Mark S. Anner opens Solidarity Transformed by referencing two wrenching changes that have transformed the world for workers: neoliberalism—the scaling back of welfare states, industrial policies, and labor protections—and globalization. He questions how these shifts have affected workers and how worker organizations in diverse settings have responded.

These two questions have occasioned broad debate in the last two decades. Unfortunately, much of the debate has been marked by a clash between two oversimplified positions. On one side, there has been a portrayal of inexorable change, with inexorable consequences for workers. Some depict this ineluctable spread and disembedding of the global market in triumphalist terms,Footnote ¹ whereas others point to dire consequences for workers,Footnote ² but they share the view that little appears likely to derail this process. On the opposite side, other analysts have suggested that a reembedding of the market is almost equally inevitable, either because of Marxian class struggle or Polanyian countermovement.Footnote ³ I hasten to add that all of these authors have contributed vital insights to the study of globalization and neoliberalism. Even so, taking these views to their logical conclusions leads to a clash between alternative structurally rooted inevitabilities. A more promising line of analysis takes the evolution of the relative power of labor, capital, and the state as structurally anchored but politically determined. This leaves considerable space for political economic contingency, and indeed one conclusion from this line of analysis is that political intervention itself can and does reshape the structural terrain, whether in the direction of neoliberal inequality and competition or of the developmental state.Footnote ⁴

Latin America seems like promising ground on which to advance this alternative analysis. Most of Latin America plunged into extreme versions of neoliberalism and dependent global integration in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the countries, at least by population, swung beginning in the 2000s toward “pink tide” attempts to moderate neoliberalism's legacy of wealth disparities and marginalized populations, and to reassert control over global economic ties. At the same time, Latin America's second-largest country, Mexico, has resisted the rosy renaissance and continued to hew to a fairly fundamentalist version of neoliberalism, and other large countries either remain firmly in the neoliberal column (Colombia) or teeter between policy directions (Chile). In light of these recent events, neither “inevitability” looks very inevitable in Latin America.

The four books under review here all explore this politically contingent middle ground between the “immovable object” of global capitalism and the “unstoppable force” of societal and proletarian countermovement. All four seize on Anner's questions, critical at a global scale, and examine them in Latin America in particular. All four take special aim at some version of the narrative of inexorable and overwhelming economic and political transformations rendering workers and their organizations defenseless. All four creatively bring varied data to bear on the questions, spotlighting different dimensions of contingency while acknowledging the persistent influence of economic structure.

With a bit of squeezing and prodding, we can even fashion the four books into a single, only slightly disjointed, narrative chain. Michelle L. Dion's Workers and Welfare traces the rise and so far partial fall of the welfare state. Dion sets the stage for the recent effects of neoliberalism and globalization, asking why expansive welfare states arose in the global South in the first place, even in the country that author Mario Vargas Llosa called “the perfect dictatorship,” Mexico. Layna Mosley, in Labor Rights and Multinational Production, picks up the thread by exploring the impacts of globalization and different varieties of global capitalism on workers throughout the global South. Tamara Kay, in NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism, and Anner examine organized labor's response, and particularly transnational aspects of that response. Kay inquires why unions engage in transnationalism at all, and both Anner and Kay query the determinants of distinct labor strategies.

The four authors also come up with a fundamentally similar set of answers to their questions. Economics matters: The economic sector in question and the mode of globalization make a difference. But the ideology of state actors and labor organizations is also important. And institutions exert an independent influence.

That said, these books treat related subjects in very different ways. Dion follows one country over a long historical sweep. She also, unlike the others, endogenizes institutions, looking at them as a key outcome as well as a causal factor. Mosley relies primarily on large-n statistical analyses that comprise the entire South. Worker strategies and actions largely stay in the black box as she scrutinizes the actions of multinational corporations (MNCs) and governments. Kay's case is a three-country free trade agreement (the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA) that includes one Latin American country; she studies the steps taken by US and Canadian unions as much as Mexican ones. Her outcome of interest is the intensity of cross-national labor cooperation. Anner's comparison scans unions in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, and Honduras, parsing multiple dimensions of worker strategy, including domestic as well as transnational lines of action.

