Abstract

RODRIGUEZ, Tania J. Sindicalismo argentino en el Mercosur: Estrategias de acción de CGT y CTA (2003-2015). Estud. trab. [online]. 2018, n.56. ISSN 0327-5744.

The twenty-first century began for Latin America with economic and political crises in some countries of the continent, including those whose governments that had been considered exemplary when implementing policies promoted by Washington Consensus (1989). When post-neoliberal governments arrived at the beginning of the century, the need to build other agreements was evident to reactivate national and regional economies and overcome the external bottleneck they were going through after the experience of deregulated liberal models. In this context, governments of Argentina and Brazil turned to Southern Common Market (Mercosur) as a platform to coordinate regional policies and markets in order to reactivate national economies. At the same time, post-neoliberal governments implemented policies to recover domestic demands and promoted employment growth. In Argentina, this was accompanied by the recovery of wage bargaining labor institutions and protection of workers' rights. Changes in structure of opportunities, increase in labor disputes and increase in union membership rate strengthened unions in distributive competing. In this paper, we study union's strategies in a changing situation at domestic level with new government and the new period for Mercosur between 2003 and 2015. We study the strategies deployed by CGT and CTA, Argentine trade unions confederations based on changes in structure of opportunities from other economic project, other government and historical importance of trade union organizations in Mercosur socio-labor institutions. We affirm trade unions consolidated their power resources in this period from the place they occupied in governing political coalition and that position allowed them to sustain agendas in regional level, even though the dynamics of the functioning of socio-labor institutions of Mercosur was moderate.

Keywords : Unionism; Mercosur; Regional integration; Power resources.