographs of specific labour processes and trade unions in both the industrial (Palermo, 2012; Santella, 2016; Soul, 2014; Varela, 2015) and the service sector (Abal Medina, 2014; Bulloni Yaquinta, 2013; Longo, 2012; Miguez, 2013). A first obvious shortcoming of this production is that the primary sector has gone almost unnoticed, despite its economic importance during this period. Studies of labour across the value chain in the extractive industry or in agribusiness, for instance, are absent or limited to labour market analysis. A second limitation is that it is biased towards analyses of conflict and organization of formally employed workers in unionized sectors. This focus, which can be justified by the context of growth of formal employment and revitalization of trade unions following the 2001 crisis, however, is limited in various ways.

First, by rarely engaging with non-unionized informal workers outside workplaces or with hidden/less visible forms of conflict and organization, it offers just a partial view of the structures of opportunities and power resources available to workers. This partly explains the absence of studies on the primary sector, a sector that has traditionally showed a low level of open conflict and weak workers’ organization. Second, and connected with the previous point, a union centred perspective often dominates the analysis. The union is taken as the unquestioned form of workers’ organization, the sine qua non and necessary starting point of the analysis, turning this form almost into a fetish. However, by keeping this focus, these studies have left aside a whole range of material conditions, factors and circumstances that mediate and shape the social processes driving workers’ organizing. This union centred perspective is evident even when grassroots and unorganized movements are taken into the picture and their relation and insertion in the community outside the workplace is considered. An example can be Varela’s (2015) book on FATE’s tyre workers. The book rightly points to the existing connection between the social struggles of 2001 and the resurgence of union organization in the plant, or as the author argues, between the momento social (the social moment) and the momento sindical (the union moment). This relation that could have pointed to a continuum between workplace and community struggles disappears from the core of the book, the focus of which remains on the emergence of an industry based grassroots unionism, thus fundamentally proposing a vanguard vision of social struggle.

Third, the focus is limited insofar as it disconnects the case studied from the institutional context and the broader political dimension. This is for instance the case of Soul (2014), on the workers of SOMISA (Sociedad Mixta Siderúrgica Argentina), a former state-owned enterprise producing steel (although a similar argument could be made about others too, such as Abal Medina, 2014, Miguez, 2013 or Palermo, 2012 among others). Here, the emphasis on ‘the configuration and development of a particular group of workers’, as the subtitle of the book indicates, does not help to locate the case within the specificities of Argentina as a peculiar system of industrial relations and within broader debates on class and collective organization, thus extending the reach of the research beyond the factory.

On a more general level, the impression is that the return to the ‘normality’ of capital–labour relationships in the post-2001 crisis context has offered sociological research on labour the possibility to frame the analysis within the limits of known structures, organizations and institutional frames of reference. In other words: a ‘comfort zone’, both theoretically and empirically, that safely disengages with the ‘exceptionalism’ of the 1990s, with its high levels of unemployment and social conflict dominated by social movements. This is not to deny the relevance and rationale of the aforementioned studies in the context of employment and trade unions’ growth. However, abandoning the reality of the social world existing beyond the factory and the different social forms of response to crisis, themes which were central to the research agenda in the past, an opportunity has been missed to venture into broader and more complex processes of working class formation.

This pervasive focus of the field of study in the ‘comfort zone’ of the capital–labour ‘normality’ (ultimately stemming from an institutionalist agenda) is also shared with international tendencies, though with peculiarities for the specific case that should be briefly accounted for in the next section.

The resilience of the trade union form in Argentina

Compared to other peripheral countries, Argentina has an advanced system of individual labour rights protected at both institutional and workplace level, through trade unions’ formal monopoly of workers’ representation (erga omnes principle). The legal recognition of only one trade union in each sector of the formal economy as the holder of representative power (personería gremial) is further strengthened by unions’ management of funds for health and social services (obras sociales), financed through a system of compulsory contribution from government, workers and employers. Together with this legal monopoly, workers also have the right to organize shop-floor committees to deal with workplace issues (comisiones internas), the members of which are protected against discriminatory employers’ practices (foro gremial). According to the latest official statistics from the Ministry of Labour (EIL (Encuesta de Indicadores Laborales [Survey of Labor Indicators]) 2013), trade union membership in the private formal sector in companies of more than 10 employees was 37.7% on average, with a high variance between companies with or without shop-floor committees (49.4% and 30.3% respectively). These findings are similar to those published by the Confederation of Trade Unions of the Americas for 2011: 48% (CSA, Orsatti, 2016) and higher than official International Labour Organization (ILO, 2011) data for 2008: 37.6%. Membership rates are considerably higher than the world average (above Italy or the UK) and the highest in Latin America (with the exception of Cuba). Due to the existing legal monopoly of representation (erga omnes) based on one union per industrial sector, the Collective Bargaining coverage is considerably higher: between 60% and 65% depending on the source (ILO, 2011). This ‘trade union model’ gives the state and a few trade unions an effective power of negotiation with employers and an enormous power of disciplining of workplace based structures and grassroots forms of organization, contributing to a top-down bureaucratic structure of representation that produces as a result an important anti-bureaucratic union sentiment among workers. This at times finds expression in unofficial forms of conflict and organization (without legal coverage) or organized forms of opposition either within the union (usually by first getting the control of comisiones internas with elected delegates) or with attempts to form new independent unions (though usually without any prospect of being granted representation rights, i.e. personería gremial). This oppositional dynamics between the union ‘as a movement and as an institution’ and between grassroots and institutionally based forms of representation and mobilization (Cohen, 2006) is part of the nature of trade unionism and what has historically revitalized it. However, in Argentina these oppositional dynamics are strengthened by a legislative framework that, while empowering workers in the workplace through the comisiones internas, also confers exclusive power of negotiation to only one union per productive sector. These peculiarities, together with the historically important role of the labour movement within Peronism and in the Argentine society and politics at large, partially explain the high level of mobilization historically on record (Atzeni and Ghigliani, 2009).

