Labour mobility of Argentinean software and IT service workers: the search for autonomy and income stability

BERTI, NATALIA; BORRASTERO, CARINA; ZANOTTI, AGUSTÍN

Padova

Congreso; 40th - International Labour Process Conference - 2022 Special theme: Labour Mobility and Mobilization of Workers; 2022

Since the location of several TNCs in the early 2000s, promoted by the State (Borrastero, 2019), Argentina has been linked to software and IT services (SIS) transnational value networks. This radically transformed the SIS national labour market. The industry moved from a dispersed group of SMEs targeting the internal market to a network of large foreign and local companies focused on off shore, ecommerce and fintech services. There was a considerable increase of jobs and an improvement in working conditions, but changes were introduced in work processes, control and consensus management (Braveman, 1974; Burawoy, 1985).Increased market-place bargaining power and attempts at collective action (Silver, 2008) precipitated changes in company strategies (Berti, 2019): they consolidated temporary hiring and created a cartel to restrict personnel movements from one company to another. Moreover, companies apply practices that fragment the labour pool (complex salary scales for different levels of seniority, types of contracts, performance evaluations, the management of interpersonal relationships, outsourcing, etc.). In addition, they profited from the continuous depreciation of wages in a context of growing inflation and currency devaluation. The possibilities that SIS opens up in terms of location-independent jobs (Pesole et al., 2018) allowed for a greater fragmentation of the labour pool.Faced with the difficulties to unionizing within labour relations characterised by a “segmented neo-corporatism” (Etchemendy&Collier, 2007), workers added to the mobility between companies and production segments, other strategies that increased their market-place bargaining power (Silver, 2008): creation of their own mini-firms; online freelancing; formation of IT cooperatives (guided by the specific principles of collective work in the FLOSS field (Zanotti, 2017)).Based on in-depth interviews, expert interviews, websites review and analysis of secondary sources, this work explores the forms of online freelance and cooperative work in SIS in Argentina as options within workers mobility throughout their labour trajectory. Attention to cooperative work shows counter-hegemonic tendencies to the current global accumulation processes in the SIS industry, which allow us to envision potentials towards development with social inclusion.