The ‘Estatuto del Peón’ (peons’ statute) is perhaps the most emblematic measure of the ‘first Peronism’.Footnote 1 Conceived in 1944 by units within the recently established Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión (Secretariat of Labour and Social Welfare, STP), which was headed by then Colonel Perón, the decree regulated, for the first time and in an integral and detailed way, the work of the rural labourers (peones) of the Argentine estates. From the time of its enactment, the measure became etched in the collective memory of the country as an identifying marker of Perón's policies.
There are a number of factors that explain the Statute's reputation. First, the law filled a substantial gap in legislation – a notorious and entrenched one, critiqued by diverse sectors since the beginning of the twentieth century. The mere approval of the decree signified a fundamental recalibration of rights for rural workers in Argentina. Second, what was distinctive (and truly unprecedented) about this law was Perón's tenacity in enforcing it. This resolve made the Statute a shock to the social and economic ecology of rural Argentina, and the beginning of the end of the ‘peace’ that had previously prevailed in that environment.Footnote 2 The state, through the law, as well as through the institutions and bureaucratic actors charged with its implementation, interposed itself as a third party in labour relations that had until then been almost exclusively handled out of sight, in the estancias.Footnote 3 Third, the launching of the Statute had considerable political repercussions, sizeable enough to provoke (if not directly catalyse) the strong polarisation that already existed between Peronists and anti-Peronists by the year 1945. News of the legislation generated tremendous controversy among the public and in the media: here the social and political establishment of the country ended their honeymoon period with the military government and began to make their critiques of the regime and, in particular, of Perón, more audible.
A decisive chapter in the history of workers, an inescapable reference point for the Argentine juridical tradition, an indelible watermark on the political imaginary of the country, the Estatuto del Peón still awaits its rightful place in the historiography. Indeed, historians have not yet delved into the law specifically, but reference it only in passing. Their indifference might be attributed to various reasons, one being the opacity of rural labour relations, both before and after the first Peronist period. Facing a scarcity of sources, Argentine historians embraced more attractive subjects. Those interested in labour focused disproportionately on urban environments and industrial workers – and among these, specifically, unionised workers – to the detriment of rural environments.
This is only now beginning to change, with the recent renewal of studies on the first or ‘classic’ Peronism. With a profoundly revisionist stance and an insatiable appetite for new perspectives and approaches, this recent historiography refuses to consider ‘Peronism’ as a coherent, univocal phenomenon. It has therefore dissected it into different and hitherto poorly-studied areas, such as health, education and housing policy, the make-up and workings of the new state bureaucracy and the roles of women within the state and the Party, and it has placed a marked emphasis on its cultural dimensions.Footnote 4 One key contribution to the dismantling of the Peronist construct came from regional history. Through different case studies at the provincial and local levels, this literature managed to effectively ‘decentre’ the history of the first Peronism. However, these regional analyses still continue to focus mostly on urban rather than rural areas of the provinces.Footnote 5
This article will begin to fill this lacuna. One of its central purposes is to try to weigh the importance of this renowned 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. To that end, the first section will use secondary sources to illustrate the state of rural Argentine workers on the eve of the Statute's approval. The second section will analyse in detail how the decree was conceived and the novelties it brought in terms of rights and regulations for rural workers. The third section will use trial records to explore the implementation of the Statute and its concrete effects, both in terms of working conditions and the juridical protections offered to rural peons. Trial records offer exceptional documentation for investigating these processes, as Latin American rural historiography and my own work have already demonstrated.Footnote 6 In these records, we hear from workers directly: they describe their daily life, the composition of their families, the terms of their labour contracts, their working conditions, as well as conflicts with their employers. The documents also reflect quite eloquently the problems that arose in the everyday process of interpreting and implementing the law in the labour courts, and throw light on the workers’ procedural skills and their knowledge and use of the law.
The State of Rural Labour Prior to 1944
One of the reasons for the powerful presence of the Estatuto del Peón in Argentina's collective memory is the discourse that Perón employed to accompany its formulation emphasising the dire situation of rural workers, a discourse reproduced later by the historiography. It is that contrast – between the previous deplorable conditions (semi-servile workers who earned dismal salaries, laboured at the mercy of abusive bosses and contractors, and faced nearly absolute indifference from the government) and the far more favourable conditions inaugurated by the Statute (decent salaries and working conditions, a sensitive and vigilant state that would mediate relations after years of injustice) – that gave the decree its foundational aura.
Yet, beyond this broad-brush depiction, what were the real labour conditions experienced by rural workers in Argentina on the eve of the Estatuto del Peón? This question, although critical to assessing the concrete changes brought about by the Statute, is a challenging one to answer given the existing state of research. We have considerable information about seasonal workers, who were better organised and had a strong tradition of collective action during the twentieth century.Footnote 7 By contrast, monthly rural labourers, who worked on estancias on a permanent basis and were the target of the Statute, have remained out of historians’ purview. Additionally, the wide diversity of rural workers makes it difficult to generalise: from peons who worked with livestock on the estancias of the pampas or Patagonia, to harvest labourers in the cane fields of Tucumán or Jujuy, lumberjacks in the timber industry of the Chaco, and labourers who worked the yerba fields of Misiones, or the tobacco plantations in Salta.
As a result, we know little more today about the labour conditions on rural estates than what can be gathered from century-old testimonies, such as the Bialet Massé report – perhaps the most complete account of the state of labour relations in Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 8 The text offers a rather sombre depiction of rural Argentina, in which archaic working conditions prevailed: low wages, payment in kind or through vouchers, unscrupulous labourer recruiters (conchabadores), debt peonage, extremely precarious labour, living, and dietary standards, and local authorities’ complicity with abusive landowners and merchants – in other words, a total absence of legal protection or state regulation. Although characteristic of other gloomy contemporary writings found elsewhere in Latin America,Footnote 9 and marred by inaccuracies and exaggerations illuminated by the historiography of the 1970s,Footnote 10 the precision of many of Bialet's observations is nonetheless surprising. For example, an edited volume published in 2004, printed in honour of the report's centennial, confirms the value of his descriptions. Daniel Campi notes that several of the text's observations about sugar workers were accurate, including its descriptions of a 12-hour work day without Sunday rest, the institution of the vale (voucher) whereby workers were paid in credit at the mill's store (an additional measure of economic exploitation), the deceptive practices of the conchabador, as well as a fraudulent weighing scam by which the mill short-changed labourers and the treasury.Footnote 11 Another text in the same 2004 volume confirms that Bialet's 1904 description ‘had, at least, some four decades of relevance’.Footnote 12 When it came to the Pampas region, Argentina's more modern and most developed rural labour market, the report was more positive. There, only isolation, poor living and dietary conditions, and the lack of written labour contracts characterised the precariousness of rural work, but here Bialet did not find servile labour or ruthless labour recruiters.
