- About
- People
- Thanos Angelopoulos
- Enrique Antuña
- Victoria Basualdo
- Stefan Berger
- Pratima Bhatta
- Slade Barret Brown
- Hernán Camarero
- Gonzalo Durán
- Gábor Egry
- Alvin Finkel
- Paulo Fontes
- Irakli Iremadze
- Herbert Jauch
- Mark Leier
- Alexandru Lita
- Asad Mehmood
- Marliese Mendel
- Sumeet Mhaskar
- José Babiano Mora
- Mauricio Archila Neira
- Silke Neunsinger
- Dhiraj Kumar Nite
- Ayse Orha
- Luka Pejic
- Raquel Rego
- Massimo Repetto
- Mayka Muñoz Ruiz
- Carolina Maria Ruy
- Eleocadio Martínez Silva
- Tim Schicker
- Mary Anne Trasciatti
- Aurora Trif
- Luisa Veloso
- Constanze von Wrangel
- Manfred Wannöffel
- Edlira Xhafa
- Ruhr-Universität Bochum Seminar Participants
- Organizations
- Alberta Labour History Institute
- Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek/Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library
- Archive of Social Democracy (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung)
- Archives of Political History and the Trade Unions
- La Asociación Mexicana de Estudios del Trabajo, A.C. (AMET)
- Association of Indian Labour Historians
- Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB)
- BC General Employees Union (BCGEU)
- Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU-K)
- Centre of Cooperation - RUB/IGM
- Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-Iscte)
- Centro de Estudios Históricos de los Trabajadores y las Izquierdas (CEHTI)
- Centro de Memória Sindical/Trade Union Memory Center (Brazil)
- Fundación SOL
- General Agricultural Workers Union of Ghana (GAWU-TUC)
- Hans-Böckler Foundation
- International Association of Labour History Institutions
- Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University, Bochum
- Laboratório de Estudos de História dos Mundos do Trabalho (LEHMT)
- La Fundación 1st de Mayo
- Pakistan Workers Federation (PWF)
- Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition
- Simon Fraser University (SFU)
- UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
- Union of Professional Health and Care Sector Workers in Nepal (UNIPHIN)
- Countries
- People
- Projects
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche: Workers' experiences; Lives, bodies struggles (France)
- Biographical Archive of the Workers' Movement [Italy]
- General Federation of Trade Unions (UK)
- A History of São Paulo's Metalworker Unions/A história dos metalúrgicos de São Paulo
- Instituto de Estudios Obreros "Rafael Galván". A.C. (Mexico)
- Labor History Resource Project (USA)
- LEHMT: Sites of Memory/Lugares de Memória
- Remembering Activism (ReAct): The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (EU)
- Sites of Social Struggle in the Ruhr (Germany)
- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Memorial (USA)
- Issues and Themes
- Blog
- A capitalism with a human face? Union power in Germany
- “When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend”: Commemoration and Labour Politics
- Labour history online course: a critical resource for trade unionists, and labour activists and researchers
- Workers and Labor Policy under the Social Democratic Government: The Georgian Experience (1918–1921)
- The Strike That Never Ended: Memories of the 1982-83 Mumbai Textile Strike and the Resurgence of Labour Politics
- Resources
- Contact
Argentina
Contributed by Victoria Basualdo
The trade union movement has been a major political and economic actor throughout Argentine history, from the initial stages of a consolidation of a working class. The history and memory of trade-union organization, mobilization and struggle is a heated topic of discussion when analyzing the present and the future of the country.
Particularly, considering that Argentina has a historical tradition that combines strong industrial-type and nationally-based trade-union organizations with exclusive bargaining rights for a single organization in each economic activity, strong national trade-union confederations and a firm presence at the shop-floor by means of delegates elected by the rank and file and “comisiones internas”, a body of shop-floor representatives. From some perspectives, this is considered a central asset and a crucial tradition that favored the consolidation of a structure of rights, while others consider this as one of the main problems of Argentina.
While debates and confrontations regarding the place of workers and trade-unions in society were present in different stages, one period was particularly dramatic: the brutal dictatorship between 1976-1983 in Argentina, which left a serious legacy of human rights violations as well as a significant loss of economic, social and political rights. The working class and the trade union movement, always encompassing different sectors with various ideologies and perspectives, became targets and underwent strong transformations, many of which were deepened during ensuing neoliberal governments. Today, many Argentinian trade union organizations are engaged in issues related to history and memory, not only concerning the long-term history of these organizations and their workers, but also in terms of the victims of these human rights violations that marked their organizations during the dictatorship, increasingly becoming part of the process of Memory, Truth and Justice to remember these crimes and repair their long-lasting impacts along with continuing fighting for economic and labour rights.