Let us return to the start of my deliberately contrived narrative, with Dion's take on the rise of the welfare state. The author points out that Mexico's welfare state trajectory is an unexpected one. Mexico forged social insurance programs targeted at industrial workers at a time when the country's population was overwhelmingly agrarian. Mexico expanded its welfare state at the same time as it consolidated authoritarian one-party rule. And even when the dominant parties—first one, and later two—embraced neoliberalism and sought to dismantle much of the social insurance edifice and shift to need-based social welfare programs, they found it difficult to do so, and so far have only partially succeeded.

Dion's explanation for this trajectory is straightforward. While most analysts have emphasized the subordination of unions to the corporatist state, she argues that labor buy-in was critical to the coalition underpinning the Institutional Revolutionary Party's “perfect dictatorship,” so that unions had some power to make, and win, demands on the state even during Mexico's most authoritarian phases in the postrevolutionary period. She also posits that the policy shift to a need-based welfare system was not simply the result of changing ideology: In post-import-substitution Mexico, the formal working class that benefits from employer-based social insurance shrank, and the informal working class grew; thus, counting votes pointed to a redirection of the welfare system. The reduced importance of the industrial and public-sector workforce meant that their unions were not able to block reform entirely—but these constituencies retained enough power to delay reform for years, as well as to limit the scope of reform up till now, with the result that there is currently a dual welfare system including both old and new elements.

On a theoretical level, Dion seeks to synthesize class–coalition analyses and punctuated equilibrium accounts of the evolution of welfare states, which discuss institutional change in terms of long periods of inertia punctuated by exogenous shock-induced reform. She suggests that ruling coalition partners, particularly unions, reshaped Mexican welfare laws frequently over the last century, but also that welfare institutions, once in place, created a variety of vested interests (including providers as well as recipients) with a stake in defending them. To drive home the point that welfare system change walks on two feet, she briefly invokes the added examples of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

Dion accomplishes much in Workers and Welfare, which certainly presents the most thorough and comprehensive history of social welfare in Mexico of which I am aware. Her thorough demonstration that expansion of the welfare state was a response to explicit union demands, and not just a preemptive attempt to head off dissent, is compelling, and adds to the literature showing Mexican unions as proactive agents, not simply corporatist puppets. She marshals historical, quantitative, and comparative data to make her case.

Dion's historical analysis is more convincing than the other two components of her analysis, however. The quantitative (time series) analysis does in general show a link between labor activism and subsequent expansion of welfare, a link that ends or even reverses around 1980. But as is common with quantitative data, some of the key results are less than robust. Perhaps most disconcerting is an upshift of two to three orders of magnitude in late-period coefficients on the lagged number of strike petitions (which signal intent to strike) when a fiscal centralization variable is added—with all the coefficients involved achieving p-values under 0.001 (p. 163). On another front, the comparative analysis squeezes three countries into 28 pages (pp. 223–50); the resulting sprint through comparative Latin American history is more suggestive than definitive. For example, while the author takes care to contextualize political coalitions within the changing economy in Mexico, the narratives for the other three countries are stripped-down political accounts with little context. Also missing, in this case for all four countries, is a discussion of the ways in which the recent commodity boom and tax reform have helped underwrite the expansion of need-based welfare. Still, these are small gaps in a bounteous contribution to our understanding of welfare states in Latin America—and elsewhere.

