Economic Restructuring and Labour Scarcity: Labour in the 1920s

Abstract

The inter-war decades witnessed dramatic change which left a profound impact upon the course of Argentine development during the latter part of the twentieth century. Historians and political scientists re-examine the 1920s and 1930s in order to determine the nature — and to explain the failure — of Radicalism, the rise of Peronism and the descent into political instability which became such a marked characteristic of Argentine politics between the 1950s and the 1980s. Social historians have tended to qualify optimistic accounts of economic progress during the ‘Indian Summer’ of the so-called golden age of export-led growth by pointing to rural poverty, disease, class conflict, urban squalor and the generally inadequate living conditions of the mass of the population around the First World War. Only recently have some of these more gloomy accounts been challenged.¹