Charity, Rights, and Entitlement: Gender, Labor, and Welfare in Early-Twentieth-Century Chile
2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-555
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America
ResumoIn 1939 the Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (CSO, Obligatory Insurance Fund), the Chilean agency that provided social security, disability, and health care insurance to blue-collar workers, published an advertisement in the Socialist party magazine Rumbo. “The social security system,” read the advertisement, “tries to replace the denomination of ‘indigent’ with that of ‘taxpayer’ [impo-nente], a switch from ‘charity’ to ‘insurance’ and from ‘alms’ to ‘rights.’” The CSO thus aligned itself with a modern notion of state welfare as a “right.” According to the agency, the extension of CSO-administered benefits would suppress demeaning and retrograde forms of public and private welfare, which it termed “charity.”1This CSO advertisement appeared in Rumbo less than a year after the election to the presidency of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, the first of three Radical party members elected as standard bearers of Center-Left, popular-front coalitions. The first popular-front coalition was formed in 1936 and was formally composed of the Socialist, Communist, and Radical parties. This and successive Center-Left coalitions won presidential elections in 1938, 1942, and 1946. The alliances persisted in some form until around 1948, when cold war rivalries tore them apart. Programmatically, the popular fronts sought not simply to modernize the Chilean economy but also to mobilize and incorporate working-class Chileans into the polity. According to popular-front leaders, working-class Chileans were vital and therefore worthy members of the nation who deserved both to share in the economic benefits of development and to have a recognized political voice. Along with promoting industrial self-sufficiency and economic development, the coalitions championed the economic and social rights of the poor, fostered a rhetoric of citizen entitlement among popular sectors, and sought to democratize public services.2Yet as this essay argues, not all impoverished Chileans benefited equally from popular-front efforts to expand state services and democratize welfare. Workers employed in the formal sector,3 most of them male, were the popular fronts’ core constituency and received CSO and other benefits that were seen as rights. Characterized as temporary aid given in times of need, CSO-administered disability and health benefits did not imply worker dependence on the state. And since workers helped finance these benefits, worker organizations consistently demanded—and obtained—participation in the administration of social security and health programs. By contrast, nonworkers and workers outside the formal sector continued to receive forms of state aid that were more akin to charity. Women—who were for the most part housewives or nonindustrial workers—as well as unemployed and informally employed men had fewer rights and little, if any, say in the operation of the agencies that dispensed aid to them as indigent. State officials would continue to determine the need of these clients deemed “dependents” who had no legal right to state aid.4The popular fronts’ extension of health and social security benefits thus simultaneously furthered and limited democratization. For workers, material entitlements and the right to help determine how those benefits would be administered became a palpable manifestation of broader citizen rights. Those inducements helped secure working-class support for the popular-front alliances. At the same time, the popular fronts circumscribed the claims of women, nonworkers, and workers outside the formal sector—all of whom received fewer benefits and had less say in how benefits would be dispensed. Nonworkers and informal sector workers became subordinate members of the popular-front alliances.As this essay demonstrates, these distinctions were intrinsically gendered. Political elites justified political and economic entitlements by acknowledging (male) workers’ productive contributions to the nation and by linking the rights and responsibilities of workers to their role as family heads. They also advanced worker rights by contrasting productive, reputable, manly men with both dependent family members and disreputable men. In so doing, the popular fronts not only failed to recognize the importance of the labor performed by those outside the formal sector. They also advanced the rights of presumably productive workers by asserting their masculine privilege and power vis-à-vis nonworkers and dependents.Formal sector workers on balance benefited from state-administered benefits as well as from the recognition of their authority over dependent family members and disreputable men. As a result, they generally reinforced the gendered hierarchies that undergird the construction of state policies. Like popular-front officials, workers and their organizations argued at times for the extension of entitlements to nonworkers and workers outside the formal sector. Yet they just as often deepened gendered divisions by presenting organized workers as especially deserving. In so doing, they reinforced their alliance with the middle-class reformers who spearheaded state expansion while politically distancing themselves, at least in some ways and at times, from other working-class Chileans. Overall, then, the popular-front coalitions and their supporters extended citizen rights by broadening and democratizing state services and by bolstering the authority and influence of formal sector workers. But they also defined entitlement in ways that limited the rights and the citizen influence of other Chileans.The popular fronts’ unique and contradictory blend of popular empowerment, state intervention, and capitalist revitalization emerged after several failed attempts to move beyond traditional oligarchic elites’ primarily repressive approach toward