Mosley shifts the focus to economic factors, and to a world stage. The cover photo of an Indonesian athletic shoe assembly line signals that this book does not focus on Latin America, although it does devote its one in-depth case study to Costa Rica. As a dependent variable, Mosley selects collective labor rights, as proxied by a score that diminishes with reported violations of workers' “legal right as well as their de facto ability to organize, bargain collectively, and strike” (p. 4). She emphasizes two theoretical arguments. On the one hand, multinational production through foreign direct investment (FDI) should lead to improved labor rights due to technological upgrading, reputation effects, and multinationals' efforts to harmonize practices transnationally. On the other hand, multinational subcontracting should lead to declines in labor rights, given competitive pressures to cut costs. Cross-section time-series analysis for 90 lower-income countries from 1985 to 2002 yields support for both hypotheses. Mosley further hypothesizes that a variety of domestic economic and political variables should mediate these MNC effects, and that the sectoral and technological composition of multinational production and the source country of FDI should likewise affect rights outcomes. Again, she finds some empirical confirmation.

On the terrain of politics, left governments, democracy, and the absence of civil conflict are associated with stronger labor rights. (The prevalence of human rights NGOs is associated with worse labor rights records, but presumably, the NGOs are the consequence of rights violations rather than their cause.) Economically, higher-technology and more capital-intensive producers, and customers or investors with ample labor rights in their home countries, are linked to greater collective rights. Finally, Mosley presents a case study of Costa Rican multinational production, illustrating how the well-known electronics cluster anchored by a giant Intel chip plant has a relatively strong labor rights record, but domestic politics, institutions, and sectoral mix impede broader diffusion of labor rights advances.

Mosley deserves credit for the sheer scale of her enterprise. She summarizes theory and literature on a dozen determinants of global labor rights. She has painstakingly created a completely new, authoritative, collective labor rights variable, which distinguishes among types of collective rights and between legally codified rights and rights observed in practice (p. 120). She has also gathered an impressive collection of other economic and political variables from varied sources, including FDI statistics from individual sending countries. Her analysis proceeds from theory to descriptive statistics on labor rights violations (themselves highly informative), thence to statistical inference, and finally to an in-depth country case study. Labor Rights and Multinational Production will serve as a benchmark for quantitative global labor analysis, and richly merits inclusion in global labor course syllabi.

While Mosley's ambition and reach is laudable, data availability issues and mixed results undermine the case for her central argument. On the dependent variable side, as she rightly emphasizes, reported violations of collective labor rights constitute a reduced-form measure, compressing into a single variable the degree to which workers attempt to organize, the degree to which they are blocked in this attempt via rights violations, and the degree to which these violations are observed and reported. The legal codification variable does not suffer as much from this process-compression issue (laws barring organizing can exist even in the absence of worker attempts, and are more readily observed than violations in practice), but as Mosley also notes, in many countries labor laws are primarily honored in the breach.

This book also faces issues on the independent variable side. In the absence of data on subcontracting proper, Mosley's proxy for multinational subcontracting is the scale of trade flows. But trade flows include mineral and agricultural commodity exports and production by directly owned MNC subsidiaries (for example, Delphi auto parts production as well as maquiladora output in Mexico). Mosley measures FDI more directly. She argues (p. 138) that FDI flows, rather than stocks, are likely to have the greatest effect on worker rights, setting the stage for a finding of statistically significant coefficients on the flow variable but not the stock one. However, it seems more plausible to this reader that the stock of violations should be tied to the stock of FDI; indeed, a correlation between labor rights and FDI flows suggests the possibility of reverse causality. Moreover, even the coefficient on FDI flows lapses into statistical insignificance when Mosley adds political variables (p. 153), looks at rights law and practices as separate dependent variables (p. 162), or incorporates a country's sectoral composition or FDI source country (p. 188). In short, the case for negative rights impacts of subcontracting and positive rights impacts of FDI is less than decisive. Plus, in her basic specification (p. 152), regional dummy variables seem to have much larger impacts than any other variables, suggesting that domestic factors swamp global ones—a finding that appears consistent with the results of the Costa Rica case study.

