President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner’s claim in October that Argentina was “decoupled” from the global economy is looking ever more ridiculous. The car industry is already feeling the first effects of the international economic downturn.
Its heartland is the industrial centre of Cordoba, Argentina’s second city and home to 30,000 workers employed directly by the automobile multinationals such as FIAT, Volkswagen, Renault and Iveco, as well as many suppliers to the sector. Here 57% or 1,700 of all subcontracted workers in the automobile industry have already been fired. The automobile workers’ trade union SMATA (Sindicato de Mecanicos y Afines del Transporte Automotor) historically a very powerful union, has responded with a strategy in line with its standard practice: to negotiate for the firing of subcontracted workers instead of permanent workers, and to replace redundancies with suspensions and cutbacks of working hours.However, this has in many cases been countered by the alternative historic tradition to bureaucratic craftism, semi-spontaneous rank and file actions such as walkouts, road blockages and rank and file assemblies. These have taken place in various factories in Cordoba, and at General Motors in Santa Fe. In many cases this has forced the SMATA leadership to take a harder stance against the firings, and ask the government to impose “obligatory conciliation” where, for a designated period of time, the bosses can’t fire anyone and the workers cannot take industrial action. In late November, the multinational GESTAMP, which makes parts for car manufacturers, announced the firing of 226 subcontracted workers. In the week beginning 24th November, a group of around 30 of these, accompanied by family and left-wing activists, blockaded the highway which passes the factory (in the middle of an industrial estate that is home to all the companies already mentioned), burning rubber tyres and demanding the reinstallation of all fired workers all without any support from the union or any shop stewards. These purely rank and file protests earned the attention of the national media, making the front pages of the regional newspapers, and led to the national government agreeing to enter into negotiations.The protests of the GESTAMP workers were set to continue into the week beginning Monday 1 December but the announcement on the preceding Friday by Iveco of 42 job losses (subcontracted workers) despite an agreement signed with SMATA who had agreed to suspensions instead caused great anger on the production lines. Fearing rank and file walkouts and a challenge from more combative shop stewards, the SMATA leadership solicited an audience with the provincial government on 1 December, backed up by a general march of all its members on Wednesday 3. On the Monday, around 1500 workers (taking into account that only those who did not have that shift could attend) from Volkswagen (which has announced 370 redundancies), Iveco and GESTAMP rallied outside the Labour Ministry, chanting for the immediate reinstatement of all fired workers. On the morning of the same day, 500 workers from Iveco, along with a group of shop stewards, had organised themselves in opposition to the orders of the SMATA leadership in that factory, and voted to block the highway leading to their factory and to march to the city centre to join with the more than 750 Volkswagen workers already gathered there. Hundreds of people along the long march from the industrial suburbs came out of their houses to applaud.
These protests were also joined by the around 30 GESTAMP workers and their families, who had held out for the initial week-long struggle. Disgracefully, however, not a single union rep from that factory supported them even at this stage, something which led to them being insulted by the songs of the Volkswagen and Iveco columns.
The shock of this unprecedented level of protest by automobile workers led the authorities to enter negotiations and to pressure the companies in question to cancel the redundancies . However, when the bureaucracy left the meeting to announce this to the workers outside, many began to raise chants demanding the immediate and guaranteed return of all their colleagues, and threatening another Cordobazo . The SMATA leadership eventually managed to disband the protest by promising to fight for the return of all workers and that negotiations would begin immediately. These negotiations are currently taking place, and the bosses, the government and bureaucracy all know that there may well be an uprising of historic proportions if they do not come to a favourable agreement.
Another scene of struggle is General Motors in Santa Fe. Here the bosses had announced cutbacks due to the global economic situation and earmarked around 220 workers for redundancy, but had met with resistance. After the firing of the first worker for “poor performance” in late October, rank and file workers and some combative shop stewards called general assemblies, independent of the SMATA leadership, and decided to strike. The provincial government came to an agreement for obligatory conciliation with General Motors and SMATA, which was due to end the week beginning December 2. During this period the multinational concretised plans for suspension for a year of around 160 workers. Furthermore, they kept the reinstated workers in a part of the factory separated from the rest (jokingly named the “Chevy Club” by the workers) and photographed any who moved from their isolated posts.For its part, the provincial government, led by Hermes Binner (first “Socialist” governor in the history of Argentina) sent police every day to guard the factory from any disturbances. This climate of constant provocation and intransigence on the part of the bosses was topped off by the withholding of many of the reinstated workers’ wages on Friday November 28, which led to the decision of a general assembly the following Monday to call an indefinite strike. This led to emergency meetings between the union and the authorities/bosses, and to SMATA being forced to threaten road blockages if GM refused to moderate its position.
