ABSTRACT
Economic changes prompted by neo-liberal policies in Argentina in the 1990s brought about market reforms and industrial rationalization processes, labor precariousness, flexibilization, and the disappearance of thousands of jobs. In spite of the fact that trade unions engineered numerous strikes against the socio-economic, political and cultural model that set in between 1989 and 1995, several authors point to the gradual dismantling of the trade union based protest matrix in subsequent years, a fact that eventually gave way to a civic or rights matrix with the emergence of citizenship protests and mobilizations (Schuster and Pereyra 2001; Scribano and Schuster 2001). Whole towns in the interior of the country became immersed in a crisis related to the implementation of structural adjustment in provincial public accounts. The people came out into the streets in defense of their interests (puebladas).1 Movimientos de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD: Unemployed Workers’ Movements) started in the interior of the country, in areas that had been affected by the cutbacks in sources of employment that ensued from privatization plans. These movements organized roadblocks that they called “pickets,” which finally led people to call these workers “picketers.”2 More than one hundred enterprises were “recovered” from their owners and managed by the workers in the sectors of economic activity that were most deeply affected either by
imports or the difficulties posed by exports, especially in meat packaging houses, textile factories, tractors, trailers, metal working plants, plastics, etc. (Di Marco and Palomino 2003, 2004a, 2004b).
