Union power and transnational corporations in Argentina Steel Industry

Capítulo de Libro

Resumen *

?No borders? is the slogan that identifies the latest Techint Group?s display advertising campaign in Buenos Aires streets. With this campaign an Argentina-born company tries to show its transnational expansion around the world. Techint Group owns the major steel companies in Argentina (Ternium Siderar and Tenaris Siderca) which became transnational enterprises during the 90?s decade, period of powerful neoliberal hegemony. Since then, and through the participation in Latin American privatization processes, Techint Group owned main steel facilities in Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Brazil forming Ternium group, focused on flat steels, main inputs for automotive and white goods industries, as much as for construction and gas industry. On the other hand, through its controlled firm Siderca, Techint Group acquired facilities in Canada, Romania, Italy, Japan, Colombia and Brazil. Nowadays, those facilities integrate Tenaris a group specialized in seamless pipes production, closely linked to petroleum industry. Along with the international expansion, both companies ? but specially Ternium ? leaded a process of mergers and acquisition of semi ? integrated steel plants in Argentina (Soul: 2008). Both capital centralization and international expansion processes developed along with important transformations in productive consumption and management of labor force, were objective advances over working class working and living conditions, founding a new ?industrial legality? (Soul: 2012). Nowadays we are concerned with conditions that shape union power. Our starting point is a theoretical assumption that considers labor unions as a workers? secondary organizational field, shaped primarily by capital structural features. In this sense, although it seems to be clear that national policies shapes union action, the company?s international scope allows us to identify changing relations between company?s strategies, union power and national policies. On one hand, we consider that capital accumulation processes, expressed and mediated by national policies, are the more influential factors that contributed to shape workers collective action and union dynamic since the neoliberal hegemony consolidation. On the other hand, these processes opened new scopes for union action, traditionally linked to national states. In this sense, our inquiry focuses on internal factors, such as shifts in the balance of power between different union organizational levels (workplace committees, section and national boards) and the role played by international union network in union power construction. In this paper, our aim is to describe three empirical nodes of relations ? each situated in different levels of social relationships - in order to produce inputs for comparative insights about union action as a result of contradictory local/international political and economic processes. The nodes of relations to be described are: Workplace relations between union and company: this level of union action has been reputed as central to the building of union power. We will describe how company policies tend to build a ?global culture? among workers and how the company is able to impose forms and contents of bargaining processes. National relations between union and company: the description of relations at this level will allow us to discuss empirical consequences of one of argentine union structure distinctive features: the monopoly of national industry representation by only one organization, and the centralization of collective bargaining that it supposes. International relations between national unions and federations and the global company: Through the description of this level of relations, we will focus on different actors engaged with the building of international union power. At the same time, this will allow us to single out the role of governments, national regulations and company policies in these relations.Our first insight is that it is through their ? contradictory ? engagement with international networks that the argentine sections achieve a national action level. This finding allows us to build hypothesis and comparisons between union structures, union power and company policies. Información suministrada por el agente en SIGEVA