The re-emergence of the trade union both as the institution and movement type form of workers’ organization has not been limited however just to the formal sector of the economy. On the one hand, the increase of formal employment that came with the economic recovery following the crisis of 2001–2002 has allowed the inclusion of workers with a history of precariousness into the formal economy, entering thus in the ‘orbit’ of formal trade unions’ representation. On the other hand, alongside the formalization of employment, state policy has favoured the increased dualization of the job market. With targeted social policy programmes and the regulation and protection of the most precarious jobs (domestic workers), the state has attempted to establish forms of protection and representation for workers still outside the reach of formal regulations. This has been, for instance, the case with various groups of workers of the so-called popular economy (waste picketers, street vendors, small farmers and artisans) organized by the Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy (CTEP), an umbrella organization that is going through the process of formal recognition as a trade union confederation. What all these experiences of organization of informal sector workers tell us is that, from the point of view of unprotected workers, trade unions represent the key to achieving protection through the existing labour laws. This certainly partly explains today’s resilience of the union form in Argentina. However, the historical role played by the union movement in the defence of workers’ rights and in shaping working class identity and politics has also created a broad social recognition of the trade unions’ role. Despite the historical, political and strategic importance of these organizations, we believe a fruitful agenda for labour movement studies in Argentina and beyond should consider other variables and their relevance. In the next sections we want to consider two of them: the relation with the community and with the cycles of capital accumulation.

Lost agendas: The labour market, the community and non-workplace conflict

An interesting feature of the recent Argentine academic production is the lack of dialogue and continuity with the pressing and dominant issues of the 1990s: unemployment, the community (in Spanish: el territorio) and the role of non-workplace conflict. During the 1990s many studies were devoted to understanding the interconnections between these issues. This focus was justified by the growth of the unemployed workers’ movement, whose importance went well beyond the roadblock, the most visible form of conflict used by these workers, and included a wide range of ‘territorial activities’ to support everyday life: communal building of infrastructure and housing; popular education; cooperative social ventures. The 1990s used to have a growing concern with the problem of the community (el territorio) and its relation with formal workplaces, as summarized by the CTA (Central de trabajadores Argentinos, the second largest general trade union) in ‘la fábrica es el barrio’ (the factory is the neighbourhood). The argument was that unemployment and the growth of informal work had created a mass of working poor not attracted by traditional trade unions’ strategies and whose common interests were located in the community or in the neighbourhood rather than in the factory. Despite the limits that these experiences of organizing in the communities encountered, they pointed to the denaturalization of post-war industrial relations and reopened the debates of working class strategies, widely conceived – an agenda which has been absent in current debates. (Elbert, 2015 is the exception here, though, once more, from a union centred perspective.)

Beyond this research, labour studies were also concerned with explaining the dynamics of the labour market: the impact of unemployment on marketplace bargaining power; descriptions of the composition and changes in the workforce; analyses of the conditions leading to soaring rates of unemployment. With a few exceptions (Lopez, 2015), what could potentially be a very challenging and original inquiry into how the new cycle reshaped all these relations and shed light on the dynamics of employment, bargaining power and organizational strengths have been unfortunately neglected. What kind of challenges did job creation entail for the workers’ movements as a whole, considering the still present high level of precariousness? To what extent did job creation have an impact on the ‘recovery’ of trade unions? What were the relations between formal and informal job creation, and also how did formal employment growth impact on recuperated factories and other solidarity economy experiences (for instance, in terms of the effect of direct concurrence of market jobs and competition dynamics on cooperative partnerships)? What effects did job creation and Pink Tide policies have on the mobilizing capacity of the unemployed workers’ movements? In sum, the restoration of the pre-crisis agenda casts a shadow over how the understanding of the dynamics of unemployment in the 1990s was seen as an exception, rather than as another possible outcome of capitalist development.

