ILPC 2026

In the Mar del Plata city during the 1990 decade the employment crisis came together with one critical situation in fishing sector resources. That was product of policies that enabled overexploitation and the incorporation of fleets with greater capture capacity and without ground processing. It affected with particular intensity to the main resource of the local fishing industry: the hake hubbsi.. The work was transformed in a variable of privileged adjustment from local businesses, in order to preserve its already hit profitability.

In this scene the labor protections were in fact and of right dissolved by the proliferation of the informal employment contracts and the appropriation of legal forms destined to elude the obligations of employers. The production process, associated with the availability of the resource, deepened its irregularity characteristics and downloaded on the workers the costs of unproductive times under precarious forms of contracting. The cycles of availability- abundance- scarcity conditioned increasingly work and not work times in the sector.The transit between underemployment, overemployment and unemployment marked the work trajectory of a growing number of workers. In this regard, the fishing processor industry exposed with greater intensity some qualities that were delineating to the job market as a whole.

The piece rate sharpened the intensity of work in association with the reduction about size of the hake hubbsi. To the workers they continued to pay by volume of processed fish, which translated into lower salaries since the sizes were reduced, because process equal volume took more time. It added, clear, to the decline of the available resource for processing. The payment for production volume exposed to the workers to an intra class dispute for access to the resource to process, that translated in salary. At the same time, the risks of accidents and chronic diseases grew to the rhythm of the intensity of work in correlation with a destined regulation to diminish the legal protections to the health of workers. The Law of the Risks for Work (1995) limited the possibilities of economic repair in the face of deteriorating health and accidents on occasion of work.

In this paper we will address this process through an ethnographic record and of judicial judgments from local labor courts. The experiences of deterioration of the salary condition identify themselves with a certain ecological awareness acquired to subsequently facing the impossibility to enforce labor rights enshrined in the collective bargaining agreement of 1975.In the labor justice is expressed an ambivalence between the validation and the questioning of this violations. While it proliferates the media spectre of the trial industry throughout these decades, the workers see plummeting its possibilities of economic repair to deal with injustified dismissal for pregnancy and maternity, the irregularity in the contractual forms, among other insults to the rights of the workers identified along this research.