Many accounts of social movements still place the workers’ movements in an important position even when they are criticizing it from a “new” social movement perspective. It was one of the original social movements, and it continues to have considerable weight even if this is now much diminished in some parts of the world. In Latin America, the workers’ movement was shaped by the nature of the dependent development process, albeit not in a deterministic manner. As Charles Bergquist puts it:

The making of the working class – through immigration and industrialization – thus played a major role in the forging of contemporary Latin America. And the workers’ movements have played an important role in the politics and culture of Latin America.

During the industrialization phase and the establishment of a national-popular state, workers became ever more central both in economic and political terms. With industrialization after the global depression of the 1930s, and particularly after the Second World War, labour was “nationalized”, as it were. Trade unions became a key component of many nationalist movements, often with their own social agenda. When democracy was closed down in Latin America, as it was during the military dictatorships of the 1970s, the workers’ movement was at the centre of resistance to its untrammelled rule. Although “new” social movements came into play then – such as the exemplary human rights movement – workers continued to resist daily, in the workplace and in the community. With democratization in the 1980s, and after the long neoliberal period of the 1990s, workers again became central under the left-of-centre governments after 2000, sometimes as supporters but also as antagonists.

This chapter starts with an examination of the history of the labour movement in Argentina, originally one of the strongest in Latin America.