Democracy as strategy, ideal and practice in organising and structuring workers collective power: empirical cases from contemporary Argentina

ATZENI, M.

Montreal

Congreso; Union Futures: Innovations, Transformations, Strategies International CRIMT Conference; 2012

CRIMT

Since the economic recovery of 2003, traditional and mainly unions led labour conflicts have occupied the scene of social mobilization in Argentina. The growth of the economy, government emphasis in employment generation and collective bargaining, the role given to central trade unions confederations in tripartite bodies, can all be considered as factors that have contributed to a re-habilitation of trade unions as major actors in the economic sphere and industrial relations. This context has certainly increased the power of existing trade unions structures, their role as institutions and their mobilising capacity but without much innovations in terms of strategies, political orientations and patterns of workers  representation (Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007, 2011). However, in parallel with this institutional growth, the same context has also produced a fertile soil for the re-emergence of the democratic and movement sides of unionism (Cohen 2006). Grass-root mobilisations and direct actions have empowered workers' at the workplace and favoured a renewal of strategies and leaderships, within a more Leftist ideological discourse. These bottom up movements, even if proportionally few, have nonetheless represented, through their emphasis on participation and democracy, qualitatively a step forward with respect to traditional unions representation and methods of struggle, re-installing in Argentina the debate on union democracy and forms of workers' representation in the construction of unions power, while at the same time expressing in their everyday demands the most radical opposition to neo-liberal flexibility. Why these movements have been inspired by grass-root democratic methods and principles and why these specifically have been considered as the only powerful basis for an open confrontation with the employers? What are the challenges faced by these democratic experiences of organising? Are democratic and participatory practices sustainable in the long term in the face of employers offensives and changing economic cycles and market contexts? Is democracy sustainable in situations of conflict? Is democracy compatible with leadership?  Are institutionalisation and delegation irreversible tendencies? Following up from previous research on democracy and collective organising (Atzeni and Ghigliani 2010) and thorough an empirical comparison of two of the most representative cases of grassroot organising recently occurred in Argentina, in this paper we aim to answer these questions by disentangling the complex relations and tensions existing between the emergence and establishment of grassroots democracy and the strenghtening of workers' organising power. In order to map the interconnections of these two dimensions, the paper presents empirical findings of two of the most representative cases of grassroots organising that recently occurred in Argentina, in both the informal and the formal sector of the economy. In the first case, that of SIMECA, an association of delivery workers, workers’ pursued collective organising through democratic decision making processes in precarious conditions of employment, without any legal protection or previous unionisation. In the second case, that of the Buenos Aires underground, workers’ experience with democratic organising took place through conflicts in a highly visible/high impact sector of activity, with existing workplace representation and in a historically unionised sector. These two highly contrasting contexts can help to better grasp and disentangle the complex and contradictory dynamics underlying the relations among workplace democracy, workers organising and workers power. We believe these different contexts can help to better grasp the complex and contradictory dynamics underlying the relations among workplace democracy, workers organising and workers power, an old topic that, for its centrality in thinking about strategies for unions innovation and workers participation, has always been present in academic and militant debates (Hyman 1975, 1979; Offe and Wiesenthal 1980; Fairbrother 1984; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 1995; Levesque at al. 2005; Cohen 2006; Levi et al. 2009; Peetz and Pocock 2009; Darlington and Upchurch 2012; Martínez Lucio 2012).