Reclaiming the unions
What is particularly new about these actions is the extent of solidarity between permanent and subcontracted workers, something which goes against the “common sense” of the Argentine working class of recent years a common sense which, for example, meant that even the shop stewards in GESTAMP refused to give any support to protests against such a heavy blow as the laying-off of 226 workers. It also allowed Hugo Moyano, the national leader of the CGT (ConfederaciÛn General del Trabajo) Argentina’s largest trade union federation, to claim only last month that there had been no redundancies in industry i.e. he did not even count the sacking of subcontracted workers as redundancies.The bosses and the bureaucracy use this division to set workers against one another and to provide the former with a large pool of super-exploited and easily disposable workers, who nobody will defend if fired. However, the automobile workers of Cordoba and Santa Fe are challenging this reactionary common sense, with thousands marching in the streets and taking rank and file action to defend their subcontracted colleagues. In this sense, these struggles can represent a real qualitative development of the class struggle in Argentina.
The struggle for solidarity and against the fragmentation, chauvinism and short-term concentration on only “my” workplace and “my” colleagues directly employed by the company, which is encouraged by the union bureaucracy, is part of a wider struggle against this apparatus, which has been a vital tool of the Argentine ruling class.
One potentially very important event in this struggle was the recent decision by the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional a law stating that only members of trade union structures containing personnel affiliated to a union granted negotiating rights by the state could exercise certain rights as union representatives, for example, the right to collective bargaining. This effectively granted a monopoly to the CGT in most sectors of the workers’ movement. The case that brought this to the Supreme Court was that of the Association of Workers of the State (ATE), which called elections for representatives, which were then annulled by the Union of Civil Personnel of the Armed Forces (PECIFA), which claimed that only it had the right to take such a measure. ATE challenged this in the Supreme Court, saying that this went against the right to free organisation of workers guaranteed by the constitution, and won .The decision by the Supreme Court was, of course, motivated by neoliberal ideology and is reminiscent of attacks on union structures in Western Europe that were used to weaken organised labour. However, in Argentina, the trade union structure is traditionally monolithic and affiliated to bourgeois parties, a legacy of Peronism, and workers can take advantage of this decision to elect combative representatives and form independent unions in their workplaces, which would otherwise have been strangled by the CGT bureaucracy (as PECIFA attempted to do with ATE). The hollowness of the CGT’s claims that an attack on its structure represents an attack on all workers’ bargaining power can be seen from the fact that, at the very same time, the bosses’ organisations were warning the Supreme Court that it may have opened the doors to “anarchy” in the workplace.
The fact that the current economic crisis is opening the doors to more and more challenges to the limits imposed by the leaderships of the CGT and the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA) has already been met by a “strong-arm” reaction in the city of Rosario, on December 4, with tragic consequences. Here, the regional section of the union ATIRLA, which organises workers in the dairy processing industry, rejected a pay deal signed by the leadership (Hector Ponce, an ally of Hugo Moyano). This had led to violence against them by the national leadership. When, in response, they called a protest alongside human rights organisations, this protest was in turn attacked by 300 armed thugs in the pay of the ATIRLA leadership (many of them barras bravas Argentina’s famous football hooligans cum mafias) which resulted in two deaths and various injuries, whilst the police just looked on.
The Political Scene
All of this represents a strong and increasingly politicised intervention by one of the most productive sectors of the organised working class into an unstable national political scene. This was a factor absent in recent years of economic growth which allowed the establishment of a social equilibrium based on the super-profits, super-exploitation, rapid job creation and slow but constant growth of wages, permitted by the devaluation of 2002. It was only this year that the average worker’s purchasing power reached the level of 2001, and that year was preceded by two years of deep recession.These conditions permitted a kind of soft populism from both Kirchner governments (though Christina from the beginning has had a more pro-business profile than her husband), allowing for an open alliance with the trade union bureaucracy. This allowed the bureaucracy to avoid direct conflict with the mass of union members, while the government avoided having to take any meaningful measures to curb the excesses of the capitalists, including the imperialist corporations and both financial and the industrial sectors of the so-called national bourgeoisie. One example of this “virtuous circle” is the fact that the government could periodically use the reserves of the central bank to pay its debt to the IMF, and that this could be more than covered by the dollars gained through export, allowing for a “historic” growth of reserves at the same time .
Now, however, the global economic crisis is testing this equilibrium to the limit, and is bringing to the fore the deep malaise of the current regime, elected only in October 2007. Already it has been battered by corruption scandals, cynicism over its populist and nationalist rhetoric in the face of huge and growing social inequality, concentration of wealth, and looting by the multinationals. There has been a damaging months-long conflict with agricultural producers that caused it to lose the support of the middle class. The working class responded with indifference to the attacks on a government supposedly based on this sector. The confrontation ended in a humiliating defeat in the Senate for the government’s proposed exports-tax, with the vote being decided by the Vice-President, Julio Cobos, who voted against it. The government was unable to force him to resign, and relations have supposedly broken down between the two camps, but Cobos’ permanent presence is a constant slap in the face for Christina, while the former builds a base amongst Argentina’s most reactionary sectors and is constantly praised by the mass media.