popular classes. After 1920 reformist elites increasingly advocated an enhanced role for the state in mediating labor disputes, mitigating capitalism’s worst excesses, and directing economic development. Yet given traditional elites’ aversion to social reform and popular organizations’ continuing reservations about top-down state policies, none of the governments of 1920–38 successfully implemented its project. The popular fronts would, by contrast, succeed in reforming economy and polity by recognizing and mobilizing existing popular organizations.During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Chile’s traditional ruling elite had tried to combat “communism” through a combination of charity, repression, and scattered social legislation. Yet it failed to discourage labor organizing or stifle popular mobilization. The mildly reformist Liberal party member Arturo Alessandri, who was elected president in 1920, sought to advance labor stability and capitalist modernization by regulating labor relations and bettering workers’ living and working conditions. To solve the country’s “social problem” and avoid the costs associated with the repressive policies of the oligarchic state, he and his followers advocated legislation that mandated health, social security, and disability insurance for blue-collar workers; provided for state recognition of labor unions; and set up tripartite conciliation and arbitration boards.5Significant segments of workers and employers opposed Alessandri’s proposals. Alessandri alienated organized labor by calling on troops to put down striking mine workers at the San Gregorio nitrate office in 1921. More important, worker organizers feared the reforms he proposed would allow employers and the state to co-opt their until-then illegal organizations. Mutualists rejected control of pension and health funds, which workers would help finance, by bureaucrats or the wealthy. Luis Emilio Recabarren, at the time a congressional deputy for the pro-labor Partido Obrero Socialista, presented a counterproject that called for locally administered work tribunals.6 Congress and proprietors were not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Alessandri’s proposals either. While some employers, such as the U.S.-owned Braden Copper Company, supported legislative changes, a great many others feared that reforms would give workers unwarranted leverage. They rallied around a more traditional and repressive approach to labor relations and responded to the round of strikes that accompanied Alessandri’s election with a series of lockouts. Discrepancies erupted into violence: a bomb exploded at the door of the deputy who had authored social security legislation.7 Reforms stalled in Congress.Only a military intervention secured the passage of controversial labor and welfare laws. Under pressure from the military, in September 1924, Congress acceded to legislation that regulated the formation and financing of labor unions, the right to strike, and the establishment of conciliation and arbitration boards. It also passed a law creating the CSO. Shortly afterwards, Colonel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo placed himself at the head of the military movement and began to rule from behind the scenes. In 1927 he was elected president in an almost completely uncontested election.Once he assumed the presidency, Ibáñez forged an alliance of organized workers and state-employed, middle-class reformers that foreshadowed the popular-front alliance. Ibáñez did not hesitate to jail labor leaders who opposed him, and labor movement did not as a whole support the military caudillo. Yet like his Brazilian counterpart Getúlio Vargas, Ibáñez bolstered loyal trade unions and sought to form them into an official, government-sponsored labor movement. Given employer hostility to unionization, many labor leaders saw alliance with state officials as the best way of consolidating the labor movement and satisfying at least some of its demands. Ibáñez also rallied popular support by putting progressive middle-class reformers sensitive to popular demands in charge of state agencies dealing with labor, health, and welfare. Several of the middle-class reformers who would later found the Socialist party in 1933 held office in labor and welfare agencies during Ibáñez’s presidency. There, they learned to court popular sectors and to make state employment a political springboard.8Yet Ibáñez’s attempt to control and co-opt popular sectors, like Alessandri’s attempt before his, ultimately proved unsuccessful. In 1931 massive street demonstrations fueled by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions brought Ibáñez down, and by 1932 the Right had recaptured the presidency. Yet Liberals and Conservatives could not hold on to power either, in part because they were divided on issues of social reform.9 As a result, the until-then impossible task of reconciling capitalist development with the needs of Chile’s working people would fall to the popular fronts.Like Ibáñez, the popular fronts used working-class support and state intervention to curtail the excesses of the oligarchy. But they also introduced new ways of winning the adherence of popular sectors: they promoted equality and inclusion and offered to eliminate patronizing charitable forms of private and public aid to the poor. Perhaps most important, they sought to enhance the material well-being of popular classes, solicited the backing of existing popular organizations, and explicitly eschewed repression. These strategies apparently paid off. In the streets and at the polls, popular sectors rallied enthusiastically behind the popular fronts. In the mining province of Antofagasta, a traditional stronghold of the labor movement, for instance, popular-front candidates obtained over 68 percent of the vote in each of the three presidential elections between 1938 and 1946.10 Ultimately, it was this enthusiastic popular support that allowed the popular fronts, unlike Alessandri and Ibáñez, to maintain power.Progressive