Book Review: Somiseros: la configuracion y el devenir de un grupo obrero desde una perspectiva antropologica by Julia Soul and La disputa por la dignidad obrera: sindicalismo de base fabril en la zona norte del conurbano bonaerense 2003–2014 by Paula Varela

Abstract

Julia Soul Somiseros: la configuracion y el devenir de un grupo obrero desde una perspectiva antropologica, Rosario: Prohistoria ediciones, 2014, ISBN 9789871855940, 230 $ARS Paula Varela La disputa por la dignidad obrera: sindicalismo de base fabril en la zona norte del conurbano bonaerense 2003-2014, Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2015, ISBN 9789597931925, 250 $ARS In contrast with the social movement focus of the previous decade, the last few years have seen a renewal of traditional labour movement studies in Argentina. This has been partly a consequence of the improved socio-political and economic landscape following the 2001 crisis. The economic growth and the centrality given to collective bargaining and tripartite agreements in industrial relations have empowered trade union structures at central and workplace level, favouring the re-emergence of grassroots organizations and workplace labour conflict in the formal sector of the economy. This renewal of traditional workers' struggles--often associated with issues of workers' representation, trade union democracy and work precarity--has thus provided a fertile soil for research to a young generation of left-oriented researchers. The books reviewed in this article, although from different theoretical and disciplinary angles and political nuances, represent well this return to the normality' of the capital-labour relationship and to the management of labour conflict in formal sector workplaces and within the traditional institutional regulatory framework, far from the anti-politics and the anti-institutional social mobilizations of the early 2000s. The book by Julia Soul, Somiseros, using oral history interviews and ethnographic methods, offers an anthropological perspective of workers' collective formations and identities in a steel company, SOMISA, across time. This long-term perspective is developed through three chronological phases, each corresponding to a particular configuration of the capital-labour relations in the plant: the creation and expansion of the state company in the 1960s; the tension for the processes of rationalization of the 1980s and the privatization of the early 1990s; and the downsizing, flexibilization and exposition to world market as part of the transnational steel giant Techint from the 2000s to the current days. This long-term perspective gives the possibility of identifying and delving deep into the collective practices and processes constituted through what the author calls the cotidianeidad fabril (everyday plant life) and how these practices and processes have changed, particularly with the privatization of the company in 1993. This micro-perspective, centred on the cotidianeidad fabril, gives insights of the tensions running through the social relations established within the collective of workers, allowing to locate the discussion about SOMISA's workers into more general debates associated with the management of labour power (technological changes and the transformation of labour control, the precarization and division of the workforce) and with trade unions as agent of workers' collective representation. This fine-grained and ethnographically rich analysis of the tensions within the collective of workers is maintained and well developed throughout the whole book, giving the reader a lively, almost filmic, image of the factory's social relations. This micro-analysis clearly represents the core anthropological part of the book and at the same time the best part of it. However, I also think that the centrality given to this micro-analysis in the narrative and in the book's structure does not allow the author to explicitly pose issues which are fundamental in working-class studies and for the broader social sciences. What does the work tell us in terms of class (re)configuration? Are industrial workers, as far as the experience of SOMISA can teach us, still the central political subject in the construction of social change? …