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The ‘Estatuto del Peón’: A Revolution for the Rights of Rural Workers in Argentina?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2018

Juan Manuel Palacio
Juan Manuel Palacio*
Affiliation:
Professor of Latin American History at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) and Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The article addresses the history of the ‘Estatuto del Peón’ (peons’ statute or rural workers’ code), one of the most emblematic measures of the so-called ‘first Peronism’. It tries to weigh the importance of this legendary Peronist act for the actors directly involved and in particular to calibrate the magnitude of the Statute's impact on the everyday life and working conditions of Argentina's rural workers. I analyse in detail how the decree was conceived and the novelties it brought in terms of rights and regulations for rural workers. It also uses trial records to explore the implementation of the Statute and its concrete effects, in terms of both working conditions and the juridical protections offered to rural peons.

Spanish abstract

El trabajo se concentra en el ‘Estatuto del Peón’, una de las medidas más emblemáticas del llamado ‘primer peronismo’. El artículo intenta ponderar la importancia que tuvo esa norma legendaria para los actores involucrados de forma directa y en particular calibrar la magnitud de los cambios que produjo en la vida cotidiana y las condiciones de trabajo de los peones rurales de la Argentina. Para tal fin, el trabajo analiza en detalle cómo fue concebida la norma y cuáles eran las novedades en materia de derechos y regulaciones que introdujo para los trabajadores rurales. También utiliza expedientes judiciales para analizar la implementación del Estatuto y los efectos concretos que tuvo, tanto en las condiciones de trabajo como en materia de protección jurídica de los peones rurales.

Portuguese abstract

Este artigo aborda a história do ‘Estatuto do Peão’, uma das medidas mais emblemáticas do chamado ‘primeiro Peronismo’. Uma das propostas centrais do artigo é tentar medir a importância desse ato legendário do Peronismo para as partes diretamente envolvidas e em particular para mensurar a magnitude do impacto do Estatuto na vida cotidiana e condições de trabalho dos trabalhadores rurais da Argentina. Através da análise de registros jurídicos, o artigo explora a implementação do Estatuto e os efeitos concretos do mesmo, tanto em termos de condições de trabalho como em proteção judicial oferecida aos peões rurais.

Keywords

peonageArgentinalabour lawrural workers’ coderural historypeonismoArgentinaleyes laboralesEstatuto del Peónhistoria ruralpeonagemArgentinaleis de trabalhoEstatuto do Peãohistória rural
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 333 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 Recent historiography refers to the period 1943/6–55 – which goes from the year Perón came to power as part of the military government of the ‘June Revolution’ of 4 June 1943 through his first two presidencies until he was overthrown in 1955 – as the ‘first’ or ‘classic Peronism’. The term peón refers broadly to rural workers.

2 Juan Manuel Palacio, La paz del trigo: Cultura legal y sociedad local en el desarrollo agropecuario pampeano, 1890–1945 (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2004).

3 In Argentina estancia usually refers to medium to large estates, generally specialised in cattle raising or mixed farming. Unless otherwise specified, the term estancia will be used here to refer to these kinds of rural estates.

4 See, for example, Karush, Matthew and Chamosa, Oscar (eds.), The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. For more on this historiography, see Acha, Omar and Quiroga, Nicolás, ‘La normalización del primer peronismo en la historiografía argentina reciente’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 20: 2 (2008–9), pp. 7–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Palacio, Juan Manuel, ‘El primer peronismo en la historiografía reciente: Nuevas perspectivas de análisis’, Iberoamericana, 39 (2010), pp. 255–65Google Scholar; Rein, Raanan, Barry, Carolina, Acha, Omar and Quiroga, Nicolás, Los estudios sobre el primer peronismo: Aproximaciones desde el siglo XXI (La Plata: Instituto Cultural de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 2009)Google Scholar.

5 One recent exception to the rule is Alejandra Salomón, El peronismo en clave rural y local, Buenos Aires 1945–1955 (Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2012). The pioneering book on these regional perspectives is Darío Macor and César Tcach (eds.), La invención del peronismo en el interior del país (Santa Fe: Universidad del Litoral, 2003).

6 Among many others, Catherine Legrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850–1936 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); Cliff Welch, The Seed Was Planted: The São Paulo Roots of Brazil's Rural Labor Movement, 1924–1964 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Juan Manuel Palacio, ‘Judges, Lawyers, and Farmers: Uses of Justice and the Circulation of Law in Rural Buenos Aires, 1900–1940’, in Carlos Aguirre, Gilbert Joseph and Ricardo Salvatore (eds.), Crime and Punishment in Latin America. Law and Society since Late Colonial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 83–112; Thomas D. Rogers and Christine R. Dabat, ‘“A Peculiarity of Labor in this Region”: Workers’ Voices in the Labor Court Archive at the Federal University of Pernambuco’, Latin American Research Review, 47 (2012), pp. 163–78.