middle-class reformers as well as members of the laboring classes benefited from popular-front rule. Working-class organizations gained direct access to spheres of political decision-making, as they had begun to during Ibáñez’s years as president. However, because popular-front elites frequently quarreled amongst themselves and because the popular fronts, unlike Ibáñez, eschewed repression, labor now had greater leverage. Middle-class members of the coalitions—especially Radicals and to a lesser extent the Socialists—benefited from the extension of state services, which provided attractive employment opportunities within the bureaucracy. They also surmounted the subordinate status they had inevitably assumed in prior governing coalitions. As Aguirre Cerda asserted on the eve of the 1938 election, “because of the Right’s unyielding incomprehension, the Radical party, which represents mainly the middle class, has openly taken a step to the Left in order to ally itself cordially with the working class.”11At the same time, the popular fronts furthered capitalist development. More conservative sectors of the Radical party actively sought the support of the “modern” sectors of the capitalist class. The Socialist and Communist parties courted economic elites to further the “bourgeois-democratic” capitalist modernization they believed should precede a socialist revolution. As a result of this widespread support for capitalist economic development, popular-front leaders undoubtedly quelled popular protest and redefined popular demands in a way that made them more palatable to entrepreneurs.12Yet the middle-class leaders of the popular fronts did not completely stifle popular militancy, co-opt working-class organizations, or disregard popular demands. Indeed, popular classes gained significant material advantages during the popular-front era. According to the best figures available, the real wages of formal sector workers in manufacturing rose a formidable 65 percent between 1937 and 1949. In addition, the popular fronts’ failure to repress popular mobilization allowed popular groups to grow and to maintain a degree of autonomy. As state officials abandoned their repressive tactics, labor organizing and work stoppages mushroomed, as did other forms of popular mobilization.13Moreover, the prominent participation of Socialists and Communists in the popular-front governments—a feature that distinguished the Chilean popular fronts from national-popular coalitions in Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil —provided popular organizations with distinct venues of influence. Members of the Socialist party secured positions within the bureaucracy—until 1947 Communists sought to maintain their independence by avoiding ministerial appointments—and both Socialists and Communists embraced electoral politics. Because leftist political parties were relatively weak, they tended to indulge popular demands as a way of gaining support and to encourage at least certain forms of popular mobilization. Consequently, members of both parties provided popular sectors with access to formal and informal political spheres that might otherwise have remained unavailable. Compared to Mexican workers during this period and Argentine workers under Juan Perón, Chilean workers maintained greater organizational autonomy from both the state and ruling parties.14Though Chileans of modest means generally benefited from the popular-front governments, the coalitions favored industrial workers, including miners, over rural and nonindustrial workers and over women. As past scholarship on the popular fronts has indicated, in relation to rural labor the exclusionary policies of the popular-front leadership apparently resulted from an explicit bargain between popular-front politicians and the Right. In return for passing legislation that created the Corporación de Fomento (CORFO, Development Corporation), the motor of state-led industrialization, right-wing politicians demanded that rural unionization be stopped. The exclusion of women was more subterranean. Yet women were denied full political rights—and other restrictions on suffrage such as literacy requirements continued—because political elites on both the Right and the Left believed that universal suffrage would cause political dislocations. The popular fronts’ position on the family wage system, which defined men as entitled breadwinners and women as dependent housewives, was negotiated even more quietly. Yet on balance, the popular fronts cemented male-headed nuclear families materially and ideologically, making it difficult for women to make independent political or economic claims. Male industrial workers made concrete gains as a result. Depressed rural wages benefited urban workers materially by keeping the price of foodstuffs low, and the family wage system assured men that women would not compete for the best jobs.15The gendered hierarchies that undergird popular-front rule were constructed by relating the type of labor believed to promote progress—particularly industrial and mining work—to political entitlement and by associating entitlement with hegemonic forms of masculinity. Because industry and mining were seen as crucial to Chile’s economic well-being, (male) industrial workers were considered important members of the national community. Conversely, because industry and mining had long been considered critical economic activities, organized industrial workers were more effectively able to demand political and economic entitlements. By contrast, women, campesinos, and informally employed workers gained less political influence and fewer economic benefits because popular-front governments, and the worker organizations that supported them, continued to see “workers” as exceptionally consequential actors and to define women and nonindustrial workers as nonworkers. As I discuss below, this gendered political economy reaffirmed the association of masculinity and industrial work by asserting women’s role as housewives and mothers, by ignoring women who