BY MEGAN ARNEY

Argentina was brought to a standstill as millions of workers stayed home, banks and public schools closed, buses and subways stopped, and airlines canceled flights as part of a general strike.

More than 100,000 people demonstrated in the capital, Buenos Aires, September 26, protesting the government's austerity campaign. The demonstration began a 36-hour strike called by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), Argentina's main union organization. The action follows a similar 24-hour work stoppage last month.

"There is a lot of discontent," Héctor Pérez, a glass factory worker, told reporters. He was one of hundreds of volunteer monitors deployed at the Plaza de Mayo by the CGT.

Argentina has record unemployment, standing at 17.1 percent, and is now crawling out of an 18-month recession, following the Mexican peso crisis last year.

It is under these conditions that President Carlos Menem is spearheading the attacks on the unions through labor legislation he is presenting to Congress. The proposed laws include ending the requirement that employers pay permanently laid off workers a month's salary for each year of service; replacing wage negotiations industry-wide with negotiations at company level; and extending the current 8-hour workday to 12 hours with time off as compensation instead of overtime pay.

Menem is also trying to make it easier for companies to hire and dismiss workers, cut family allowances, privatize state- owned companies, and deregulate Argentina's economy. He has threatened to enact these provisions by decree if Congress doesn't approve them quickly.

Some of the austerity proposals codify what the union tops have already conceded. A number of unions, including food industry workers headed by current CGT leader Rodolfo Daer, have signed contracts containing more concessions than required under current law.

"The union bosses are fakers," bank employee Julio Martínez, 23, told reporters as he headed for the Plaza de Mayo. "When they had to defend the workers, they didn't. And now people are so upset that they finally have to respond."

At first Menem derisively described the labor action as "a touristic strike," insinuating that it was an excuse for a long weekend. By September 27, Menem conceded that the strike was "relatively successful."

Argentine news organizations estimated that 80 percent to 90 percent of workers nationwide stayed home. Economists said the strike cost the country's rulers $1.2 billion a day.

The austerity measures are aimed at weakening the unions and destroying the gains made by workers from the late 1940s to mid-50s. During that period of capitalist boom workers wrested social concessions from the government of President Juan Domingo Perón. Perón used these concessions to gain popularity with workers, while he maneuvered for a better position for Argentine capital against the main contending imperialist forces in the area -Britain and the United States. The Peronist movement, which included the CGT, was a mass movement with hundreds of thousands of workers in its membership.

Menem and his Peronist party now run the government. "That allows Mr. Menem to deal a blow to the unions, much as Richard Nixon's anticommunist credentials let him open the door to China," wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Friedland in a September 27 article.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home