[The following articles appeared in the May 1975 issue of Revista de América, a revolutionary-socialist monthly published in Buenos Aires. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
BUENOS AIRES-The trickle of labor struggles that began in early March became a torrent in the following weeks. The opening created by the victories at Rigolleau glass factory and Centenera metalworks widened into numerous struggles waged in dozens of factories by all the unions. Many of these conflicts have resulted in important victories; in others the gains are less important; some have yet to be resolved.
There have also been defeats in these struggles: At the Ledesma Sugar Mill, where the union was placed under trusteeship by the government and the leaders are in prison or being hunted by the police, work was resumed after a five-day strike.
But the victories are more numerous and more important than the defeats. Some of the most outstanding examples, but by no means the only ones, are Propulsora Iron and Steel Works near La Plata, where employees won an emergency wage increase, and Indiel, a metal plant in Greater Buenos Aires that won the release of thirteen leaders and activists held by the police after an eleven-day work stoppage.
However, the most important struggle is the one still going on in Villa Constitución. In March 1974 an extended conflict at the iron and steel plants in that town of Santa Fe Province won recognition of the metalworkers' right to freely elect the local leadership of the Unión Obrera Metalúrgica [UOM-Metalworkers Union]. A fighting, class-struggle leadership committee was ratified by those elections. On March 20, 1975, the government struck a blow against that leadership and other militant sectors of the workers movement. The Ministry of Labor ordered the take-over of the Villa Constitución branch of the UOM and the union at the Ledesma Sugar Mill (in Jujuy). At dawn that day police detachments arrested dozens of leaders and activists at the steel and iron plants in Villa Constitución, the Ledesma Sugar Mill, and several factories in the Rosario area.
The, outraged metalworkers of Villa responded with a strike, a strike that has 730
Number of Strikes now lasted one month in spite of constant announcements by the government, which daily prediet the imminent resumption of work. The Villa Constitución plants supply a very important part of the national market; their paralysis is creating a very difficult situation for the construction industry and threatens to bring on a shutdown of the automobile factories.
While this long and heroic strike was developing, a spontaneous work stoppage in Buenos Aires produced the biggest traffic bottleneck anyone can remember in the capital. The subway workers, tired of bad worse working conditions, wages and conducted a slowdown during the entire muniqué belong to that union. In the city that was the center of the police proceedings, Villa Constitución (there were also proceedings in San Nicolás, Campana, and La Plata), the leadership of the regional UOM, whose membership is the personnel working at the Acindar plant, does not follow the line of the national secretariat of the metalworkers union, because the leadership is in the hands of the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores.
In San Nicolás the local UOM represents the workers at the General Savio plant of Somisa. This body traditionally was socialist, which forced Augusto Timoteo Vandor to take it over and designate José Ignacio Rucci as delegate of the leadership council. Once the section resumed normal functioning, Rucci was elected its head.