The International Labour Organization as a Domesticating Arena: Argentinian Trade Unions and Workers? Representations at the ILO in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

ANDRÉS STAGNARO; LAURA CARUSO

The Internationalisation of the Labour Question Ideological Antagonism, Workers? Movements and the ILO since 1919

Palgrave macmillan

Año: 2019; p. 235 - 258

The paper´s objective is to analyze the figures of Argentinian workers and government delegates at the ILO. In this case the look will be pose on the first half of the 20th Century. While rescuing these workers and government representative?s trajectories on the international arena, the paper will introduce some questions about the roles of this delegates and the struggles between been representatives of the organize Argentinean working class or Argentine government in the case of the workers, and the relations between the government representatives and the workers. The Argentinean workers? delegates were the object of intense debates in the first Annual Conference in Washington and during the period it was usual the problems with the representativeness of the workers delegate. This problem was solved only after the General Confederation of Labor (CGT for its initials in Spanish) was able to handle the controversy about the representations between different ideological options for the labor organizations by the 1950 when the Peronism became the major choice of Argentinian workers.This controversies weren´t only local or national, since the Argentinian trade unions were the most important and organized of Latin America. The links between the Argentinian trade unions and the international trade unions date back to the end of the 19th Century, and the disputes on the international labor movement had huge impact in Argentine and vice versa. On the other hand, the Argentinian government took advantage of this disputes to domesticate the trade unions. By backing some trade unions over another they were choosing a concrete options of the trade union movement disposed to negotiate and recognize the State authority. This lead us to the other objective of this paper: the relations between the government and workers delegates in the ILO. Did they have a unique strategy? Was the national loyalty more important that class consciousness? Through the analysis of the ILO´s Annual Conferences Record of Proceedings, Argentinian workers representative´s papers and reports, Argentinian Governments reports, this paper will present these trajectories as part of different disputes: between ideological options on the Argentinians Trade Unions movement, the state cooptation?s of trade unions representatives delegates, the international disputes of trade unions movement in a local frame, and even the dispute between the European and American trade unions and the Argentinian trade unions seen as an imperialist imposition. It also presents dispute about the ILO´s objective ?such as the internationalization of labor standards and regulations- and principles ?such as the liberty and dignity or the tripartite government- that was no exempt of anti-imperialism judgments and accusations about the ILO Eurocentrism.