The worker dreamed by his boss: business policies in an oil community in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina (1917-1932)

Abstract

This article examines the welfare policies deployed by the leadership of the state-owned company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) in Comodoro Rivadavia between the end of the 1910s and the beginning of the 1930s. Based on the review of a set of diverse sources, it questions the way in which oil workers and their families intervened in the design and implementation of these initiatives in terms of demands for rights expressed through different actions and forms of protest. It dialogues with a literature that assumed these policies as a model of philanthropy or bussines paternalism, emphasizing the success of the disciplining exercised by the company's leadership. By focusing on certain signs of workers' practices both in the productive space and in those related to family life and diverse networks of community sociability, this study discusses the scope of this disciplining effort and its success, also reflecting on certain categories with those that have been used to approach the study of these labor communities.

Keywords

• working class
• petroleum
• company welfare