Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A train station along the Western Argentine Railway. There was a boom of railroad building in
Argentina between 1880 and 1910.
(Patricia Harris Postcard Collection, Benson Latin American
Collection, University of Texas at Austin)
British-owned railways formed the vanguard of the Argentine labor
movement. British railway construction in Argentina ended in the
mid-1910s, during a critical political period in which the first demo-
cratically elected government replaced the conservative regime that had
strongly supported the railway companies. While the popular Radical
Party was in power, from 1916 to 1930, the workers initiated their most
important struggles for the enforcement of work rules. These rules
governed work conditions and procedures on the shop floor, protected
the workers, and restrained the companies from wielding arbitrary
power at the grassroots level. Two unions led the resistance. Founded
in 1887, the Locomotive Fraternity (La Fraternidad) constituted the
craft union of the engineers and firemen. The nonlocomotive workers
did not have their own organization until 1922, when they successfully
formed the highly centralized Railway Union (Unión Ferroviaria) after
numerous failures over a long period of time. Only the unskilled and
itinerant roadbed laborers, most of them criollos, were not organized.
The Radical Party governments proved more responsive to workers'
demands than their conservative predecessors had been.
