two or three workers at the plant get the nerve to meet with him and explain their situation, Soto gets things moving. Something happens on March 25th, 1921 that takes the directors of the powerful North American company by surprise: a strike at their meatpacking plant in Río Gallegos.
It’s the only thing that was missing: the Swift strike comes hot on the heels of the rural strike and right at the height of the slaughter.
But the men of the Rural Society and Swift & Company aren’t going to take it lying down. They call for a hardline approach in the pages of La Unión, blaming Soto and the men of the Workers’ Society instead of the plant’s wretched working conditions. According to La Unión, the workers, “by presenting a list of demands contrary to the spirit of the contract, and by refusing to load ships and undertaking other actions that amount to preemptive retaliations, such as demanding to be paid for days squandered in working out a settlement, have shown that outside agitators have intervened in this dispute, distorting the intentions of the true workers.”
This time, the employers have the upper hand. The Workers’ Society will be defeated. After a week, the meatpackers will meekly return to work. This time, Governor Yza allows the police chief, Captain Schweizer, to settle the conflict however he sees fit. Led by Ibón Noya, the Rural Society meets with Schweizer and tells him that the problem will be easy to resolve if only Soto and company are removed from the picture. The captain gathers the strikers together and tells them that everything can be straightened out if only they distance themselves from the Workers’ Society and elect their own strike committee. He also offers to have the Rural Society intervene on their behalf.
The workers, brought in from Buenos Aires, are easily tamed. Penniless and homeless—despite Soto’s best efforts—they know they can find no other jobs in town, nor can they return to Buenos Aires. They accept, almost without a second thought. And so a solution is found. La Unión is euphoric: “The workers have decided to return to work on the same terms as when they left, with no modifications to their employment contracts one way or another… Those who prepared the demands driving the strike have failed.”
Rural Society president Ibón Noya publicly congratulates the police chief, the first step towards reconciling the bosses with Yza’s Radical government.
During the strike, Soto had been unable to give his full attention to the meatpackers’ struggle because he was facing one of the most dangerous offensives against the labor organization: internal division. Between the victorious conclusion of the first strike and the coming tragedy, Soto must wage a relentless struggle against the union leaders sent from Buenos Aires by the syndicalist FORA and against a faction of workers that have broken away from the Workers’ Society to organize non-aligned unions.
The mighty are delighted by this split in the Río Gallegos labor movement and they encourage this sectarianism as best they can. At the beginning of April 1921, La Unión prints an exultant article titled nothing less than “Signs of Backlash”:
Some unionized workers in Río Gallegos have decided to form an independent organization, allowing them to more spontaneously make decisions that serve their own interests in the trade union struggles in which they are engaged.
The first group to leave the Workers’ Society is the printers’ union, led by Amador González, whose disagreements with Soto we have already seen. To raise funds for their union they organize a festival, which is promoted in the conservative newspaper. This same newspaper will later run a story on the event, describing it as:
An enjoyable party that has proven to be a great success, judging by attendance, and whose eminently humanitarian purpose is a faithful reflection of the societal ideal that this union is pursuing through its honorable independence from the systematized tyranny currently observed in many other unions. This attitude can be seen in their statement of principles, which speaks with measured eloquence on the standards that must be met by the new organization, which has already won some concessions and which subscribes to the principle of harmony and concord between workers and bosses.
The good workers, in other words. The launch of a “free” trade union triggered the first split from the anarchists of the Workers’ Society. The bosses have high hopes: they see the free trade unions as a way to put the rebels in check. As La Unión writes, “the attitude of the printers will soon spread to many other unions once we can objectively appreciate the results of their efforts.”
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