To take a closer look at the years just before the rise of Peronism, we can make use of the observations of another traveller who visited Argentina between 1942 and 1943 and whose perception of the country's rural living conditions was far more benevolent: US sociologist Carl Taylor, whose book Rural Life in Argentina has become an invaluable source for researchers of Argentina's agrarian history. Ironically, however, this student of ‘rural life in Argentina’ was practically mute on the subject of the permanent labourers who worked on rural establishments. Concentrating almost exclusively on, in his words, ‘family farms’, peons are not an object of study, and when he does dedicate a few lines to these workers, he does not offer much detail beyond noting a few labourers that he observed directly, or providing caricature-like descriptions gathered second-hand.Footnote 13
Regardless of the gaps in our knowledge, we can confirm the lack of legal protection afforded to permanent estancia workers until the middle of the twentieth century. Whatever disagreements remain over the application of the few labour laws or the existence of state regulation (e.g. that by labour departments, created during the first half of the twentieth century), there is no doubt that by 1944 labour relations in Argentina's agriculture sector were much more at the whim of private agreements within rural establishments than under the control of the few norms and regulations that could be found on the books. The isolation of rural areas, the absence of state offices of control (whether out of apathy, incapacity or strategic acquiescence), and a lack of organisation by workers themselves presumably explains this state of affairs.
In effect, the existing labour legislation when Perón arrived in power did not extend to rural areas, and what little that did was often not applied due to the determined opposition of landowners and employers.Footnote 14 These groups invoked the liberal credo of the governing elites, and claimed that the sui generis nature of work and life in the countryside made it impossible for the state to regulate in the way it might in a factory or office. This discourse and consensus, which was commonplace in various milieux, effectively blocked proposals to regulate rural work in national and provincial congresses during the decades prior to the rise of Peronism.Footnote 15 To sum up, by 1944 the rural workers of the Argentine estates almost completely lacked juridical protection for or state supervision over most components of their labour contract (salaries, hours worked, living, sanitary or dietary conditions). For that reason they were subject to the conditions, always arbitrary or unpredictable, that were established by ‘local customs’ – customs that had been shaped by paternalistic practices over the long term. In this scenario, it is not difficult to imagine the drastic turn in labour relations in the Argentine countryside that the Estatuto del Peón represented. The remainder of this article will be dedicated to analysing this change.
The Statute: Origins and Characteristics
The history of the Estatuto del Peón is inseparable from that of the STP, an institution created by Colonel Perón out of the earlier Departamento Nacional de Trabajo (Department of Labour), as designated by the military government that arose from the June Revolution.Footnote 16 The legal advisors to the STP conceived and authored the Statute, inspired by the dominant climate of ideas about social legislation in the world at that time, and grounded in international law and the recent recommendations of the International Labor Organization (ILO).Footnote 17 Indeed, by mid-twentieth century, social legislation and labour regulation by the state were already a fact of life in the Western world. During the first decades of that century, most European and American countries passed protective labour laws, created state regulatory agencies, drafted labour codes, established specialised courts to enforce the new labour laws, and some even produced social constitutional reforms. In this sense, Peronist labour policies were both a product and active agents of this truly transnational ‘labour turn’.Footnote 18
The transformation of the Department into a Secretariat in November of 1943 was not merely a change in name. It was, in fact, an attempt to enhance state intervention through a centralised and expanded office, with increased personnel, budget and functions, and the clear aim of changing the quality of intervention. Here, Perón planned his ambitious programme of social intervention and built his political career, first within the military government and, later, at the national level.Footnote 19
First, the Secretariat absorbed all of the departments and offices of labour that existed in the provinces; these became ‘regional agencies’ (delegaciones regionales) of the STP, as did other state entities related to social policy dispersed across various public offices. The Secretariat took up supervision and regulation of the labour laws across the nation, with the capacity to undertake inspections, receive complaints, fine infractions, keep records, etc. It also possessed the power to issue standards (for example regarding minimum salaries), establish norms and provide information and assistance (union, legal, procedural) from its offices in its ‘intense outreach’ efforts (as one of the recitals of the decree put it) to instil doctrinal and political consciousness among the workers.Footnote 20 The Secretariat also aimed to pursue any and all of the labour conflicts that took place across the nation, through a centralised system of mediation and arbitration between employers and labourers.
The STP was thus created with both a mission and a degree of mystique: a commitment to radically changing the situation of workers in the country coloured its discourse from the very start. The words of Perón on the day he took over the Secretariat are well known, but they are worth repeating here, as his rhetoric presaged his actions:
The state kept itself at a distance from the labouring population. It did not regulate social activities as was its responsibility […] With the creation of the Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión the era of social policy begins in Argentina. The era of instability and disorder in which relations between bosses and labourers were mired will be forever in the past […] the workers, for their part, will have the guarantee that the labour norms that are instituted, establishing the rights and responsibilities of each party, will henceforth be implemented by the labour authorities with the greatest zeal and that failure to comply will be severely punished.Footnote 21
To offer clear evidence of the sincerity of Perón's proposals, the Secretariat worked feverishly from the very first weeks of its creation: it developed an ambitiously complex bureaucratic structure, put regional delegations into action, conducted inspections and celebrated collective agreements at a furious pace. The Secretariat also produced several significant pieces of legislation with the aim of generating a quick and forceful effect. Among these, the Estatuto del Peón is without a doubt the most significant.
