The Social Life of Politics

Ethics, Kinship, and Union Activism in Argentina

Sian Lazar

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503602427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A central motor of Argentine historical and political development since the early twentieth century, unions have been the site of active citizenship in both political participation and the distribution of social, economic, political, and cultural rights. What brings activists to Argentine unions and what gives these unions their remarkable strength?

The Social Life of Politics examines the intimate, personal, and family dimensions of two political activist groups: the Union of National Civil Servants (UPCN) and the Association of State Workers (ATE). These two unions represent distinct political orientations within Argentina's broad, vibrant labor movement: the UPCN identifies as predominantly Peronist, disciplined, and supportive of incumbent government, while the ATE prides itself on its democratic, horizontal approach and relative autonomy from the electoral process. Sian Lazar examines how activists in both unions create themselves as particular kinds of militants and forms of political community. The Social Life of Politics places the lived experience of political activism into historical relief and shows how ethics and family values deeply inform the process by which political actors are formed, understood, and joined together through collectivism.

1

THE STATE AND THE UNIONS IN SPACE AND TIME

It is no coincidence that “no return to the 1990s” was the slogan that summed up the opposition to Mauricio Macri’s election during the period between the first and second rounds of voting in late 2015. Indeed, Argentine political history framed nearly all of the discussions I had with public-sector unionists during my research, and the 1990s were particularly prominent in that history. The nature of the Argentine state shaped their work, both as unionists and as state employees. Needless to say, the Argentine state as an entity is neither singular nor stable, and some key moments in the contemporary history of state restructuring were extremely important in shaping life for public-sector workers and in the different trajectories that ATE and UPCN took in recent decades. Those different trajectories need also to be understood in the context of longer-term histories of unionism and Peronism that stretch back into the early twentieth century.

The interplay of recent events and longer histories shapes the contemporary modes of ethical-political subjectivation that are the subject of this book. Here I introduce the two unions and describe state employment and the effects of the 1990s restructuring. I place these descriptions in the context of longer-term histories of the labor movement in Argentina and consider the class position of state workers and union activists. This is crucial context to the more microlevel analysis of the following chapters. By including this detail here, as well as threading historical resonances through the ethnographic chapters themselves, I hope both to be true to the historical consciousness of my interlocutors and to avoid some of the pitfalls of what Don Kalb describes as an anthropology that fails to “escape from its culturalist reveries and engage with the larger scales and longer terms of political economy” (2015: 10). The political economy I engage with is a product of the interaction between national and global scales but for my informants was mostly expressed in terms of national history.

UNION ORGANIZATION

Focusing on unionists—especially those at leadership levels—created a particular spatial distribution of my research field, a problem undoubtedly common to much urban anthropology. I found many of my informants in the central offices and gatherings run by the union, but they were also delegates from a workplace that consists of a distributed network of the institutions that make up the Argentine state system. The two spatial configurations overlapped. I begin by outlining the union configuration before discussing the state itself. I then address the unions in their temporal, historical dimension.

Both ATE and UPCN have national reach, but each organizes itself slightly differently. UPCN follows the structure of the federal state. It has a National Leadership Council (Consejo Directivo Nacional), under which are sectional offices (seccionales). The largest and most important sectional office, and the one that I worked with, the Section of the Federal Capital and National Public Sector Employees (Seccional Capital Federal y Empleados Públicos Nacionales [Capital Section]), is based in the city of Buenos Aires.¹ It covers all the employees of the national state and the small number of employees of the municipal government of Buenos Aires city who are members of UPCN. Andrés Rodríguez, the current general secretary of the Capital Section, is also the general secretary of the National Leadership Council, an important political interlocutor for the national and local government, and a significant figure in the leadership of the Peronist Partido Justicialista in the city of Buenos Aires.²

ATE organizes its affiliates on a more directly territorial basis and aims at more horizontal and autonomous forms of organization. So all those employees who work in a particular territory (e.g., the province of Buenos Aires) are members of that Provincial Leadership Council (Consejo Directivo), whether they are employed by the provincial or federal government. They also have a National Leadership Council, known as ATE-Nacional, which coordinates the actions of all the provincial councils. ATE-Capital is the council for state employees in the city of Buenos Aires, whether employed by the municipal or national government. My informants came from both ATE-Capital and ATE-Nacional.

Both UPCN and ATE organize themselves below the level of the Capital Section and ATE-Capital through internal commissions for each institution where they have enough affiliates (such as a hospital, ministry, regulatory office, or even a theater). The activists who form these internal commissions are called delegates; and the UPCN commissions are usually called delegations, while ATE activists call their commissions juntas internas. For both unions, each internal commission will usually include the three top positions—general secretary, adjunct secretary, and gremial secretary—but may also have secretaries of social welfare, equal opportunities, youth, culture, professionals, and other responsibilities, depending on their size.

