Everyone knows that behind every truck there is a story torn away, a machine that will never return, a promise turned into scrap metal. "While they kept us entertained with hearings, they were emptying the company," says Lazarte, and the phrase hits hard, a naked truth among the smoke of burning tires. At Acerías Berisso, the battle for jobs is being fought. The workers denounce that the company—with the complicit silence of the offices—is, piece by piece, tearing out the lungs of a factory emblematic of the city.
The mandatory conciliation dictated by the Buenos Aires Ministry of Labor is dead letter: trucks continue to enter and leave as if they were transporting the remains of an industrial corpse. They break the conciliation as if it were a worthless piece of paper. While bureaucrats discuss hearings and businessmen pretend not to be going bankrupt, the workers watch. The factory is agonizing, but those who built it—with their hands, with their years—are not willing to sign its death certificate. There, in the cold of the steel and the contained fury, the last flame resists.
In the old plant of Acerías Berisso, where the furnaces once roared, today only the echo of dismantling is heard. They are not just demanding a salary: they are defending the right to continue existing as a class in the face of the desert the bosses want to impose. Carlos Lazarte, delegate of the UOM, summarizes it without metaphors: — We show up every day at six in the morning, our usual schedule, and the doors remain closed. The salaries arrive late, when they arrive, and each day without an answer is another wound to the workers' dignity. The workers, along with their families, set up a guard at the gates, lit bonfires and cut off the street to prevent them from taking what little is left.