The Statute
On 13 October 1944, President Edelmiro Farrell signed Decree no. 28,169, which approved ‘the Estatuto del Peón proposed by the Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión’.Footnote 22 The decree emphasised the foundational nature of the rights granted by the legislation to remedy the situation in which labourers found themselves:
… the same weighty responsibility applies to the government, rural entities and employers, that, in contrast to the advance of modern machinery and methods of exploitation, have held back the conditions of the rural labourer, permitting the coexistence of a nearly medieval system of labour, in contradiction with the progress of technology […] The current government must assume the representation of this part of the population of the country which until now has not been considered and has been disregarded, so that they are taken notice of, so that they will be respected.Footnote 23
The Statute's 29 articles established minimum wages for an exhaustive list of rural jobs, as well as detailed prescriptions on working, sanitary, dietary and housing conditions for rural establishments. The decree applied to all permanent workers, and defined these in the widest of terms, as those engaged in work that ‘took place in rural environments, mountains, forests or rivers’ (art. 1). Seasonal labourers were explicitly left outside its scope, to be addressed in separate legislation.Footnote 24
In terms of salaries, the Statute proposed establishing minimum wages for all rural activities in every region in the country. Revealing the STP's grand ambitions for regulating rural labour relations, the authors of the decree prepared 16 annexes with tables – one for each province or region – which established minimum wages (both by month and by day) for 37 categories of workers, from fence-makers to mule drivers, from couriers to farmhands, from sheep herders to ‘recorredores’ (ranch riders). Each occupation was then subdivided into five contractual conditions (‘with housing and meals’, ‘with neither housing nor meals’, ‘with housing but without meals’, ‘with meals but not housing’ and ‘with housing for family and grounds’). Accounting for the largest possible number of rural activities across the nation, these tables effectively rebutted the argument made by landowners’ spokesmen to the effect that it would be impossible to implement labour regulation across so wide a variety of regions and labour conditions.
The tables did not merely cover the most typical jobs of certain regions (like ‘rice farmer’, ‘lumberjack’, ‘dairy farmer’ or ‘flower grower’) but, in establishing minimal differential salaries, took into account differences between regions (e.g. 80 pesos per month for a fence-maker with housing and meals provided in the province of Tucumán, versus 60 in the province of Formosa; 70 pesos per month for a farmhand with housing and food provided in Entre Ríos as compared to 110 for the same job in Tierra del Fuego).Footnote 25 The decree established that the STP reserved the right to ‘update, modify, add, eliminate or merge the rubrics and figures contained in the tables’ (art. 7). This right would prove particularly useful when it became necessary to update the minimum wage tables in order to adjust them in line with inflation, as occurred periodically during the Peronist years.
In addition to the regulation of wages, the Statute established minimal conditions for hygiene, diet and housing. Regarding the two former, recommendations were rather vague and open to interpretation: meals provided should be ‘abundant’ and served under conditions with ‘adequate hygiene’, and workers should be provided with ‘adequate clothing and shoes that protect against rain and mud’. By contrast, the statements on housing were extremely detailed: according to art. 11, lodging ‘should satisfy minimal conditions of warmth, air ventilation, natural light and a space equivalent to 15 cubic metres per person; [living quarters] should also include individual furniture for rest and be sufficiently equipped for personal hygiene’. The designated eating ‘or recreational’ space should have tables, chairs and utensils for each worker and ‘the light of said locale should be adequate for reading and remain on for an hour after the end of dinner’ (art. 13). In cases where a worker's contract included the provision of housing for his family (those included in the fifth column of the wages table), the decree established, on the one hand, that their lodging must possess ‘a sufficient number of rooms so as to separate the older children by sex’, and, on the other, that the employer must supply them, additionally and compulsorily, with ‘a parcel of land with a minimal extent of half a hectare, or three hundred metres squared if it is irrigated land, appropriately fenced, such that it can serve as a kitchen garden, [or] for the raising of poultry, the fattening of pigs and for dairy produce’ (art. 14).
The Statute demonstrated the same zeal for detail when addressing rest time during the working week – another subject with respect to which the landowning classes had alleged that the particular rhythm of agriculture did not permit regulation. Thus, the rule, while specifically stating that it would ‘not alter the customary working day’, established the following mandatory breaks: 30 minutes during the morning, for breakfast, one hour for lunch between the months of May and November (and three and a half in the summer from December to April), with thirty minutes for ‘a light meal in the afternoon’ (art. 8). At the same time, it declared Sunday rest compulsory (art. 9).
The Statute also established that employers were required to provide ‘medical and pharmaceutical assistance to their workers, in addition to [their] salary’, a measure that, taken together with the established minimum wages, directly raised labour costs for rural estates. To meet this obligation, employers could make use of ‘professional entities, insurance, or […] any other means that, in the opinion of the enforcing authority, ensures that the required social services be effectively [provided]’ (art. 20).
Finally, the Statute gave rural workers the same legal status as industrial workers in two different areas: paid holidays and job security, or protection against unfair dismissal. For the first, art. 22 established that workers with at least a year's continuous service had the right to eight concurrent days of paid holiday. In regard to the second, the Statute established that peons could not be fired without just cause (art. 23), and if his employment were terminated without justification, the worker had the right to compensation amounting to half a month's salary for each year of service.
No less important were the procedures established for dispute resolution under the Statute. Article 25 established that a conflict arising from the new rules would first be subject to ‘one instance of preliminary conciliation procedure before the enforcing authority’. Only if that level of mediation proved unsuccessful could the case enter the court system. This possibility aside, the Statute provided concrete penalties for employers who did not comply with the provisions. It established fines ‘from ten to 5,000 pesos for each person affected by an infraction, or otherwise, detention for from one day to six months, which will be set reasonably, in accordance with the amount of the penalty owed’ (art. 26). The authority charged with the task of applying the Statute was the STP, ‘of itself or via its regional agencies’, offices that were ‘well equipped to research the facts’ and were able to carry out ‘all investigations considered appropriate in places of work, administrative centres, [and on] books and papers, […] and [which] could make appear those persons implicated in the investigation’ (art. 28).