performed industrial work, and/or by portraying women workers as anomalous. Men who either performed informal or “unproductive” work or who did not work were seen as “dependent” and feminized. As a result, industrial workers affirmed their superiority not only over women but also over less reputable men. The gendered hierarchies of the popular-front years thus structured relations not only between working-class men and women, and between popular-front leaders and their constituents but also among men of the laboring classes.At a strictly formal level, popular-front policies did not for the most part discriminate based on gendered criteria. Despite widespread claims to the contrary, many formal sector workers labored outside manufacturing and mining, and all workers, even purportedly unproductive rural workers and domestic servants, could receive CSO benefits if they had labor contracts. Even self-employed workers could qualify for CSO benefits if they paid the requisite taxes. Furthermore, popular-front leaders and their supporters often argued that entitlements should be extended to those who lacked them, such as the sizable number of domestic servants and rural laborers who worked without contracts or benefits. However, even as popular leaders and political elites argued for the formal extension of benefits, they justified entitlements by equating formal sector work with industrial labor and masculinity. In so doing, they reinforced normative gendered definitions of “worker” and undermined the claims of those who did not fit those definitions.In regards to women, political elites and labor activists together circumscribed women’s rights by rejecting paid labor for women and by defining full-time homemaking as the only proper feminine activity. Politicians and activists also downplayed the importance of both women’s work within the home and informal forms of employment, activities that were deemed similarly “unproductive.”By implicitly and explicitly disapproving of women’s work outside the home on the grounds that women could and should depend on the economic sustenance of a male breadwinner, popular-front leaders limited women’s access to the one presumably “productive” activity that might have entitled them to citizen rights. Throughout the popular-front period, few women worked for wages (see table 1). The CSO itself called for the dismissal of its white-collar women employees when they married, and the Postal and Telegraph Service sought both to exclude married women and to set quotas barring women from occupying more than 20 percent of the positions within the service. Similarly, a 1940 civil service competition for the Dirección General del Trabajo stipulated that women should occupy no more than 50 percent of new positions and 10 percent of total inspector positions. Though feminists and many popular-front leaders opposed these measures, other popular-front officials defended men’s positions as breadwinners even when that meant openly discriminating against women in the workplace.16Some working-class activists echoed this logic. A front-page article in the newspaper of the Partido Socialista de Trabajadores decried the miserable working conditions, long hours, and bad pay faced by white-collar women in commerce. To remedy this situation, the article called on labor inspectors to trap scoundrel employers. It went on to argue, however, that prohibiting women from working would be just as effective and class-conscious a remedy: “Women’s work in certain ‘businesses’ should be prohibited, not only limited. This measure would oblige the employment of men and make an enormous contribution, benefiting workers’ homes, at the same time it would oblige those hasty financiers, who have made an enormous market of our patria, to curb a bit their overflowing profits.” Believing that women took jobs away from men who really needed them, thereby undermining the male-headed nuclear family and the prosperity of the patria, this article called for the exclusion of women from paid labor. In a similar but more misogynistic vein, when Socialist mayor of Santiago and women’s movement activist Graciela Contreras de Schnake provided women with employment in the municipality, a rival socialist faction accused her of misspending on “hundreds of worthless and frivolous girls who took the bread away from many workers [obreros].”17Women’s housework and childrearing did not for the most part make them full citizens because these activities presumably constituted unproductive, private work performed within the home. The contributions of house wives and mothers to the patria were deemed at best indirect: they would raise the future citizens of the nation and facilitate the productive labor and political participation of male family members. Within working-class organizations, a significant (but not necessarily widespread) discursive strand defined women’s political participation as auxiliary to that of men and as social (because based on domestic roles) rather than political. For instance, Eusebia Torres, a Communist municipal councilor from the coal mining town of Coronel, touted the importance of miners’ labor to the nation even as she praised her women constituents for supporting their men family members and refusing to work outside the home. Her constituents were, she said,Later in the same speech, Torres downplayed the women’s role in a cost-of-living protest, and called it a rearguard, “last ditch effort” in support of the miners:Here, Torres drew on a long tradition of portraying women’s protest as motivated by appropriately feminine concerns, and she underscored women’s familial role by pointing out that they protested with their children by their sides. While in her view the miners’ struggle was closely linked to the well-being of the nation, their wives’ actions were not.18Similarly, voicing the notion that women’s political participation was auxiliary, in a 1993 interview, Fresia Gravano suggested that in the Vergara nitrate camp, where she grew up, women’s activism was more social than