This article attempts to answer some questions related to the labor struggles during the period 1976-1983. How did these struggles affect industrial discipline? Did they weaken management control and its power to impose changes in labor organization in order to increase productivity? Could workers' unruliness develop within a paternalist system of labor relationships? To answer these questions the article compares labor relations, forms of discipline and workers' oppositional actions, either collective or individual, in two different industrial complexes in the city of Tandil.