The Implementation of the Statute
It is easy to imagine the kind of commotion that such a stark change in state interference in labour relations caused to employers in rural Argentina. The number of aspects of labour life that the Statute intended to regulate, on top of the minutiae of its efforts to follow them through, revealed, at least on paper, a marked contrast with the free hand employers possessed previously.
In the days following its approval, newspapers across the country echoed news of the decree. Opposition quickly grew within agricultural and estanciero associations. Among the most vocal reactions were those that came from the Sociedad Rural Argentina (Argentine Rural Society, SRA) and, in particular, the diverse organisations that centred on small and medium-sized farms – like the Federación Agraria Argentina (Argentine Agrarian Federation, FAA) – which were presumably the most affected by the Statute.Footnote 26 Indeed, the rise in the cost of labour resulting from the Statute (higher salaries, medical insurance) and, even more so, the requirements for living quarters and sanitary facilities, which required investment, implied proportionately higher costs for smaller producers than for large estate owners, whose scale of production permitted them to better absorb them. That is why, in the weeks immediately following its approval, the FAA, along with a number of small and medium-sized farmers’ associations, petitioned the national government against different provisions of the new decree.Footnote 27 Perón, for his part, took advantage of these showings of disapproval to rail against this sector of the ‘oligarchy’ as hostile to the labouring class. Thus, in addition to delivering heated speeches, he looked for support within workers’ organisations and among academics and experts. The STP dedicated a special, 300-page edition of its periodical, Crónica Mensual, to the Statute. The issue defended the ruling as necessary by including supportive contributions from a range of specialists (agronomists, economists, jurists), hundreds of workers’ organisations and a comparable number of favourable journalistic articles reprinted from local, provincial and national papers.Footnote 28
However, a compelling question remains: were employers’ fears justified? Would the Statute be enforced? To what extent? And why not assume that this law would suffer the same fate as many of the labour laws that came before it – laws that, once passed, faded into irrelevance? These questions, which certainly unsettled the estancia owners then, continue to intrigue historians today.
It is surprisingly difficult to answer these questions given the state of current historical research. A reliable evaluation of the Statute's implementation would require a collective research effort in rural districts spread across the country to access previously-unused sources. As a starting point, scholars might begin with two specific sets of sources: the records of the main enforcement authority (the STP) and those of the labour courts, a new branch of the judiciary created in various provinces during the 1940s, and to which the workers appealed with greater frequency as the years went by.Footnote 29 These sources are as invaluable as they are problematic, however. For a start, judicial archives in Argentina are very fragmentary and incomplete, even when accessible to the historian. This, combined with legislation that requires destruction of documents when they are no longer of judicial interest, makes it impossible to acquire complete series. Furthermore, the original records of the STP regional offices are untraceable, which suggests a systematic destruction of documents following the fall of Perón in 1955. As a result, we can acquire only qualitative images and impressions of how workers used the judicial system, and any records of the proceedings of the STP that we do come across are indirect or fragmentary (e.g. references to the conciliatory proceedings before the regional delegations made in the labour courts, or, if one is fortunate enough, a copy of one of those proceedings that survived attached to a court record).
These limitations notwithstanding, a few things become apparent the moment one enters these archives. The first is that some of the central points of the Estatuto del Peón met with a high rate of compliance (e.g. wages, compensation for dismissal) from the very first years of implementation, while others (e.g. requirements for housing or sanitary facilities in workers’ living spaces) clearly needed more time to be put into practice. Second, enforcement of the decree did not happen overnight; it was a long process, with advances and setbacks, in which many of the provisions of the Statute were altered over time. Finally, the success of the Statute's implementation was determined by two decisive and concurrent factors: the state's determination to enforce the law, despite the obstacles posed by employers’ opposition and the sheer vastness of the territory that the Statute sought to regulate; and the active support of rural workers themselves, via labour organisations and, especially, through the demands they filed regularly with the authorities in charge of implementation, as well as in the courts.
‘A Friendly State’: The STP and its Regional Delegations
Implementation of the Statute had much to do with the Peronist state's positive and vigorous attitude to the decree, channelled via the STP. This reflected two of Perón's central concerns: the efficiency of the state's management systems to gather exhaustive information and place it in the hands of trained functionaries with a belief in the Secretariat's fight for social justice;Footnote 30 and centralisation of decision-making, to avoid having to work through intermediaries over whom Perón could not exert close control. The key to achieving these objectives was the wide network of regional agencies and local sub-agencies (subdelegaciones) deployed throughout the country, which worked both as a source of information and as an executive arm of Peron's policies, and bolstered his aim of making the state ‘friendly’ to workers. In his words:
The agencies that were simultaneously created across the country […] acted like a true nervous system to bring, from the periphery to the centre, the perceptions that they gathered, and to carry out action, from the centre to the periphery.Footnote 31
While these agencies were built on the foundation of the old provincial labour departments, the Secretariat's empowering decree gave them a new character. Soon after the new Secretariat took up its role, the offices were rapidly transformed and broadened in scope. The STP took over the old departments (now, delegaciones) so as to modify their activities or install personnel that concurred with its objectives, and increased the number of agencies and sub-agencies across the national territory. In many cases, this meant creating new jurisdictions or reorganising pre-existing ones, thus re-drawing the administrative map.Footnote 32 According to STP records, in the year 1947 the office had 33 regional offices and a ‘wide network of subdelegaciones and inspectors, many of which could be found under the control of municipal authorities, police and the border patrol, which collaborated with this Secretariat until it possessed its own resources’.Footnote 33
The early deployment of this network of agencies was decisive for peons, who were generally not unionised and were isolated from one another on estancias. The installation of regional offices of the STP was crucial, if for nothing more than the dissuasive effect that they might have on nearby estates that were looking to evade the law. Equally important were the roles that these agencies played in prosecuting workers’ complaints and legal demands, as well as the free legal counselling and representation they offered. As will be seen in the following section, all of the complaints that were prosecuted in the labour courts were brought forward through the STP's branch offices; it is quite probable that they ended up in the justice system precisely because of the assistance and support received at these offices.