Overall, the silence on these interesting debates of the 1990s points towards an implicit underlying assumption: ‘full employment’, workplace struggles, trade unions and state mediated labour/capital relations are ‘normal’. Neoliberalism occupies thus the place of the crisis, precarious work that of an exception, and non-trade unionized struggles become invisible. We would urge instead to attempt to conceptualize the different modes of domination and resistance in a single framework.

Linking accumulation and social conflict

Finally, we should briefly mention an issue that ultimately underpins several of the shortcomings mentioned above: the virtual silence on the relation between accumulation and social conflict. The post-2001 financial and economic context has been particularly beneficial in the terms of trade for Argentina (and the region) thanks to the international commodity boom. This new source of income reinforced state’s capacity. This, alongside the debt default, relaxed the country’s dependence on the IMF and international financial markets, as a consequence leaving the government room for manoeuvre in terms of its strategies for ‘growth with inclusion’. There is first a need to factor in the recovery and growth of some industrial sectors thanks to a combination of growth in effective demand, protection against international competition after devaluation, public incentive for industrial production, credits for housing and infrastructure, the re-nationalization of important sectors (aviation, post, oil) and investments in research and technology that had a strong and uneven impact on the generation of employment, reconfiguring the composition of workforces among sectors.

Similarly, the post-crisis context is marked by a recovery of profitability through quite different mechanisms: the reduction of local costs (as a result of devaluation, particularly in the export sector); state subsidies (in services such as electricity or transport); exchange rate barriers and other protectionist measures. These, in turn, dramatically altered the cost of wages as a ratio of firm costs. Moreover, after 2005 there were important state interventions in wage policies: increases in the minimum wage and one-off ‘emergency bonuses’ among other attempts to improve the level of wages. These important factors have not been systematically theorized or even explored enough (a notable exception is Marticorena, 2014).

It could be argued that studying the relationship between accumulation and labour could help unravel the complex dynamics of industrial relations in the previous period (1992–2001) and reintegrate both that ‘exceptional’ moment with the post-crisis recovery in a coherent and unified perspective. This would also entail reflecting on the constraints social conflict imposed on the recovery: for instance, what was the impact of unemployed workers’ movements or recuperated factories in shaping specific forms of state and businesses’ actions during the phase of growth? Or, along a similar line, what were the legacies from the forms of struggle that were imposed by the pegged currency during the expansionary phase of neoliberalism? Were there long-term transformations of the trade union model? Also, as mentioned above, what was the differential impact of the recovery on industrial branches? Did those that remained more or less unaltered after the crisis have a distinct type of industrial relations? In sum, rethinking these links also helps recover the lessons learnt during the 1990s in a useful way and reinstate the lost agendas in a more complex vision of the sociology of labour in Argentina.

Accumulation can also be linked to the dynamics of social and labour unrest indirectly. One such dimension is the impact of specific forms of accumulation on the state’s capacity to intervene, or more accurately, on imposing constraints on this capacity. The transformations of the redistributive capacity of the state during the commodity boom (which was able to appropriate a fraction of the new rents) probably allowed a certain number of new possibilities, including increases in the minimum wages, labour welfare and pensions. At the same time, during the 1990s the ongoing momentum of the unemployed workers’ movement also challenged the assumption that the neoliberal state is neither willing nor able to redistribute, as the development of special and substantive lines of social welfare in the form of conditional cash transfers took place during this period.

These sets of questions, among many others, constitute the bare minimum inquiry of the ties between accumulation and conflict, a line of inquiry calling for new efforts of development.

Conclusions

In this article we have reviewed the recent renewal of sociological research on workers and the labour movement in Argentina. The context of economic and employment growth and political alignments in which this renewal took place has clearly influenced the research agenda, producing a fundamental revitalization of workplace based trade union studies. This represented a radical departure from previous studies concerned with unemployment, territorial organizations and social movement forms of workers’ organization. The focus of researchers on the trade union as object of analysis is fully justified by the specific context, but also by the particular legislative arrangements regulating workers’ representation and the political and social role trade unions have historically occupied in the country. However, we believe that this exclusive focus offers just a limited view of working class forms of organization and identity, and does not help to frame specific case studies in the broader dynamics of accumulation (Harvey, 2010, 2014). As reconfirmed by Harvey (2015) in a recent formulation with a more militant tone, there is a ‘symbiotic relationship’ between the ways in which capital organizes production and distribution and the forms of workers’ organization. In this sense, the vision of a working class represented by trade unions continues to be dominant in the studies of labour specifically, and across the social sciences more generally. In a global perspective, the analysis of today’s work should, however, go beyond the ‘comfort zone’ represented by trade unionism and be able to understand changes in working classes’ conditions and issues, by linking work to broader political economy dynamics and the workplace to the community, thus recovering its everyday life dimension.