ILPC 2026

 The purpose of this presentation is the discussion of certain topics engaged in my current doctoral research project, regarding labour organisation and repression in industrial factories located in the Capital City and the Province of Buenos Aires during last Argentine civil-military dictatorship. Particularly, I aim at presenting the progress made so far concerning the analysis of the working class and labour movement in the specific case of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) oil distillery located in the junction of La Plata, Berisso and Ensenada, in the Province of Buenos Aires, between 1974 and 1980.

Firstly, I will go through the main features regarding work relations and labour process in the distillery, considering both their technical and social aspects. Secondly, I will address the issue of labour conflict, taking into account not only formal and centralised union organisations, but also those forms of struggle which developed at a shop-floor level, usually outside formal structures –and sometimes challenging their authority-, as well as conflicts among different currents within the working class. Likewise, I intend to reflect on the way these structures and forms of organisation developed by YPF Distillery workers established links with other trade-unions, as well as political and armed-political organisations which had influence within workers. In this vein, my look intends to go beyond the boundaries of the distillery, so as to analyse it within a wider regional framework, as part of La Plata, Berisso and Ensenada industrial district. Moreover, I aim at studying the distillery as part of YPF oil company as a whole, considering those particularities which characterised labour organisation in Argentina´s largest industry.

For the sake of this project, I base myself on a wide range of primary sources: both business and union records, as well as different types of oral and written testimonies given by people who took part in or witnessed these historical processes, in addition to material produced either by press or by contemporary political and armed-political organisations. I also rely on surveillance documentation coming from the Intelligence Section of the Buenos Aires Province Police, kept in the Provincial Memory Archive, located in La Plata, as well as official records of the National Ministry of Labour.

Evidence analysed so far for this particular case suggests that studying labour organisation thoroughly –that is taking into account not only formal structures but also the informal or “underground” ones, which prove that workers and union activists were not an homogeneous group- becomes vital in order to understand not only the development of labour struggle itself, but also disciplining and rationalisation processes which took place in workplaces in the dictatorship context, together with repressive policies against labour activists.