7 See, for example, Humberto Mascali, Desocupación y conflictos laborales en el campo argentino, 1940–1965 (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1986); Waldo Ansaldi (ed.), Conflictos obrero-rurales pampeanos, 1900–1937 (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1993); Adrián Ascolani, El sindicalismo rural en la Argentina. De la resistencia clasista a la comunidad organizada (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2009).

8 Juan Bialet Massé, Informe sobre el estado de las clases obreras en el interior de la República (Buenos Aires: Adolfo Grau, 1904), 3 vols. The report was commissioned by Minister of the Interior Joaquín V. González during the second administration of Julio Argentino Roca.

9 See, for example, John K. Turner, México bárbaro (Buenos Aires: Hyspamérica, 1985), whose first English-language edition was in 1910.

10 Arnold J. Bauer, for example, brought some historical accuracy to many of the components of this black legend in ‘Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 59: 1 (1979), pp. 34–63.

11 Daniel Campi, ‘Bialet Massé y los trabajadores tucumanos del azúcar’, in Marcelo Lagos, María S. Fleitas and María T. Bovi (eds.), A cien años del informe Bialet Massé. El trabajo en la Argentina del siglo XX y albores del XXI (Jujuy: EdiUnju, 2004), pp. 182 and 184. He also critiques Bialet Massé’s benevolent view of the supposedly harmonious conditions of the more paternalistic mills.

12 Ana A. Teruel and María Silvia Freitas, ‘Historiando las develaciones de Bialet Massé en torno a los trabajadores y conflictos sociales en los ingenios de Jujuy’, in Lagos et al. (eds.), A cien años, p. 136.

13 Carl C. Taylor, Rural Life in Argentina (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1948). Aside from a few livestock labourers seen living in brick dormitories on a very prosperous cabaña (a farm for breeding purebred livestock) that he visited in the province of Buenos Aires (p. 5), when he generalised about ‘agricultural hired men’ the most positive thing that he was able to say was that he did not find slaves in those latitudes: ‘Their wages are so low, from 40 to 60 pesos per month, that they cannot accumulate sufficient capital to become tenants. None of them are serfs, however. Some of them may be perpetually in debt to their employers, in some cases are still compelled to purchase supplies at the plantation commissary, and in a few cases are partly paid in script, but all of them are free’: ibid., pp. 205–6, emphasis added.

14 According to Ascolani (El sindicalismo, pp. 310–15), only the laws of Sunday rest (from 1905), of payment of salaries with money (1925) and, very partially, of work-related accidents (1915) had, at least in the letter of the law, jurisdiction over the rural labourer. However, this tells us nothing about these laws’ (very unlikely) application in rural areas. The law regarding labour-related accidents was officially applied to rural labourers only in 1940, and its application was erratic. See Luciano Barandiarán, ‘El accidente fatal del trabajador rural y la justicia en el centro de la provincia de Buenos Aires (1935–1947)’, Res Gesta, 51 (2014), pp. 1–25.

15 Limits to the application of labour laws in the countryside during the first half of the twentieth century were hardly unique to Argentina, but rather a common trait in Latin American countries. In some, like Bolivia, Peru or Brazil, it took years (even decades) for rural workers to gain access to the benefits and rights that urban workers enjoyed. See Rossana Barragán Romano, ‘Inclusions and Exclusions: From Labor Legislation in the Andean Nations to the Formation of Labor Courts in Bolivia (1900–1952)’, in Leon Fink and Juan Manuel Palacio (eds.), Labor Justice across the Americas (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), pp. 164–88; Paulo Drinot, The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Welch, The Seed Was Planted.

16 Decree no. 15,074, 27 Nov. 1943, Anales de Legislación Argentina (hereafter ALA), 1943, pp. 459–61.

17 I have analysed this ‘climate of ideas’ in detail in Juan Manuel Palacio, ‘From Social Legislation to Labor Justice: The Common Background in the Americas’, in Fink and Palacio (eds.), Labor Justice, pp. 16–43. A complete list of ILO recommendations can be consulted at http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12010:0::NO:::, last access 6 Oct. 2018.