Together with the creation of a wide network of regional agencies, the Secretariat's legal department issued decrees and launched multiple labour-related legal projects. Because aspects of the Statute proved vague or inaccurate in the original version, the STP periodically re-wrote specific clauses in order to better define the provisions of the original decree, making corrections to resolve problems that arose in practice. It also wrote new legislation that even further improved the situation of rural workers, including the recognition of the right to paid holidays and the highly significant decree that established a minimum living wage (salario mínimo vital), the aguinaldo (annual bonus or 13th-month salary), and new levels of compensation for unfair dismissal.Footnote 34 The legal department of the STP wrote the draft of Law no. 12,921, which ratified all of the decrees approved during the military government with regard to labour matters (including the Estatuto del Peón), confirming their legitimacy in the face of questions from the opposition.Footnote 35
But the Secretariat's most important decree in relation to rural labour was that which established ‘rules and regulations’ for the Statute in the year 1949.Footnote 36 The new decree broadened several edicts considerably, including those that referred to medical assistance, breach of contract and compensation for dismissal, establishing specific instructions for the method of payment of wages and adding a new requirement: company bookkeeping, which would prove decisive when it became necessary to prove, in court, the existence of a contractual relationship or the employer's compliance with the Statute's salary tables.Footnote 37 Many of these clarifying edicts met with difficulties in implementation during the first five years; they also suffered the superimposition or contradiction of other rulings and, as we will see, conflicting interpretations that came to light in the labour courts.
Awakening Consciousness: Everyday Activism of Rural Workers
In addition to the measures that the ‘friendly state’ took to implement the Statute (and its eagerness to publicise the benefits that Peronism had brought to rural labourers), workers themselves helped ensure the Statute's success. In some cases, particularly where there was some degree of organisation, actions were taken in the form of strikes and collective bargaining, in order to demand compliance with the new wages standards and working conditions established by the Statute.Footnote 38 In the rest of the rural sector, however, the vast majority of workers continued to labour in the isolation of estancias and activism was expressed in a far more silent and invisible form: through the claims and reports they filed before the STP regional delegations, many of which ended up in court. Although discreet, these kinds of actions were nonetheless very effective and gave the Statute resilience: they led to adaptations and corrections which, over the years, shaped and strengthened the Statute in the courts.
In these efforts, the workers counted on another invaluable ally: the labour courts, a new branch of the judiciary that was created by STP decree, the same year the Statute was passed and in the middle of another significant political and media firestorm.Footnote 39 These tribunals were born in a climate of ideas across Latin America favourable to social legislation and regulation in the world of work, and, in this sense, they were another materialisation of the ‘transnational legal consciousness’ of the social, as Duncan Kennedy nicely put it.Footnote 40 However, their 1944 creation included fiery rhetoric that condemned the arbitrariness of the existing ‘oligarchic’ judicial system and generated powerful opposition, not only from businessmen and landowners, but also from the judicial establishment.Footnote 41 These all identified the labour tribunals, as well as the first labour judges, with nascent Peronism. Indeed, the first labour judges in the country had been appointed by decree in the midst of a heated controversy around their professional capacities.Footnote 42 Moreover, the interventions that the labour courts made during their early years appeared to confirm those suspicions, as rulings clearly favoured the workers, sometimes explicitly supporting Peronist social policy.Footnote 43
Nonetheless, it is not possible to determine to what degree and with what frequency workers either made their complaints known to the STP or initiated lawsuits before the courts, given the limitations of the judicial archive referred to above. Moreover, if one could make any assumption it is that these kinds of complaints were neither easy nor frequent. In effect, it is not hard to imagine what it would mean for a monthly labourer to report his employer for not complying with the Estatuto del Peón at the local STP office when, afterwards, he would have to return to his place of work, which doubled as his home, and where he probably lived with his family. This would be even more challenging when it came to long-term employees who, given the particularities of rural work, required a degree of coexistence with the landlord: work life in the countryside normally entailed emotional bonds.
However, fortunately for the historian, one particular circumstance brought workers before the courts and generated substantial archival evidence: when they were dismissed. In effect, once a worker had been fired there was nothing that might keep him from suing his former employer. When the deed was done and the worker was dismissed, when he had lost everything, there was only his compensation, guaranteed by the Statute, left to him. It was for this reason, that, at least during the Statute's first years of application, these claims were the most commonly adjudicated by the STP delegations and in the new labour justice system.Footnote 44 Beyond their benefits for the workers, the trials resulting from these claims and lawsuits offer an invaluable vantage point from which to study the Statute's implementation during its first years, and to examine the degree of compliance among rural employers. In what follows, we analyse some of these testimonies, unearthed from a selection of judicial sources mostly from Buenos Aires province.Footnote 45
First and foremost, they reveal that, of all the aspects of rural life regulated by the Estatuto del Peón, the minimum wage provisions were enforced to impose compliance on landowners, if not immediately, then shortly after the Statute came into effect. Two trials in 1948 clearly demonstrate this.
