Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Continuity Despite Change: The Politics of Labor Regulation in Latin America

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2874773

1527-1900

María Lorena Cook,

Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies

Economic pressures led Latin American governments to restructure their economic and social policies in the 1980s and 1990s. They also threatened to transform labor laws. Scholarship on labor law change focused on this reform period, tracking where change occurred and trying to explain labor law outcomes. Yet researchers found that labor law proved remarkably resistant to large-scale change. And despite similar pressures for “flexibilization,” convergence of labor law regimes across the region did not occur.Matthew Carnes's book is the latest addition to this scholarship. His research aims to fill several gaps. First, he argues that by focusing on the reform period of the 1980s and 1990s, previous studies were unable to account for the stable evolution of labor codes since their inception. Carnes studies the origins and evolution of labor codes from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This long view reveals a surprising continuity in labor laws, given the political and economic upheavals that most countries in the region endured.Second, Carnes looks to economic factors to explain the particular configurations of labor codes. Specifically, he considers skill levels of workers in the “preincorporation” phase and argues that labor laws were fashioned in response to labor market dynamics generated by these skill distributions. This unique explanation for labor law's design is essential to Carnes's main argument, which is that the distribution of skills undergirds enduring labor codes. Labor laws that do not correspond to the skill distribution of a country's workers will be short-lived; pressure will mount to push discordant labor laws back into equilibrium. Carnes also incorporates a political variable, the “organizational capacity of labor,” which he sees as connected to skills and critical in explaining the emergence of protective labor legislation, or its absence. These two factors, skill distribution and labor's organizational capacity, shape the origins of labor codes and act as constraints on their subsequent evolution. According to Carnes, this explains why Latin American labor laws are diverse but also relatively stable over time.Carnes's third important contribution is a data set of labor laws in 18 countries of Latin America. He codes individual employment and collective labor laws in each country at three distinct points in time: before the introduction of reforms (1980s), during the period of most reform pressure (1990s), and afterward, in the 2000s. He then tracks the extent to which countries move from the 1980s starting point in the degree of protections afforded by individual and collective labor laws. Most countries did not move far, a finding that Carnes highlights to indicate the stability of labor laws even in a period of strong reform pressures.Carnes also constructs a model of four ideal types of labor law regime that incorporate different degrees of protection in individual and collective labor laws. The four types are “market” (no labor regulation, no existing cases), “professional” (focus on individual protections), “encompassing” (focus on collective protections), and “corporatist” (both individual and collective protections). The second half of the book is devoted to historical narratives of countries that fall within each type: Chile (professional), Peru (encompassing), and Argentina (corporatist). Here the author hopes to tease out the mechanisms by which skills, labor's organizational capacity, and labor law change interact over time.This is an ambitious agenda, made more challenging by the number of studies that already populate the field. Rather than overturn previous research, Carnes's book extends and deepens it, both by expanding the time frame and by applying quantitative tools that reinforce and refine elements of earlier work.Still, Carnes's claim that skill distributions are relatively stable raises some questions. The period that Carnes covers includes important changes in labor markets: the shift from rural to urban industrial labor, followed by the decline of manufacturing and the increase of service-sector jobs at the end of the twentieth century. If skills are important in understanding labor codes, why don't these shifts lead to corresponding changes in labor laws? And some labor codes (Mexico's, for example) never accurately reflected their labor markets yet remained unchanged.Carnes also acknowledges the political nature of labor law, but his account of the evolution of labor laws is bloodless; conflict is largely absent. Agency (of elites or labor) matters little in the end, since labor codes realign to their equilibrium point. The author assumes that workers preferred more or less protective regulation, depending on their skill levels and collective capacity. Yet rather than push for protections, organized workers often opposed early state efforts to regulate (and control) labor.Carnes's book is an important addition to the literature on Latin American labor laws. His effort to provide a coherent explanation for the evolution of labor codes raises new questions as well, inviting more scholars to explore this complex topic.