18 Duncan Kennedy refers to this phenomenon as the ‘globalization of the social’: Kennedy, ‘Two Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850–1968’, Suffolk University Law Review, 36: 3 (2003), pp. 631–79. In the case of Peru, Paulo Drinot analyses the conformation of a ‘labor state’: Drinot, The Allure of Labor, p. 18. Argentine historiography – including current revisionism – has been reluctant to analyse Peronism in comparative perspective. A clear exception to this is the recent work by Ernesto Semán, Ambassadors of the Working Class: Argentina's International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017).

19 Yet there are still few works specifically on the subject. See María Paula Luciani, ‘La etapa formativa de la Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión (1943–1946): Primeros pasos organizativos y figuras relevantes’, Anuario del Instituto de Historia Argentina, 14 (2014), pp. 1–16. Perón's experience at the STP was crucial to the definition not only of the social programme of his first administrations but also of his comprehensive transformative project of the state's structures. For these, he had valued advisors, such as the Spanish jurist José Figuerola, who had been key to the implementation of social reform in his own country and had migrated to Argentina in 1930. For Figuerola and other ‘second-line’ officials of Peronist administrations see Raanan Rein and Claudio Panella (eds.), La segunda línea: Liderazgo peronista 1945–1955 (Buenos Aires: Eduntref, 2013).

20 Decree no. 28,169, 13 Oct. 1944, ALA, 1944, p. 174.

21 La Nación, 3 Dec. 1943. Emphasis added.

22 Decree no. 28,169.

23 Ibid. Emphasis added.

24 Said norm would be enacted in 1947, with the passing of Law no. 13,020, which regulated the labour of seasonal workers, and completed Peronism's legal edifice vis-à-vis rural labourers. Law no. 13,020, 6 Oct. 1947, ALA, 1947, pp. 354–7.

25 If one multiplies the 37 categories by the 5 contractual conditions under each, and then again by the 16 regions, the result is 2,960 different salary levels.

26 See Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina, 78: 7 (July 1944) and 78: 12 (Dec. 1944); La Nación, editions of 14 Oct., 5, 10, 15, 19, 24, 26, 30 Nov. and 2, 17, 30 Dec. 1944.

27 See, for example, the following reports, all from La Nación: ‘La Federación Agraria formuló observaciones al Estatuto del Peón’, 5 Nov. 1944, p. 5; ‘Corrientes – Una asamblea trató en Mercedes la aplicación del Estatuto del Peón’, 15 Nov. 1944, p. 7; ‘Rosario – La Sociedad de Tamberos ha hecho objeciones al Estatuto del Peón’, 19 Nov. 1944, p. 4; ‘Rosario – Una institución local pidió la modificación del Estatuto del Peón’, 24 Nov. 1944, p. 4; ‘Consideran en una asamblea de tamberos el Estatuto del Peón’, 2 Dec. 1944, p. 6; ‘Santa Fe. Una entidad pide modificaciones al Estatuto del Peón’, 12 March 1945, p. 7. ‘Tamberos’ are dairy producers.

28 ‘Edición dedicada al Estatuto del Peón’. Crónica Mensual de la Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión, 2: 12 (April 1945); Luciano Barandiarián, ‘Posturas divergentes: La revista Hechos e Ideas y los Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina ante el Estatuto del Peón (1944–1947)’, Estudios del ISHiR, 2: 4 (2012), pp. 138–56.

29 Labour courts were created by Decree no. 32,347, 30 Nov. 1944, setting up the labour tribunals of the city of Buenos Aires. From then on – and given the federal character of the application of the labour law, according to the Argentine constitution – each province had to create its own. By 1950, most provinces had done so. See Juan Manuel Palacio, ‘El peronismo y la invención de la justicia del trabajo en la Argentina’, Nuevo Mundo – Mundos Nuevos, Debates, 25 Sept. 2013, on line: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/65765, last access 6 Oct. 2018.

30 Patricia Berrotarán, ‘“Educar al funcionario”: De la frialdad de las leyes a las innovaciones doctrinarias: Argentina 1946–1952’, Nuevo Mundo – Mundos Nuevos, Debates, 16 June 2008, on line: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/index36602.html, last access 6 Oct. 2018.

31 Speech delivered 11 Jan. 1955 at the Casa de Gobierno, to celebrate the 11th anniversary of the STP. Revista de Trabajo y Previsión (hereafter RTP), 2: 24, 2nd series (Jan. 1955), pp. 59–60.

