Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

1. Industry, Wages, and the State: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

16 chApter 1 Industry, Wages, and the State The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture In the early 1940s, the Corporación para la Promoción del Intercambio (Corporation for the Promotion of Trade), an agency whose executive board consisted of the directors of the most powerful industrial firms in Argentina, hired the U.S.-based Armour Research Foundation to conduct a study on the state of Argentina’s national industry and the prospects for further development. A private agency specializing on business and economic consulting, the Armour Research Foundation did an in-depth assessment of agricultural and industrial activities, demographics, commerce, banking, transportation, and communication systems, but what really caught the researchers’ attention was the low wages of the working class. Between 1937 and 1939, an Argentine worker earned half the income of an English laborer and one-third of the salary paid to his American counterpart . Although food was generally less expensive in Argentina, the report 17 Industry, Wages, and the State asserted, low wages prevented the working class from reaching the same consumption levels as workers in England and the United States, even in terms of the amounts of bread, potatoes, and sugar they could afford. Most importantly, meager earnings barred Argentine workers from spending on durable consumer goods. For example, they could buy only one-third to one-fourth of the same clothing purchased by their peers in the United States. Similarly, for workers in Argentina a sewing machine was three times more expensive and a radio cost seven times more than for an American worker. In fact, the research team had been warned about the limited participation of the low-income sectors in the consumer market. Upon their arrival, a local businessman told them, “You must never forget that the Argentine market has three and a half million people—not thirteen million.” In the final report, the researchers explained the pessimistic view of their informant by arguing that to keep labor costs low, industrialists refused to pay higher wages, but, as a result, sales of their products were poor and industrial development was hindered. The addition of new technology on shop floors, the consolidation of mass production, and the advancement of the secondary sector as a whole was dependent on mass consumption, but the size of the internal market was too small.1 Less than a decade later, headlines conveyed an entirely different view. In 1947, the newspaper Democracia proclaimed that “Argentina is the country where living is cheapest and the worker earns more.” Four years later, the celebration of good times continued as the weekly Mundo Argentino announced that “the standard of living of Argentine workers is the highest in the world.”2 As an expression of the late 1940s spirit, the press depicted a triumphant age that has remained in the popular memory as the “golden years of Peronism.” For many Argentines, this was a time of bonanza and achievement with the working masses partaking in the social feast. María Roldán, a meatpacking worker in those years, adhered to this view when she recalled many decades later: “With Perón we discovered many things. A pair of nylons, a nice dress. Life changed. We could buy things like refrigerators. I bought mine in 1947.”3 In her memories of increasingly affordable consumer goods that transformed everyday life and broadened horizons, Roldán synthesized an original historical process that peaked in the years following the visit of the Armour researchers, a process in which workers turned into consumers. This chapter explores the structural conditions and the political decisions that contributed to the emergence of the worker-consumer. As the exceptional circumstances of international trade caused by the Second 18 Chapter 1 World War were soon to come to an end, several local interest groups—from powerful long-standing industrial firms and the agro-export sector to small factory owners and the military—planned different paths to industrialization to overcome the obstacles identified by the Armour report. The chapter examines these conflicting views of national development and focuses on the triumphant one: a vision of growth rooted in industrialization for the domestic market and high purchasing power for the working population. As an icon of widespread well-being, the worker-consumer was the essential articulator of Juan Domingo Perón’s project of national industry and full employment, an inward-looking economic model based on the expansion of internal demand and aimed...