Sindicatos en la "capital del azúcar". Organización y lucha en el mundo del trabajo de la provincia de Tucumán (Argentina), 1930-1943

The purpose of this article is to analyze the evolution during the 1930’s of workers’ unions in the sugar industry in Tucumán, a province located 1,200 kilometres north of Buenos Aires. It aims at examining the patterns of unionization and the consequences it brought with it in terms of representations, struggles and demands, through the study of newspapers, official documents, interviews and union and industrial sources. In a protected industry as the sugar production was, the fixation of profits had always been negotiated by those who were able to lobby through their organizations and corporations, at least until the arrival of Peron to power. In Tucumán, factory owners were the first ones to organize themselves, a path then followed by cane growers. Workers had historically protested and fought for better wages and working conditions, but their associations were weak and intermittent, and they faced serious difficulties to sustain them over time, a circumstance that undermined their chances to uphold their demands in the middle and long term and monitor agreements. This situation, however, started to change in the mid-thirties, when workers set up a stable union within a nationwide process of union growth. In real terms their accomplishments were limited but their main achievement was giving a counter-hegemonic sense to the traditional discourse about the sugar workers.