Union responses to stability and precarity in state employment. Why do pay grades matter?

• In Event: La ‘clase media’ and urban life in Buenos Aires: knowledge, critique, belonging

Abstract

Employment within the Argentine civil service is political in a broad sense. Seemingly dry questions of contracts, pay grades, vacancies and annual evaluations call forth issues of formality and precarity, the national constitution and political influence, sub-contraction of state work via universities and international development agencies, administrative reform under the rubric of neoliberal structural adjustment overseen by IFIs, collective politics, intergenerational relations and family. This paper seeks to trace the connections through a discussion of the two principal trade unions of workers in an Argentine Ministry and their articulation of knowledge about the national state and processes of neoliberal and postneoliberal administrative reform and reconstitution. I will explore the relationship between ‘stable’ and ‘precarious’ workers through the actions of the unions, and the interaction between their two very different approaches to the question of the stability of state employment. If an employment environment as ‘middle class’ and privileged as the civil service has become criss-crossed with tensions around precarity and sub-contracting, how do we understand precarity itself? How do we understand ‘the middle class’? How do the unions address the challenges of employment instability, while also protecting the interests of their more stable affiliates? How does this change when the ‘unstable’ workers are the nieces, nephews, sons and daughters of the ‘stable’ ones? I hope to explore what mundane questions of pay grades, promotions, and contract negotiations – the nitty-gritty of employment conditions – can tell about broader questions of labour, kinship and collective action.

Author

• Sian M Lazar, University of Cambridge