32 As was the case when the province of Buenos Aires was reorganised to create direct delegations in different localities. ‘Resolución de la Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión 406’, 18 Nov. 1944, RTP, 1: 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1944), pp. 1477–8.

33 Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión, Memoria Año 1947, Buenos Aires, 1948, p. 97.

34 Respectively, Decrees nos. 1,740/45, 24 Jan. 1945, ALA, 1945, pp. 48–9 and 33,302/45, 30 Dec. 1945, ALA, 1945, pp. 757–67. The latter doubled the compensation for unfair dismissal specified in earlier legislation, raising it to one month's salary for each year of employment. Together with the Estatuto del Peón and the decree creating labour tribunals, Decree no. 33,302 sealed the economic establishment's opposition to Perón.

35 Law no. 12,921, 17 Aug. 1947, ALA, 1947, pp. 143–69.

36 Decree no. 34,147, 31 Dec. 1949, ALA, 1950, pp. 283–7. In the Argentine legal system, the scope and limits of most laws are established later by the executive in secondary legislation (decretos reglamentarios).

37 Alejandro Unsain, ‘Reglamentación del Estatuto del Peón’, Derecho del Trabajo, 10 (1950), pp. 117–25. The decree consisted of 67 articles, more than twice as many as the original.

38 In its art. 29, the Statute pronounced that its ordinances could be ‘adapted or combined’ in subsequent collective agreements, but only if the conditions established by the Statute were thereby improved. The STP encouraged the signing of these agreements in order to better supervise labour relations and develop the unionisation of workers, and so they increased exponentially with the rise of Peronism. See María Paula Luciani, ‘El Estado peronista frente a las negociaciones colectivas: De las nuevas herramientas institucionales a la legalización de las convenciones colectivas’, Abra, 34: 49 (2014), pp. 1–15.

39 See note 29. For reactions to the creation of the labour tribunals see Juan Manuel Palacio, ‘El grito en el cielo: La polémica gestación de los tribunales del trabajo en la Argentina’, Estudios Sociales, 48 (2015), pp. 59–90.

40 Kennedy, ‘Two Globalizations’, p. 648; Fink and Palacio (eds.), Labor Justice.

41 Perón said: ‘We have organised justice for the workers. It is indispensable that the worker have a special tribunal that defends him from the injustices of the rest’: Juan Perón, Doctrina revolucionaria (Buenos Aires: Freeland, 1974 [1946]), p. 200. See also Palacio, ‘El grito’.

42 Ibid. For the process of the nomination, origins and careers of some of these judges see Juan Manuel Palacio, La justicia peronista, 1943–1955 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2018), chapter 3.

43 Abásolo, Ezequiel, ‘Doctrina partidaria y formulación del derecho en la Argentina peronista’, Temas de Historia Argentina y Americana, 2 (2003), pp. 13–26Google Scholar, on line: http://bibliotecadigital.uca.edu.ar/repositorio/revistas/temas-de-historia02.pdf, last access 7 Oct. 2018. Examples of some of these rulings can be seen in Alejandro Groppo, ‘Discurso político e instituciones: Un estudio bi-dimensional sobre la emergencia del peronismo en Córdoba’, Studia Politicae, 19 (2009–10), pp. 25–48.

44 As suggested by a preliminary exploration of the Olavarría Labour Court records, in Buenos Aires province, one of the few labour court archives that has been preserved in its entirety.

45 In particular, from the transcription of sentences from the labour courts reproduced in the legal journal La Ley between 1949 (the first year of operation of the labour courts in the province) and 1955; and from the trial records of the archive of the Departamento Judicial del Sur (Judicial Department of the South), with offices in Dolores (Buenos Aires province), with jurisdiction over a large rural area. As already stated, the fragmentary character of this corpus (in both cases, they are selections of a much broader universe of trials that we are unable to reconstruct) makes it useless for any quantitative analysis and unrepresentative of any regional or juridical pattern. Just to give an idea of this limitation, between 1950 and 1955 La Ley published 220 decisions handed down by the 20 labour courts of Buenos Aires province. However, according to the statistics published by one provincial source (Poder Judicial de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Departamento de Estadísticas, ‘La estadística en el poder judicial de la provincia de Buenos Aires hasta 1972’, La Plata, Dec. 1991), during those same years the number of trials initiated before those courts numbered 43,360. The Dolores archive, in turn, holds only 115 trial records from those years.