The government has responded to the economic crisis by turning first one way, then another, and then back again. First, it paid off its debts of US$6.7 million to the Paris Club in a lump sum in an attempt to halt the outflow of capital it had suffered (US$ 8 billion since the conflict with the “countryside”). This was meant to shore up the country’s reputation heading into the global crisis, but meant that the country, as a whole, had lost 20% of its reserves in only six months. The paying of the debt in itself did not represent any break with the past as together the Kirchner dynasty has made more debt repayments than any other Argentine government in history (which has not prevented a 16.4 per cent rise in Argentina’s debt since the restructuring announced in 2005), however the strong fall in central reserves is a new factor.Then came the announcement of the intent to nationalise the country’s privatised pensions system, the AFJP. This meant the government taking charge of US$97 billion dollars and an income of US$15 billion annually, a policy denounced as “Chavista” by the opposition, and opposed by dominant sectors of the national and foreign bourgeoisie operating in Argentina. Tellingly, the government only took this measure after seeing that its policy of attracting an influx of capital via the payment of debt to the Paris Club in order to fund future debt payments, had failed .The government reverted to an “anti-neoliberal” discourse to win support for this measure but was quick to justify it to the bourgeoisie as the result of “exceptional circumstances”, i.e. the need to fund the state in the face of a sudden financial squeeze which the ruling class had not counted on, and to shore up with state funding an important source of credit for business in the face of a global financial crisis. However, these assurances could not avoid a strong fall in the Merval (Buenos Aires stock exchange), which the government called a “market coup” .
Then, on Tuesday November 25, they made another turn, this time back to the right. The government announced an “anti-crisis plan”, in the Buenos Aires Sheraton, where Christina told a group of prominent capitalists, “I feel like a partner in your businesses”. This plan combines a promise to help the bosses “cut costs” in the name of “protecting jobs” i.e. that the government will step up its intervention on behalf of bosses against workers, and a programme of public works estimated to be worth 71,000 million pesos and to create 360,000 jobs . To oversee this, a new Ministry, the Ministry of Production, was created, headed by Debora Giorgi, an ex-functionary of the De La Rua government.
The measures were praised by the business sector, with FIAT President Cristiano Rattazzi, who only a short time before had denounced the nationalisation of the AFJP as a confiscation, saying that “this is a government which cares about the productive economy”, while the Argentine Chamber of Commerce and the right-wing opposition (PRO) also praised the government’s “sensible policies”.
Workers’ Solution
Argentina, like much of the world, stands on the edge of a crisis. The working class goes into this crisis with certain factors in its favour from which we can take hope. Firstly, the government is weak and there is no strong bourgeois opposition. Secondly, unlike in 2001, the past 5 years have seen a huge boom in job creation, and a re-composition and heavy concentration of the working class in the productive sectors. Workers have become used to a situation of steady wage rises and “easy” victories in union struggles, and a large new vanguard of young workers, not demoralised by past defeats, has formed. Thirdly, the decision of the Supreme Court, to favour freedom of organisation for workers, opens the door for combative reps to fight for democratic rights.The automobile industry today is in the middle of an explosive conflict. The workers of GESTAMP, Iveco and Volkswagen in Cordoba, and General Motors in Santa Fe, are making history with their current struggles, anti-bureaucratic stances, and solidarity with subcontracted workers. This situation may well represent the intervention of the organised working class into the political scene in a way not seen in Argentina for at least two decades. What is necessary now is to fight for the politicisation and generalisation of these struggles and for the hegemony of the working class’ struggle amongst all Argentina’s impoverished and oppressed groups.This means arguing amongst workers for the need to organise these struggles under a political, class based banner on the one hand, to fight for the interests of the class against the bosses as a whole, and, on the other hand, to make it clear that only through solidarity can workers defend living standards, wages and jobs in the face of the coming crisis. By taking democratic control of their struggles, via elected strike committees and local councils of action, rank and file workers can democratise their unions so that tragedies like that in Rosario in December can never happen again. Clearly, it is also necessary for workers to organise their pickets so that they can defend themselves against anyone, police or the goons of the employers or the union bureaucrats May 2009 sees the fortieth anniversary of the great uprising of the workers and students in Cordoba, the Cordobazo. The best possible commemoration of its militancy would be to score a victory rather than suffering a tragic defeat. Automobile workers were in the forefront of the Cordobazo; in 2009 they can be in the forefront of the working class, raising the slogan the Italian workers and students are using today. “We will not pay for their crisis”.At the present moment, the automobile workers can act as such a vanguard, especially if they involve all the workers in the industry, for this reason it’s urgent to call on SMATA to announce a strike of all its members against layoffs in the car industry, and to agitate for this amongst the rank and file. The union bureaucracy is currently on trial and this is a key means to expose it and further the cause of reclaiming the unions for their members. If the employers try to impose mass lay-offs or closures, workers should reply by occupying the plants, opening the books and demanding nationalisation without compensation to the capitalist bankrupts, under workers’ management.Finally, the left must fight to unite the demands of the unemployed and poor, the impoverished middle class and the student movement, behind the banner of the organised working class as the only force capable of leading a successful solution to this crisis for the mass of Argentines. This means campaigning to win these sectors to a working class perspective, and calling on all groups that claim to be progressive and on the left to show maximum unconditional solidarity with workers’ struggles. Above all, the Argentine workers need a working class party, in the foundation of which a democratised trade union movement should play a key part and which the revolutionary left should do all in its power to win to a revolutionary programme.