The social organization of work in primary dairy production in Argentina: changes in the productive agents?

Abstract

The transformations that occurred in the Argentine dairy complex in the last decades open the question about the type of production units that make it up. The article analyzes the question of the social organization of work in the primary phase of the complex and its impacts on the production units, with the aim of illustrating the type of social agents that tend to consolidate and those that are weakened in the dairy activity. The methodology combines the qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources of information. The results show that the processes of technological and productive reconversion in the primary phase unleash the following transformations: a greater intensification of the productive systems, a significant increase in costs, a deepening in the division and specialization in the farm tasks and important changes in farm management; which implies, in turn, certain changes in the social organization of work. In this sense, the predominant way of organizing the milking processes in dairy farms, the system of “mediería”, goes through a series of tensions that pose a question about its continuity towards the future. In the first place, the difficulty of maintaining the work team made up of the dairy “mediero” and his family, declining in a growing trend to combine salary schemes. On the other hand, when considering the totality of tasks in the farms, an important part of the tasks fall increasingly in workers under direct or indirect wage relationships. As for family production, it continues a process of frank retraction. In this way, the results found raise the possibility of a change in the forms of social organization of work in dairy farms towards mixed schemes or with greater weight of wage forms.