National labor unions vs global companies? Notes about union power and transnational companies in Argentine Steel industry

JULIA SOUL,

Iowa

Workshop; International Workshop on National Contexts for Unions; 2015

NSF Anthropology Section - Iowa University

Since 90?s, Techint Group has developed intense capital centralization and international expansion processes along with important transformations in productive consumption and management of labor force. Both processes were objective advances over working class working and living conditions, founding a new ?industrial legality? (Soul: 2012). Although it seems to be clear that national policies shapes union action, the company?s international scope allows us to identify changing relations between company?s strategies, union power and national policies.In this paper we will explore conditions that shape union power in these changing conditions. Our starting point is a theoretical assumption that considers labor unions as a workers? secondary organizational field, shaped primarily by capital structural features. On one hand, we consider that capital accumulation processes, expressed and mediated by national policies, are the more influential factors that contributed to shape workers collective action and union dynamics since the neoliberal hegemony consolidation. On the other hand, these processes opened new scopes for union action, traditionally linked to national states. Our inquiry in this paper focuses on internal factors, such as shifts in the balance of power between different union organizational levels (workplace committees, local and national unions) and the role play by international union network in building union power. In this paper, our aim is to describe three empirical nodes of relations ? each situated in different levels of social relationships - in order to produce inputs for comparative insights about union action as a result of contradictory local/international political and economic processes. The nodes of relations to be described are:-Workplace relations between union and company: this level of union action has been reputed as central to the building of union power. We will describe how company policies tend to build a ?global culture? among workers and how the company is able to impose forms and contents of bargaining processes. -National relations between union and company: the description of relations at this level will allow us to discuss the empirical consequences of one of argentine unions? distinctive features: the representation by only one labour organization of a full sector of industry at the national level, and the centralization of collective bargaining that it supposes.-International relations between national unions and federations and the global company: Through the description of this level of relations, we will focus on different actors engaged with the building of international union power. At the same time, this will allow us to single out the role of governments, national regulations and company policies in these relations. Our first insight is that it is through their ? contradictory ? engagement with international networks that the argentine sections achieve a national action level. This finding allows us to build hypothesis and comparisons between union structures, union power and company policies.