Mentors and proteges. The role of the trade unions in the career of the senatorial clerks

Abstract

The Senate Chamber of the Argentinian Republic stands out for the interpersonal relationships based on patronage-bonding links between authorities, legislators, political parties or labor unions and clerks. Those bonds, in constant change, are sustained by kinship or affinity. Authorities and labor unions “arrange” the designations for the temporal and stable positions, in addition to promotions in the legislative ladder; authorities and senators unionize themselves, thus the labor unions become intrinsically influenced by politics, the Public Law 24600, the Statute and the idiosyncratic proceedings for the legislative personnel of the National Congress allow these irregular behaviors. In this context, a godfather is essential to ascend and secure the clerk’s career; being the person in charge of negotiating the employee’s “orders” with the authorities. The ethnographic tools (long-lasting fieldwork and interviews), the normative’s revision and the presidential decrees, allowed to reflect upon the rationality of the strategies deployed by the labor unions and the legislative clerks; it is expected to in this way make a contribution from an anthropological point of view to the knowledge of an uninvestigated facet of the legislative world, as are the personnel designations and the directions of their professional careers.