ded that the economic solvency of the working class was the biggest priority of the government. Organized labor in Argentina before the golpe of 1943 was in a state of constant change and motion. Beginning with the golpe de estado that overthrew president Hipolito Yrigoyen in September of 1930, the political climate of Argentina was a turmoiltuous backdrop for the labor movement. The formation of the Conferatcin General del Trabajo [CGT] took place in the same year. The CGT was a conglomerate of the largest labor unions in the country, like railroad workers unions, construction workers unions and textile workers unions. This marked the beginning of a new type of unionization. The unions that formed between 1930 and 1943 were not only larger and more directed at labor than trades, but they were willing to cooperate with the government. They were "bread-and-butter" unions, now less interested in being in opposition to the state because they had gotten into industries that required more cooperation with the government like railroads for example. (Barager, 1968) The unions started to establish some general trends in their practices in terms of labor management relations. The basic foundations for these relations were collective bargaining and trade-union social insurance, which Pern later adapted for his own use.The social climate in Argentina was also receptive to unionization in the decades prior to Pern's first time in office. Immigration had all but come to a halt by 1930 which meant that the greater percentage of laborers were second generation Argentines and were more nationalist in leanings. This was another factor that led to the cooperationist nature of the new unions. Unions in general were getting larger with the migration of large sectors of the Argentine population from the countryside to the urban areas as a result of a failing agrarian economy in the thirties. The global economic depression that took place in the ...
