Trade Unions and Corporate Accountability in Argentina: Transnational and Intersectoral Alliances

Abstract

This chapter examines the mobilisation of Argentinean trade unions to hold economic actors responsible for massive human rights violations committed during the last Argentinean dictatorship (1976–1983). It places the efforts of workers and trade unions in the wider context of actions undertaken by other state and non-state actors and highlights how different sectors of worker organisations had different attitudes towards the dictatorial past and ways of reckoning with its political and economic legacy. The chapter takes a transnational and historical perspective, starting with campaigns denouncing violations of human rights during the dictatorship in the 1970s, to judicial achievements during the early transition to democracy in the mid-1980s, to the post-2003 period, which marked a turning point that accelerated the debates on corporate responsibility for human rights violations and subsequent results in the judicial realm. It shows that the relationship between trade unions and human rights struggles, while certainly not linear and homogeneous, made an impact with implications, both at the national and the transnational level, for the evolution of the corporate responsibility agenda.