Over the course of nine months in 2009 and shorter return trips in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, I conducted extensive interviews with unionists from both ATE and UPCN in both their workplace and the union offices; attended plenaries, assemblies (at the level of the sectional offices and at the workplace), and other meetings; attended classes for new delegates run by both organizations; and attended demonstrations, press conferences, and other public events associated with union activity. In 2012 I spent two months with a UPCN delegation from an important ministry located in the center of Buenos Aires, accompanying them in daily meetings, gatherings in the delegation office, and visits. During this research my focus was initially on collective politics, through the specific example of unionism. My previous work (Lazar 2008) had explored collective politics and technologies of the self in Bolivia, and the work in Argentina became an extension of those two concerns, moving toward an interest in political activism as a problem in itself. Although I do not consider myself a political activist, I have sought to make my research consistent with a personal political interest in social movements against oppression and emancipatory education in the Freiran sense (Freire 1996). As I grew closer to my interlocutors and moved methodologically from a greater emphasis on recorded interviews to more informal methods of participation in meetings and social and educational events, I took on a position of sympathizer; some UPCN activists considered that they had managed to “Peronize” me, as over time I became more familiar with their day-to-day life. Across both ATE and UPCN, my main informants were union leaders, from union delegates at the level of the administrative unit to those with positions in the central offices of the city. This focus on the committed activists means that my study does emphasize those people who were usually relatively happy with how their union acted, although that did not mean they were entirely uncritical. Furthermore, currently, relations between these union hierarchies and their members are not on the whole characterized by the violence and antagonism that has been an important part of Argentine unionism since the mid-twentieth century (see Torre 1998; Munck, Galitelli, and Falcon 1987). At the time of my fieldwork, those union members who were dissatisfied tended not to violently confront the leadership, as has happened in the past, but simply leave the union altogether. If they were UPCN members dissatisfied with its political position, they often joined ATE, but many public-sector workers chose not to be members of any union, as it was not obligatory.

Public opinion in Argentina, particularly in the city of Buenos Aires, is often very strongly against the trade unions. Many ordinary people and rival unionists think that the unions are corrupt, bureaucratized, and entrepreneurial, seeking to take advantage of their members and the workers more generally to earn money. They frequently tell murky stories of embezzlement, violence, and misuse of power and accuse union leaders of spending all their time in union activity instead of working alongside their fellow workers. In theory, unions are financed by the 1 to 3 percent of an employee’s salary that goes to pay union dues once the individual has affiliated. The precise percentage depends on numbers of affiliates, and it is deducted from pay by the employing institution and passed on to the union account. For the associated health insurance plan, the employer pays 5 percent and individuals pay 3 percent of their salary,³ and the retention (and disbursal) of these amounts is implemented by the national taxation agency, AFIP (Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos; Federal Administration of Public Income). The government pays into a Solidarity Fund for health insurance plans in general, but according to my UPCN informants, this is for special programs, “like brain transplants,” I was told jokingly. An individual can choose to pay neither health insurance nor union dues, but choosing not to pay for health insurance forfeits the employer contribution. Individuals can also choose to affiliate with more than one union. Neither employers nor the government pays money directly to the union.⁴

Union delegates are allowed a certain number of horas gremiales, hours of work per month that they can spend on union business, such as meetings, demonstrations, and negotiations, according to the Law of Union Associations (Art. 44c).⁵ Precise amounts are agreed at the institutional level and on the basis of the collective bargaining agreement, but it is important that there is protection in law for workers to act on union business. For example, and in addition to the protection of time to be devoted to union business, union delegates are protected by law against being dismissed while they are delegates and for a year after they have finished their union mandate, under the provisions of tutela sindical, union protection (Law of Union Associations, Sec. XII, Arts. 47–52). Leaders at higher levels of the union, such as the Capital Section and ATE-Capital offices, are granted licencia gremial, which is leave from their work to engage in union action. The union pays them a salary.

ATE and UPCN vary in how they define the appropriate field of struggle and suitable strategies for achieving their aims. ATE considers itself to be engaged in a broad class struggle, while UPCN is more conciliatory and seeks benefits for its affiliates through negotiation, especially within institutionalized collective bargaining. Both seek better salaries and environmental conditions and participate in campaigning and collective bargaining on measures to address workplace harassment and equality of opportunities. Both provide services to their members, and UPCN in particular considers professional training to be a core element of its activity as a union. Confrontation between civil service labor and management, when it takes place, tends to revolve around salary negotiations, pension provisions (especially with regard to how much of the salary is formally registered and therefore able to be taken into account when pensions and other benefits are calculated), and for ATE in particular the tensions around temporary and permanent contracts. Both unions seek to preserve jobs and fight situations where temporary contracts are not renewed or permanent employees are transferred to other departments (see Lazar 2016b). They do so using very different strategies and methods but share a similar understanding of what would be the best outcome for their constituency. Much of what both unions do is make themselves viable as organizations in their own right and (for ATE in particular) as a member of a broader social movement arena. UPCN and ATE are, like other unions, channels for the distribution and articulation of a wide range of political, social, and economic rights, as well as cultural life and kinship; active citizenship as made in the union is a whole-life condition, beyond specific confrontations over employment conditions.