In 1948, in the province of Buenos Aires, labourer Francisco Acevedo sued landowner Juan Kehoe after being fired without apparent cause following several years of service. In the trial, it was revealed that the estancia owner had never complied with the Statute's minimum wage requirements and had continued to pay Acevedo the same salary he had been paid before the decree's approval up until the date he was fired, nearly four years later. In a unanimous ruling, the Labour Court of the city of San Nicolás sentenced the employer to pay all outstanding wages as stipulated by the Statute, from the date the decree was passed in October 1944, and including all salary adjustments since that date.Footnote 46 Moreover, the court also required him to comply with the other provisions of the Statute which he had ignored, including a retrospective payment of the aguinaldo since 1944, and the compensation for unfair dismissal, as stipulated by Decree no. 33,302 of 1945. For each of these measures (outstanding wages for four years, unpaid aguinaldos, compensation for dismissal and unpaid wages for the months before his firing) Kehoe was forced to pay 4,661.91 pesos.Footnote 47
In another case, the worker Germán Uviedo sued his former boss, the ‘La Martona’ dairy company, which, he alleged, complied with the minimum salaries laid out in the Statute but had not paid him the ‘double’ compensation (one month's salary per working year, rather than the earlier half month) owed for unfair dismissal; the Labour Court of Appeals of the city of Buenos Aires (Cámara de Apelaciones del Trabajo de Buenos Aires) ruled in the worker's favour on appeal, obliging the company to pay him 4,337 pesos plus interest for his 12 years of uninterrupted labour as a dairy farmer in one of the company's rural farms from 1933 to 1946.Footnote 48
These initial trials reveal, first, that, during the early years of the Statute's application, there were employers who complied with the new minimum wages, as well as some who opted to ignore them. It is not difficult to imagine why: as shown in the Acevedo case, salaries offered by the estancias before the Statute came into effect were often a third of what it required. Second, the cases suggest that those who chose not to comply probably found such a strategy to be short-lived. In effect, if there was a place that made the salary tables’ application inevitable, it was the courts, where judges would have to follow the letter of the law. There, employers would encounter a barrier to their efforts to evade the law: they could continue to pay lower wages, hiding out in the secrecy of labour relations within their estancia, and confident that the threat of being fired might silence their workers’ protest, but this tactic would not make it through the courts, where, once the situation met the light of day, the law was invariably upheld. It was also likely that a succession of these kinds of judgments eventually compelled employers to realise that it was better to comply with the law than not, as the consequences of going to court could be quite costly, particularly if a dismissed employee had worked for them for a number of years, as had been the case with Acevedo and Uviedo. Moreover, these trials not only made offenders visible to the local authorities, but also to other workers on the estancia, who would inevitably take note of their peers’ success in court.
The revisions that Congress made to the Statute in 1949 were probably formulated in response to the rising number of trials like these. This appears to be the case for at least one change in particular: a new directive that instructed estancias to keep a record book of ‘salaries and daily wages’, with all of the pages numbered and ‘without amendments or erasures’. They were required to have their books certified by the local STP office, where they also had to register each labourer's salary or wage and that labourer's daily attendance at the place of work.Footnote 49 This ruling obliged employers to make the terms of their workers’ employment comply with the law; infractions thus became more open to scrutiny. As a result, in most trials after 1949 employers complied with the wages stipulated in the Statute.
Trials for compensation for unfair dismissal also help reveal other conflicts related to the Statute. One of these was regarding the definition of kinds of rural labour outlined in the decree. As noted above, the Statute's minimum salary tables included a detailed list of the different types of jobs carried out by rural workers across the country and of the skills required for these jobs; it was an exhaustive and precise classification of labour. The intention was to organise and make visible the various jobs that rural workers engaged in, with the ultimate aim of establishing fair pay for each labourer's work. However, this effort at neat classification diverged from the more complicated realities of rural labour, where it was common for a single worker to perform a number of tasks at once.
Disputes over the definitions of the various kinds of rural labour outlined in the Statute became commonplace. Such was the case when labourer Lorenzo Larrarte sued his boss, Manuel Harriet, for compensation for dismissal after being fired from the ‘Los Angelitos’ farm in Pedro Luro, province of Buenos Aires, after 17 years of working there.Footnote 50 The trial was held at the Labour Court of the city of Bahía Blanca in May 1949. Beyond establishing whether he had been fired with just cause (or if he had been fired at all, because his employer also disputed this), a good part of the trial was dedicated to the question of whether Larrarte had been a simple ‘peón’, a ranch outpost foreman (‘puestero’), or the estancia’s ‘administrator’, as the worker argued he was. This controversy consumed a large portion of the hearing; several witnesses gave testimony, including other labourers who worked at the estancia, merchants, commission agents in the area, employees of the estancia’s administrative office, and even the manager of the local branch of the Argentine National Bank. Evidence presented included bank transfers and cheques, signed by Larrarte, from the estate's bank account, as well as receipts (e.g. for livestock or for seed) or workers’ contracts that he had signed – in sum, papers that could have been signed only by an administrator, never by an ordinary worker.
As Larrarte's salary – and consequently the amount of compensation he would receive for his dismissal – depended on resolving the issue of the categorisation of his labour, the issue would have serious financial repercussions, and this was even more so the case given his long history of employment at the estate.Footnote 51 Yet, at the same time, the conflict revealed another problem: despite the fact that the Statute had tried to establish an exhaustive classification of rural tasks, with clear boundaries between them, these boundaries, in practice, were quite blurred. Thus, beyond the strategies being deployed by either side, these disputes signalled real problems in the Statute's application, which provided the judges with a wide margin of interpretation.
Another typical point of contention in trials related to the Statute was establishing whether workers were permanent or temporary labourers. As previously noted, the Statute regulated only the former, leaving it to other rulings and norms to regulate the far more numerous group of temporary workers.Footnote 52 Nonetheless, as was the case with the Statute's labour categories, the definition of ‘permanent’ status was far less clear in the everyday reality of rural Argentina than it was in the letter of the law. For that reason, it was not long before the issue became central to legal disputes between workers, who fought to be considered permanent and thus covered by the Statute, and employers, who insisted to the contrary. Such was the case for the workers who harvested and packaged sweet potatoes for the San Pedro farmer, José D'Attellis. In 1950, this group of labourers demanded compensation for dismissal in accordance with the Statute and Decree no. 33,302.Footnote 53 They alleged that they had worked as part of a permanent crew (cuadrilla) of labourers, always for the same boss, for each harvest season, from the year 1943 to the end of 1948, at which point D'Attellis decided to fire them, apparently because he disagreed with a resolution passed by the regional office of the Ministry of Agriculture of San Nicolás the previous year, which raised the set wage. In their complaint filed at the local STP office, and in the lawsuit that followed, the workers demanded all of the possible compensations. The trial thus centred on whether their labour should be classified as of permanent or temporary character, as this would form the basis of the dispute. In effect, D'Attellis, the employer, wanted to dismiss the suit, arguing that these workers were typical temporary seasonal workers. The hearing, nonetheless, demonstrated that, although there was no continuity ‘in the absolute sense’, the peons had been working with the same producer during every harvest since 1943 as a ‘permanent team’, which was composed, each year, of the same labourers, and who were committed them to making themselves available to D'Attellis before other employers. Evidence brought to the trial, through a long and well-thought-out lawsuit, eventually tilted the decision in favour of the workers.
