Ithaca College

 Jonathan Ablard presented  “Proletariats in Ties: Labor Organizing and Strikes by Barbers in early Twentieth Century Buenos Aires” at the Mid-Atlantic Conference on Latin Americas Studies (MACLAS) at the University of Virginia (March 24-25)

 In 1906, roughly 2500 of the 4000 barbers in Buenos Aires went on strike. Their demands included shorter hours, a clothing allowance, increased wages and the abolition of the tip. The challenges to organizing were considerable. The barbers worked in small shops scattered throughout the city, they were divided by language and national origin, and their bosses were often men who had once been barbers or shop assistants and were more than willing to employ scabs. While their labor actions, and the unions and newspapers that they published, were often mocked by the bourgeois press, the service sector forms an important but understudied aspect of Argentina’s labor history if only because these workers formed a substantial portion of the overall work force of the city.