Under Siege: The Kraft Foods 2009 Labor Conflict in Argentina

Abstract

This paper examines a particular labor-management negotiation process, a Mandatory Conciliation (MC), as it is named in the Argentinean labor legal system, that took place from July through mid October, 2009, between the managers of the Multinational Corporation (MNC) Kraft Foods’ (KFT) subsidiary in Argentina -Kraft Foods Argentina (KFTA)- and the Workers’ Internal Commission (WIC) of the firm’s most important industrial plant in the country. The Argentinean Ministry of Labor (MLAB) convened the MC negotiation to settle an organizational conflict, regarding of opposing views about what preventive measures were adequate to cope the risks posed over the workers’ health by the 2009 global epidemic outbreak of swine influenza A(H1N1), that escalated out of the parties control. The contribution of our case study, on such specific type of labor management negotiation, is that it allows to gain a better understanding on how negotiators, confront the complexity of contextual circumstances and manage the process and, in addition, that it explores through the theoretical lens of the Turning Points (TP) framework precipitants, departures and consequences- how they retrospectively judge that those essential elements interplayed along it. We consider that the KFTA case corroborates the aptitude of the TP framework for such kind of examination and that it allows to extract practical implications on how labor-management negotiations, although different from the international, can be managed in ways that may lead to reduce all sorts of costs - whether economic or relational - and to attain better and enduring agreements.