‘De proletarios a propietarios…’ Neoliberal Hegemony, Labour Commodification, and Family Relationships in a ‘Petty’ Steel Workers’ Firm

Abstract

The chapter discusses the working class dynamic in Argentina, through an ethnographic approach to a group of steel workers of the former state owned steel mill. The analysis focuses on one of the microfirms, the first one with a union delegate elected by its employees. In the interplay between the daily experience of labor subsumption and domination that subcontracted workers experience, and the improvement in wages and working conditions that direct workers obtain through the union, young workers abandon entrepreneur expectations and assume the proletarian ones. Thus, the new working-class generation is part of an uneven and slow process of class reorganization, involving the struggle for the improvement of daily labor relationships.