Juggling Multiple Agendas: The Struggle of Trade Unions against National, Continental, and International Neoliberalism in Argentina

FEDERICO M. ROSSI

Transnational Activism and National Movements in Latin America: Bridging the Divide

Routledge

Año: 2013; p. 141 - 160

The economic dimension of neoliberal globalization implies an increased interdependence of national economies. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), despite its failure, was the most ambitious international agreement promoted for the reduction or elimination of international trade barriers in the Americas. The anticipated economic and social consequences of the FTAA produced the mobilization of social movements and trade unions across the continent. After a decade of resistance to the FTAA, social movements and trade unions can -- arguably -- be considered partially responsible for the FTAA's failure in 2005. The role of trade unions in their resistance to this agreement opens an interesting theoretical question about how the transnational participation of domestic organizations affects their activism on the national scale. One could reason that the success of labor movements in Latin America could have been the result of trade unions' scale shift toward the transnational level of action. Moreover, the internationalist rhetoric of some labor movements might lead us to interpret their participation in this continent-wide campaign against the FTAA as an observable result of the increased cosmopolitanism of Latin American unions' leadership. In this article, I will show how these expectations are not met by the case of Argentina. The purpose of this article is to narrate and analyze how an important union organizes its action across multiple levels, and how these levels do or do not influence each other. In order to do so, I will analyze the process of coordination in Argentina that occurred in resistance to the FTAA and its aftermath from 2002 to 2010. This will be done through the study of the role played by the main national coalition created for precisely this resistance and, in particular, through analysis of the role played by the central actor in this coalition: the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina. I will show how the CTA has participated in national, continental, and international resistance to neoliberalism and provide an explanation for the "parallel agendas" that it employed on these different levels for almost a decade.