I.Furnaces.

Here, the steel is melted in big furnaces at very high temperatures. Then, the hot metal is poured from the ladles into moulds. This hot metal runs like water.

The furnaces are the heart and soul of a steel factory. In this sense, it is important that the workers can tolerate the heat for several hours. As a former worker explained to us, the owners of Santa Rosa steelworks had this in mind when they hired...

They looked for people in Entre Ríos [argentine countryside], from the country, so they could tolerate the heat, because the 2.000 kilos ingots, before, were hooked by hand… You, hook and take by the hand the red-hot ingot… Everything was hooked by hand. Not today, today everything is electromagnetic, electric cranes, you can operate it from far away. So back then, people could not tolerated it, they worked for a month and they left, they could not hold it. So, the employer brought workers from the countryside, hard, rude people, so they could work.

That is why they search for workers there, in the countryside, they were the ones who could tolerate the most. (…) My father was one of them, he came from Entre Ríos and began to work and within a month he wanted to leave. My father used to work at the coal mine in Entre Ríos, burning out coal, nevertheless he wanted to leave Santa Rosa.*

*Translated from Spanish by M. Stoler