Changing the Rules of the Game: Labor, Law, and Citizenship in Argentina, 1973-1983

Changing the Rules of the Game: Labor, Law, and Citizenship in Argentina, 1973-1983 analyzes the intersections of legal and labor history in Argentina during the tumultuous 1970s. Over this ten-year span, the country witnessed unprecedented economic turmoil, armed revolutionary struggle, and the bloodiest dictatorship in modern national history (the Process of National Reorganization, PRN). While most scholarship on this period has emphasized the PRN’s campaign of state terror, Changing the Rules of the Game argues that the law remained a critical site of contestation and negotiation throughout, even under the prolonged state of exception (1974-1983). By studying the creation and enforcement of labor legislation under both civil and military administrations, I show how state authorities, employers, trade union leaders, and rank-and-file workers all sought to impose, adapt to, and/or resist new “rules of the game” that aimed to remake daily experiences of work and citizenship.