THE ARGENTINE STATE

Any characterization of “a state” is of necessity partial and shifts according to the perspective from which one attempts such a task, and there is indeed a very well-developed literature in the anthropology of the state that explores this in depth.⁶ As a foreigner in Buenos Aires, I encountered the Argentine state in multiple ways: the border guard checking my passport as I entered the country, the immigration office where I applied for a research visa, the price controls on subway and bus fares, the national museums I visited with my children, the airplanes of the privatized then renationalized Aerolineas Argentinas by which we traveled the country. Because I was a researcher studying the unions of state employees, other elements became salient, especially the institutional and political complexity of the Argentine state, the nature of formal and informal employment structures within different state entities, and some of the most important changes in the organization of the state over the course of the last couple of decades in particular. Here I consolidate those elements that are key to understanding union action and affiliation.

Argentina is a federal state, and state employment at the national (federal) level ranges over an extremely wide and complex web of institutions, from the more obvious ones such as ministries to the national parks administration, scientific research institutions, and regulatory entities. These institutions have different forms of governance and accountability and different kinds of unionization. UPCN tends to dominate the national administration and often claims to have the majority of affiliates in any given state entity. The largest UPCN delegations are to be found in agencies that reach across the country, such as ANSES (Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social) and PAMI (Plan de Asistencia Médica Integral), respectively, the social service agency and the health insurance system for elderly people. According to UPCN leaders, they have around thirteen thousand and fourteen thousand workers, respectively; but they also have their own institution-specific unions, which compete with UPCN and ATE for affiliates. UPCN and ATE both have affiliates and delegations or juntas internas in ministries, secretariats, decentralized and autonomous institutions, the Congress and Senate administration, state-funded research institutions, and so on. In the past, ATE had considerable strength in the publicly owned industries, especially the dockyards. Now, few publicly owned industries remain, but those that do include the water utility, Aerolineas Argentinas, the mail service, state-owned media, and some high-technology firms. The management of the railways has remained in public hands, and YPF (the oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales) is 51 percent owned by the government (as of late 2015). Neither UPCN nor ATE has significant numbers of affiliates in these industries.

It is quite remarkable to think of any union attempting to represent all the different kinds of public-sector workers that exist in any given country. In Argentina in April 2013, the executive branch of government consisted of fourteen different ministries and the presidential office, which had seven secretariats. There is also a legislative branch—the Congress and the Senate—with their associated administrative workers and the judicial branch, including the Supreme Court and two public ministries (fiscal and defense). The structure of the state is somewhat fluid, as periodic reorganizations change the composition of different ministries; for example, the Ministry of Justice was in 2009 the Ministry of Justice, Security and Human Rights but was split in 2010 into the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and the Ministry of Security. In recent memory, the Ministry of Justice has been autonomous, connected to the Ministry of Education and part of the Ministry of the Interior.

Each ministry has a complex organogram, and some are made up of many different institutions, which have national reach and may have offices in the interior of the country or in the city of Buenos Aires. The Ministry of Health is a good example of the potential for institutional complexity. Although it no longer runs public hospitals, it is responsible for much more than just ministry administration, covering multiple institutions: ANMAT (Administración Nacional de Medicamentos, Alimentos y Tecnología Médica; National Administration of Medications, Food and Medical Technology) and its subsidiaries, the regulators of medication and of food; the national drug rehabilitation service; the national service for people with disabilities; the national transplant surgery coordinator; and the national administration of laboratories, which includes the Malbrán hospital and eight others located around the country. There are also civil servants in the ministry building itself and those entities that provide administrative service to the ministry, such as storage of materials or printing and transport services. This complexity presents obvious challenges for union organization within the Argentine state, and unionists in institutions such as the Ministry of Health were very proud that they had managed to successfully coordinate the people who worked in such a wide range of institutions, housed in locations across the city and even the country. They did so by having a nested structure consisting of a delegation in each institution, which reported to the central overall ministry delegation, which in turn consisted of delegates from across the institutions.

Not all ministries are as complex as the Health Ministry in institutional structure, while others have different kinds of complexities. For example, the very large Justice Ministry is responsible for several autonomous institutions, some of which—like the Automobile Registration institution—are effectively outsourced. The majority of the workers in such institutions are employed by a subcontracted agency and hold temporary rather than permanent contracts. For the unions, they count as state employees, but their status is blurred. This is relevant because the kinds of employment contracts operating in the public sector are of enormous importance to the unions and a key focus of their activities.

At the municipal level, especially in the city of Buenos Aires—also known as Capital Federal or CABA (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires; Autonomous City of Buenos Aires)—neither ATE nor UPCN is the majority union. That distinction belongs to the official Peronist union SUTECBA (Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores del Estado de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires; Unique Union of State Workers of the City of Buenos Aires).⁷ UPCN has relatively few affiliates in the CA...