"Revisiting Hyman's industrial relations to conceptualize trade unions' varieties (in Argentina)"

ZORZOLI, MARÍA LUCIANA

Londres

Congreso; Historical Materialism Conference; 2012

Historical Materialism EB, SOAS

Hyman's Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction has been regarded as a seminal work in the study of labour unions within capitalism, as a recent special issue of Capital and Class has stressed. This book has inspired a large number of thinking about industrial relations from within a Marxist point of view, reinstating the irreducibility of conflict between capital/labour relations. Hyman has helped to criticize bourgeois conceptualizing of industrial relations and to re-examine theoretical and empirical assumptions within marxism. However, much has been done and specially much has changed in capital accumulation and industrial relations in the last 40 years since Hyman's book has been published. This paper addresses the issue of how to conceptualize the differences between 'trade union models', taking the case of Argentina as seen from a historical perspective. Varieties of trade unions (including divergent forms of bureaucratic organizations) have been marked since the 1970s, something that has not been sufficiently recognized within Latin American marxism. For instance, bureaucratic trade unions began to engage actively in business activities, impersonating capital and sharing interests with capital after the neoliberal reforms of late 1970s. Workplaces labour representation has also changed dramatically to become often autonomous, usually radicalized and opposed to bureaucratic leaderships. These changes can not be though nor predicted by looking at labour unions only during conflicts, but rather by following Hyman's insight of conceiving organizations in a more holistic fashion, in a tight relationship with forms of capital accumulation and industrial relations. In Argentina, trade unionism and industrial relations more broadly have been extensively studied on a case-by-case basis, and at the same time notably undertheorized (despite a growing trend to overcome this limitation, in the recent works of Atzeni, Basualdo or Santella). The use of Hyman's framework in this context becomes interesting both to theorize a large number of case studies and to test the validity of the framework in a different historical and national context than the one it was originally intended (Britain in 1970s).