A battle of semantics could also be raised over the category of ‘rural labourer’, which was preliminary and even more general than the others. This was illustrated in a dispute between Felipe Cornoldi and his employer, Juan Boero. The suit was based on a claim for compensation following Cornoldi's dismissal by Boero in October 1946 after 16 years working as a gardener at Boero's ‘La Aurora’ estancia in the town of San Jorge in the province of Santa Fe.Footnote 54 Cornoldi registered his complaint at the Sastre (Santa Fe) delegation of the STP, in which he made a case for unfair dismissal compensation as outlined in the Statute, and also demanded holiday compensation and the aguinaldo. When mediation failed, the Judge of First Instance sentenced Boero to pay the total sum demanded, at which point Boero decided to appeal the ruling, arguing that Cornoldi, as a gardener, fulfilled tasks ‘of decoration’, and thus should not be considered a farming labourer but rather be included in the ‘domestic service’ category. The attempt, nonetheless, was unsuccessful. The Court of Appeals rejected the plea with a broad interpretation of the Statute, arguing it applied to all duties performed by farm workers, ‘or [that were] performed in rural environments’, and that this was ‘such a wide jurisdiction that it encompasses, without a doubt, the labour of a gardener on an agricultural or livestock estate, as he is no other than a labourer doing rural work, and completes his tasks in a rural environment, without this concept referring to anything other than simply the countryside’.Footnote 55
The same interpretation benefitted the carpenter Vicente Oquendo in a suit against his boss, José Clement, again allowing us to take a look at the degree to which employers complied with other aspects of the Statute.Footnote 56 The suit was filed before the regional delegation of the STP in the town of Doblas in the National Territory of La Pampa and resolved in the Federal Court of Appeals of Bahía Blanca in 1951. In it, the plaintiff demanded compensation for dismissal, outstanding aguinaldo, and holidays not granted during the four years he had laboured, to which he also added a bill for ‘medical attention and medicines’ dated February 1946 for a work-related illness. Clement, nonetheless, disputed this last obligation, noting that art. 18 of the Statute established that it was the responsibility of the employer to provide medical assistance or cost of treatment to labourers, but also permitted him (by art. 20) to delegate that responsibility to professional or insurance agencies. He argued that he had complied, and placed into evidence his proof of insurance from the ‘La Continental’ company. It was up to Oquendo, then, to request medical attention through the said company – first notifying his employer – rather than seeing a doctor privately, and presenting his receipt for reimbursement. This concrete point was finally resolved on appeal, in favour of the employer, Clement, but, regardless of the outcome, the trial is telling of the degree to which a rural producer, from a relatively peripheral area, was compliant with an element of the Statute that would otherwise be quite difficult to verify, given the sources available.
Another common point of conflict that arose out of the Statute was related to family labour. In particular, this concerned the wives and children of the peon, who had traditionally worked at the estancia without pay. This custom, which was quite common across rural Latin America and can be traced back to the colonial era, was based on the understanding that, in exchange for housing, food, and other marginal benefits granted to the rural worker (e.g. medical attention, or the possibility of raising animals for food), women and children contributed by carrying out a number of domestic tasks and small jobs. (Often the women worked as cooks or cleaners, while the children laboured as stable hands or ran errands.) After the Statute was passed, it became all the more common for the courts to hear claims for unpaid family salaries during dismissal compensation hearings. Such was evidenced in the case of Hersilia Grondona y Casares, owner of the ‘Los Cerrillos’ farm in Pergamino, in the province of Buenos Aires. Lucía Frascarelli de Risso sued Grondona y Casares for wages and unfair dismissal in 1952, claiming that she had begun to work at the farm in 1945 with her husband, and while he managed one of the estate's outposts (puestos), she cooked for the estate's labourers without any payment. During the trial she provided proof that she had laboured as a cook for eight years despite claims to the contrary by her alleged boss, and so the court demanded that Grondona y Casares pay all of the unpaid monthly salaries in accordance with the amount stated in the relevant tables of the Statute (198 pesos monthly for ‘cooks with housing and meals’ until 1951 and 395 pesos from that year onwards), plus the corresponding aguinaldo, which put the total at 11,338.75 pesos. Not only that, but she also had to pay the corresponding costs of holidays never taken and compensation for unfair dismissal, which put the total at 12,796.42 pesos.Footnote 57
Although the new labour courts were established with the mission of defending the ‘weaker party’ in the labour contract, they did sometimes rule against workers. This was the case when, for instance, they found that a worker's lawsuit did not follow the letter of the law (e.g. in the amount of the compensation); when the employer proved that he had dismissed the peon for ‘just cause’; or when the courts realised that the worker's lawsuit was the fruit of the action of ‘aves negras’ (black birds) – this is the way that unscrupulous lawyers were referred to in the Argentine countryside – who, taking advantage of the workers’ need, brought weak cases to court. Nonetheless, cases in which the courts ruled against the workers represented a minority, according to preliminary evidence.Footnote 58
The suits put forward by dismissed labourers combined with the newly installed labour courts’ friendly reception of their demands ensured that the Estatuto del Peón gradually became the law of the land at the estancias. Although much more empirical evidence is needed, that provided here indicates that employers increasingly complied with the workers’ rights detailed in the letter of the law, despite the considerable increase in labour costs they entailed.
Final Reflections
Few subjects have generated more debate in Argentina's historiography than that of continuity and change generated by the rise of Peronism. The Estatuto del Peón is an excellent example of the futility of this debate. The law's antecedents were numerous and diverse in kind, audible in the discussions of labour reformers (laboralistas) from the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as in earlier drafts of laws, in workers’ own demands, and in the platform of some political parties, in particular the Socialist Party. Nevertheless, and with all of this in mind, contemporaries, as well as the historiographic record that followed, have almost unanimously regarded the law as a radical change – and for good reason.
