Workers? Responses to Corporate Restructuring: Working Class Disorganization/Reorganization Processes in Argentina?s Steel Industry

JULIA SOUL

Sociologia del Lavoro

Franco Angeli

Lugar: Bologna; Año: 2017 vol. 146 p. 122 - 138

0392-5048

The article aims to analyze subcontracted workers? organization processes in Argentina?s steel industry through an ethnographical approach. Steel industry has been largely affected by globalization process: production has been reorganized on new territorial basis, new productive chains have been set and new collective labourer has emerged. The article retrieves the notion of a global capitalist accumulation process underlying the making and remaking of labor forces and working classes, which assume particular features in diverse contexts. The article analyzes those processes pointing out to subcontracting processes in a two-fold perspective: as processes of class differentiation in working conditions, wage level, benefits and careers; and as expression of processes of working class reorganization through collective action. The article concludes that in argentine steel industry, subcontracted workers? demands have been the core of this rank-and-file organization processes and union leaders have been able to organize and include them in a relatively traditional unionist perspective.