political, and that women’s role was one of support: “The women . . . worked with the unions. And when workers presented their demands, they worked with the strikes. . . . It was an activity, let’s say, not so much a political activity as a social activity, in the sense of supporting the union, supporting the workers with women’s struggle.” Gravano refigured women’s political involvement as unity with and aid to family members. Like Torres, she echoed a discourse that discounted women’s political contributions to the nation and therefore limited women’s claims to full citizenship.19Popular-front officials sometimes recognized the importance women’s homemaking and mothering and granted certain limited benefits to mothers and wives. Yet state benefits that rewarded women’s work within the home— family allowances, widows’ pensions, and maternal health care—were generally provided to the wives of workers. Those benefits thus reaffirmed women’s status as dependents. Given the indirect nature of women’s contributions, their rewards would also be indirect. For instance, although family allowances were meant to support wives and children, they were paid to male laborers.Many women undoubtedly saw their services within the home as important to their country as well as their families, and certainly many regarded family wages as rewards for their critical services within the home. In fact, workers’ wives often demanded the payment of family allowances directly to them. The feminist organization Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh, Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women) argued for a law guaranteeing the payment of family allowances to wives. Similarly, working-class activists who participated in a women’s group in the nitrate mining community of Ricaventura saw maternity care for the wives of CSO-insured workers as something “Organized women” had obtained for themselves and not simply as an entitlement for their husbands. However, political and labor elites tended not to see these benefits as a reward for women’s service. As one observer noted of family allowances, “On the part of workers, the family wage has been received with great enthusiasm . . . because the family wage constitutes a recognition of the social value of the worker as a family head.”20Given that women were often not deemed full citizens who made important contributions to the nation, it is not surprising that popular-front officials saw women’s well-being not as the direct responsibility of the state but as the private responsibility of men family members who should protect them economically and sexually. Employees of social service agencies spent inordinate energy tracking down recalcitrant husbands and trying to ensure that they supported their wives, and state efforts to enforce men’s responsibility toward women and children arguably constituted the single most important state policy aimed toward those groups. In contrast, state agents only sporadically found women jobs—usually in domestic service—and rarely insisted on women’s right to support themselves and their children. The state thus reinforced women’s status as dependents.21Finally, the rights of women were circumscribed not only by excluding them from wage work and by denying the importance to the polity of their domestic labor and political mobilizations but also by belittling the types of paid work that women most commonly performed. Of those women who worked for wages, few did industrial work (see table 2). Most did industrial work at home, engaged in artesanal production, or participated in domestic service and laundering (see table 3). Of 144,589 blue-collar women paying social security taxes in 1945, for example, 17.3 percent were self-employed (as opposed to 3.6 percent of men); and 58.8 percent of the non-self-employed were domestic servants.22 Like mothering and unpaid domestic labor, these occupations (which official tabulations never fully documented) were neither well regulated nor recognized as socially useful. In 1935 the Consejo Superior del Trabajo—a state advisory board that included representatives of labor, capital, and the state—proposed legislation that exempted domestic servants from minimum wage dispositions and allowed a 30 percent reduction in living wages “for women who work as obreras in jobs proper to their sex.”23 Even labor leader María González, herself a domestic servant, denigrated domestic service by characterizing it as “unproductive” and “semifeudal.” José Vizcarra, a popular-front supporter and CSO physician, asked of the limited legislation regulating domestic service: “Have these social laws . . . made domestic servants into citizens who are incorporated into the benefits of society?” He answered himself with a rotund no. In short, women were identified with either the home or with informal and intermittent work and were therefore marked as dependent and subordinate.24Besides insisting that women were unproductive and therefore undeserving of direct state aid, labor and leftist leaders advanced the notion that male industrial workers were reputable and deserving by differentiating them from itinerant, criminal, ignorant, lazy, and unmanly men. Carmen Lazo, whose father worked at the Chuquicamata copper mine, distinguished her presumably respectable family from the rural southerners who migrated to the mining community where she lived in the 1930s. “At that time,” she recalled in an interview, “there was a lot of insecurity in the [mining] camps because a lot of people from the south who were not exactly workers [obreros] would arrive, and they would rob the workers, assault them.” Using a similar notion of respectability, in 1941 workers at the El Teniente copper mine demanded the reinstatement of quintessentially respectable labor leaders who had been laid off and prohibited from coming into the mining camp. “Are these workers bandits, assassins, or rabble?” they asked. “No! . . . [T]hey are honorable laborers who should be work
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