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Labor Politics in Latin America: Democracy and Worker Organization in the Neoliberal Era

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7787577

1527-1900

Steve Ellner,

Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies

This volume contains a wealth of information about the labor movements and government labor policies of individual Latin American nations since the neoliberal period of the 1990s. Each chapter is written by one of the book's three authors. In addition to the book's historical overview (by Viviana Patroni), chapters deal with Chile (by Paul Posner), Mexico (by Jean François Mayer), Argentina (by Patroni), Brazil (by Mayer), and Venezuela (by Posner). The book formulates one central thesis and explores how it plays out in each of the five countries under study. The authors argue that the flexibilization of the workforce (for example, provisions favoring temporary employment) carried out during the neoliberal years had profound negative social and political effects, which for the most part went contrary to the stated goals of policymakers. Flexibilization tended to increase the size of the informal economy, itself a “long-standing feature in the region,” and proved to be ineffective “as a strategy for the promotion of employment” (pp. 27, 29). Related side effects included the increase in inequality (particularly in Chile), the normalization of precarious employment, and the weakening of organized labor as well as (with the exception of Brazil) the organic ties between unions and prolabor parties.In the concluding chapter, the authors suggest that flexibilization is best understood “as a means of subverting the organizational strength of workers” in that it shifted “the balance of power in favor of employers” (p. 202). While organized labor was weakened, there was no “commensurate increase in political or economic influence for workers in the informal sector” (p. 207). These findings regarding the overall impact of flexibilization refute the “prevalent school of thought” in the “literature addressing market dynamics” that flexibilization reforms “create economic prosperity, enhance labor productivity, [and] increase formal sector employment” (p. 135).In the historical overview and the conclusion, the authors present a comparative analysis of their findings. Of the five countries studied, Chile under the Augusto Pinochet regime stands out as having gone the furthest in the flexibilization of its labor force, with consequences up to the present day. Posner attributes the retention of Pinochet's antiworker measures to “the legacy of the military regime's efforts to privilege business at the expense of labor” (p. 69). Mayer notes a similar degree of continuity in the Mexican case in that “the legacy of structural adjustment and authoritarianism deeply affected labor relations in Mexico's post-transition period” beginning with the Partido Acción Nacional's advent to power in 2000 (p. 100). The authors argue that Brazil stands in sharp contrast with Chile and Mexico in that relations between labor and their affiliated political party were not radically undermined. In the first place, the authoritarian military government after 1964 was more committed to import substitution and adopted a less extreme version of neoliberalism than elsewhere. In the second place, the “new unionism” that was associated with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and formed the backbone of the Workers' Party spearheaded the drive to restore democracy. It is thus not surprising that Lula and the Workers' Party “continued to see labor as an important ally” after they came to power, resulting in “more positive party-labor ties” than in other nations on the continent (p. 206).The book contributes significantly to our understanding of the Pink Tide governments' social base of support in the early years of the twenty-first century. Pink Tide leaders who came to power in Argentina and Venezuela, as Patroni and Posner discuss in their respective chapters, prioritized the marginalized workers of the informal economy and were less generous to, and more distanced from, the organized working class. This shift from the traditional Left's emphasis on the proletariat was the direct result of the weakening of the labor movement and rapid growth of the informal economy triggered by flexibilization. Patroni points to diverse aspects of the social orientation of the governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. Not only was the Peronist-dominated labor movement highly fragmented, but it was not aligned with Néstor Kirchner's Frente para la Victoria faction within the Partido Justicialista. Both Kirchners thus sought “new alliances to extend the government's basis of support” by reaching out to the piquetero movement consisting of unemployed workers and the Peronist political organization La Cámpora, representing mainly students and youth in general (p. 125).The authors point to the convergence between the strategies pursued by Pink Tide governments and the neostructuralism defended by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which over recent decades has advocated a pragmatic approach toward globalization in order to reap maximum benefits from international markets. Along these lines, Pink Tide governments took advantage of primary commodity exports as a means to seek “pragmatic ways of addressing the broad and pressing need to increase economic growth and reduce poverty” (p. 34).In short, this is an empirically strong and cohesive volume. All chapters focus on well-defined labor issues in distinct national contexts in order to apply the book's principal theses to neoliberal and postneoliberal periods.