46 ‘Acevedo, Francisco contra Kehoe, Juan’, Derecho del Trabajo, 9 (1949), pp. 266–72. Until the moment of his firing Acevedo was being paid 30 pesos per month, in addition to housing and food, while according to the Statute's tables a person in his category and situation should have been paid 85 pesos; this had been raised 20 per cent (102 pesos plus housing and food) by a decree of April 1948, which revised the amounts in the table.

47 ‘Acevedo, Francisco contra Kehoe, Juan’, p. 272.

48 ‘Uviedo, Germán F. c. La Martona’, 8 June 1948, La Ley, 51 (July–Sept. 1948), pp. 97–8.

49 Decree no. 34,147, art. 57.

50 ‘Larrarte, Don Lorenzo c. Echeverz, Harriet, Orozco y Compañía y otro’, Archivo del Tribunal de Trabajo de Bahía Blanca no. 2, Expediente no. 19, Legajo 1, 1949.

51 The court's ruling resolved that Larrarte had been an administrator of the estancia and sentenced the property owner to pay the compensation in accordance with the salary of that category of worker. Nevertheless, the cause was appealed before the Supreme Court of Justice of Buenos Aires province, which revoked the sentence citing an incorrect interpretation of the law on the part of the labour tribunal. See ‘Larrarte, Don Lorenzo c. Echeverz, Harriet, Orozco y Compañía y otro’, fojas 16–24 and 46–50.

52 According to the 1937 Agricultural Census there were 286,468 permanent workers and 520,619 seasonal workers in the country.

53 ‘Mancicler, Juan C. y otros c. D'Attellis, José’, 13 Dec. 1950, La Ley, 62 (April–June 1951), pp. 125–9.

54 Cámara 2a en lo Civil y Comercial de Santa Fe, 9 June 1950, ‘Cornoldi, Felipe c. Boero, Juan B.’, La Ley, 62 (April–June 1951), pp. 142–3.

55 Ibid., p. 143. The Supreme Court of the province of Buenos Aires used the same criterion in another case the same year, which ruled in favour of a dairy industry worker whose company denied him the status of rural peon. According to the court's ruling, the correct criterion to determine if a worker was or was not rural should be ‘ecológico’ (sic; e.g. the place in which the labour is conducted, the countryside) and not ‘jurídico absoluto’ (the nature of the work). See Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, ‘Vega, Domingo c. The Albion Land Co. (S.A.)’, La Ley, 62 (April–June 1951), pp. 263–6.

56 Cámara Federal de Bahía Blanca, ‘Oquendo, Vicente, c. Clement, José E.’, La Ley, 62 (April–June 1951), pp. 139–41.

57 ‘Frascarelli de Risso, Lucía c. Grondona y Casares, Hersilia M. L.’, La Ley, 70 (April–June 1953), pp. 90–4.

58 Given the state of the judicial archive referred to above, it is hard to prove this quantitatively. Nevertheless, an exercise with the labour courts’ sentences in Buenos Aires province reproduced in La Ley in 1950 shows that, out of 52 decisions, 31 (60 per cent) favoured workers. This proportion is higher if we select only the rural cases (those related to the Estatuto del Peón): in another exercise, this time with the labour court of Olavarría during 1952, out of 25 cases related to the Statute only one was decided in favour of the employer.

59 This strong bias on the part of both the STP officials and the labour judges did not change through time, not even in the years known in Argentine historiography as the ‘return to the land’ – those of the early 1950s, when Perón took a different stand towards the agricultural sector, with more favourable macroeconomic measures (such as lower export taxes). According to my own work, such a ‘turn’ had no effect on everyday policies at a micro level, nor affected the decisions of the judges, which speaks to the relative autonomy of their decisions from what was decided at the highest levels of the executive authority. See Palacio, Juan Manuel, ‘De la paz a la discordia: El peronismo y la experiencia del Estado en la provincia de Buenos Aires, 1943–1955’, Desarrollo Económico, 49: 194 (2009), pp. 221–46Google Scholar.

60 Abrogated by the last military dictatorship in 1980, the Statute was reinstated (in an updated version) as Law no. 26,727 in 2011.

61 Paradoxical as it may seem, much of the social legislation in Latin America was passed during exceptional regimes, such as the Estado Novo in Brazil or the revolutionary governments in México. I have reflected upon this in Palacio, Juan Manuel, ‘Legislación y justicia laboral en el “populismo clásico” latinoamericano: Elementos para la construcción de una agenda de investigación comparada’, Mundos do Trabalho, 3: 5 (2011), pp. 245–65Google Scholar, on line: http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/mundosdotrabalho/article/view/20132/19166, last access 7 Oct. 2018.