In the first place, no proof is required that the Statute served as an enormous shock in Argentina: one need do nothing more than read the media outcry and public debate it generated (mentioned only in passing here) to confirm this sentiment. That this controversial measure was one of Perón's first major initiatives when he took control of the STP (the other being the creation of the labour tribunals) served as a clear message to labourers, and to the landed classes of the country, of what was to come.
The vast impact that the Statute had on Argentina's legal history – and in particular on labour law – also requires little further explanation. There was no lack of juridical and parliamentary precedents to the law, but, nevertheless, it was the first wholesale regulation of rural labour to be implemented nationally. The Statute signified the definitive juridical integration of the rural peons of the country, granting them all of the benefits of existing labour law.
When it came to the state's tenacity in seeing the law implemented in every corner of the country, there simply was no precedent. It was the first time that the state would secure, in a systematic way and by investing a great deal of human and economic resources, that laws destined to protect rural labour would not be ignored.
Now, does this mean that the Estatuto del Peón changed the lives of rural workers in a drastic and immediate way? In no way. If the evidence summarised here demonstrates anything it is that the application of the Statute was neither immediate nor simple and that its provisions were only partially and gradually complied with, in a gruelling process full of advances and setbacks.
The fact that the letter of the Statute was forceful and precise did not mean that it was definitive. On the contrary, far from being set in stone forever, the provisions were retouched, widened and perfected on a number of occasions and according to the challenges, contradictions and interpretations that came to the surface over the course of its application (in the regional STP delegations, in the judiciary). The revision of the decree in 1949, which more than duplicated the number of articles in the original statute, is certain proof of the open and contingent nature of this process.
In terms of practice, it is evident that some of the concrete benefits that the Statute granted arrived before others. For example, it appears that the protections granted toward continued employment implied by the compensation for unfair dismissal were put into effect from Day 1, largely because it was an ordinance that was very difficult to evade. From the moment that the Statute was put into action, any employer who decided to fire a peon without just cause could either pay him the compensation owed by law, or wait for the lawsuit that would surely come. And once in court, the success of the worker was almost assured; the law was unambiguous and the labour judges inflexible.
Other benefits probably did not take hold overnight. For example, the new salaries that were established in the decree, at least on paper, were technically put into effect from the day that the law was approved. However, as can be seen in the Kehoe case, it is likely that at the beginning the number of employers who did not respect the law was greater than those who did. Nevertheless, it is also probable that this practice of evasion was short-lived. The proliferation of unfair dismissal lawsuits (in which employers largely suffered resounding defeats) exposed non-compliant employers before the authorities and the rest of their employees, from which we can infer that, sooner rather than later, they opted to observe this part of the law.
The sources consulted here are relatively mute in respect of other ordinances included in the law, but it is probable that their implementation took more time. We have fragmentary evidence on whether the employers complied with the obligation to provide medical assistance to their workers, as was noted in the José Clement case. However, given the sources available, it is improbable that we will ever know which employers, in which regions, complied with specific requirements like the changes made to labourers’ work spaces or living quarters. It is plausible that such requirements were more difficult and onerous to implement for small and medium-sized farmers who employed few permanent labourers than for larger-scale estancias. But until we have more evidence, we will not know for certain what the real costs of the Statute were for each kind of employer, or to what extent this impacted the law's implementation.
We can identify the principal actors that put the Statute in place. On the one hand, we find the state, represented by the STP administration and its delegations, and labour judges. The former were effective guides for the workers, pushing them to report infractions, helping them write up their demands and accompanying them to the courtroom; the judges were faithful in their defence of the ‘weaker party’ in the labour disputes heard in court.Footnote 59
On the other hand, the everyday actions of workers in the courts were decisive – and not merely because they ensured compliance with the law. Their actions were also key to defining the Statute itself: it was through their demands and disputes over provisions that appeared simple on paper, but in fact were quite contentious in practice, that the decree became more precise; for example, regarding the concept of the ‘rural labourer’, the multiple tasks associated with rural work, and the question of permanent or temporary categorisation. The construction of these categories, which occurred through the continual and regular process of arguments made at the judge's bench, proved to be as critical for the consolidation of workers’ rights as the enforcement of the new wages and rights to family payment.
Finally, these actions speak to another change, more intangible but still notable, accompanying the Estatuto del Peón: rural labourers’ consciousness of the new rights that they had obtained through the law. Certainly, this too was not immediate; yet, in their appearances before the courts, in which they deployed the knowledge about the law and its application that they had acquired at the STP regional offices, rural workers incorporated an increasingly sophisticated and mature language of rights, and this was something that they would not relinquish.
Notwithstanding its close link to Peronism, the Estatuto del Peón had a long life after Perón's overthrow. Initially a decree issued by the military government of the June Revolution, it was ratified by Law no. 12,921 of 1947, during Perón's first presidency, together with hundreds of other labour decrees issued during the military regime. Despite the many efforts by the military governments that followed Perón to erase his deeds and even his name from the face of Argentine history and politics, the Statute survived his ousting for decades.Footnote 60 That way, together with some other key institutions such as the labour courts, the aguinaldo and various labour laws, the Statute remained a key feature of the country's labour regime. It was most definitely a significant legacy of Peronism to the juridical tradition of Argentina.Footnote 61
Acknowledgements
This essay was originally drafted for the final conference of the International Research Center ‘Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History (Re:work)’ programme at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin (2016–17 academic year). I owe much to the inspiring environment I enjoyed as a Fellow at that programme. I am grateful to Daniela Soldano, Hilda Sabato, Leon Fink, Seth Rockman, Víctor Uribe-Urán, Alex Lichtenstein, Fred Cooper and Juan Carlos Torre for their generous reading of and critical comments on previous versions of this article. I am also indebted to three anonymous reviewers and the editors of JLAS for their insightful comments that helped to improve the manuscript.