Finally, Mosley at times seems overly anxious to draw conclusions from ambiguous results, as when she affirms that “[trade] engagement … is far preferable to sanctioning” (p. 208) based on a finding of higher labor rights when more exports flow to countries with high labor standards—even though sanctions could be one channel of influence for high-labor-standards export destinations. Overall, though, the book is a magisterial synthesis of theory and evidence on global production.

Kay's NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism takes us back onto the turf of qualitative analysis, and shifts the spotlight to labor strategies responding to changes in the rules of the global economic game. Kay points out that although NAFTA critics predicted that the free trade pact would render solidarity among Mexican, US, and Canadian unions impossible, the reverse was true: The onset of NAFTA revitalized transnational solidarity in North America. To explain this surprise, she bridges two literatures: a long-standing empirically grounded theoretical literature on the determinants of national-level social movements (specifically, theories of the political opportunity structure) and a new, booming, but almost completely empirical literature on transnational social movements. She uses transnational union alliances around NAFTA (a case composed of many smaller cases of particular alliances) to develop a theory of the impact of the political opportunity structure on social movement formation at the transnational level.

Kay advances two main arguments, building on different kinds of comparisons. First, she uses a time-series comparison (when did movements arise?) to argue that NAFTA triggered transnational labor alliances by creating new “transnational institutional fields,” that is, global governance institutions that share some characteristics with national states. (In particular, transnational institutions with some degree of accountability created opportunities for organizing.) This is a highly original proposition that takes us onto exciting new theoretical territory. Second, she uses a cross-sectional comparison (which unions formed transnational alliances?) to argue that it was primarily political and ideological orientation, rather than economic interests, that determined which actors would build enduring forms of transnational action.

The main strength and main limitation of this book are its singular focus on labor movements around NAFTA. The limitation, of course, is that the theory derived from this (meta-)case is not tested against other cases. Nonetheless, what Kay does is plenty for one monograph. She presents extremely rich, detailed knowledge of the NAFTA case, which renders her arguments compelling and her narrative fascinating. She draws on an extensive set of interviews with a large number of key union actors, plus relevant documentary evidence and accounts from the media and other literature. She supplements discursive analysis with a brief excursion into more formal analytical method (Charles Ragin's qualitative comparative method) in order to sort through why some unions formed solid North America–wide alliances whereas others did not.

On the whole, Kay's historical-comparative analysis of the reasons that North American transnational labor solidarity arose when it did is more satisfying than her cross-sectional analysis of the union alliances that formed and deepened. Her blow-by-blow account concerning how unions across the three countries grappled with the new institutional spaces and structures created by NAFTA makes a convincing case that it was precisely these institutions and (limited) institutional accountability that were the keys to concrete labor solidarity. In terms of which alliances formed, she identifies as necessary conditions the presence of a progressive Mexican union and either progressive Canadian and US unions, or an industry vulnerable to foreign trade (pp. 230–35). The problem is that there is only limited variation in two of the variables. Only one of the 10 cases summarized on page 234 is not exposed to cross-border trade (the exception is telecommunications, though one could argue that the growth of FDI in this sector may have had a similar effect). Even more crucially, progressive Mexican unions are such a small pool (she identifies the small Authentic Labor Front [FAT] and the much larger Telephone Workers' Union [STRM]) that it is hard to tell how important the other putatively necessary conditions are. The US United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers may not have had consistently progressive leadership over this period, but they might have built strong and lasting alliances like the United Electrical Workers (which partnered with the FAT) and the Communications Workers of America (which partnered with the STRM) if they had similarly faced Mexican counterpart unions of comparable size and sectoral focus.

Anner broadens the analytical focus beyond Kay's Mexico to consider Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, and Honduras, but narrows it on other dimensions, contemplating only the apparel and auto industries and principally examining the home-country unions themselves as actors. Not surprisingly, Anner's flow-chart is more complicated than Kay's, but again ideology and economics matter greatly. In Solidarity Transformed, he identifies four main outcomes. In buyer-driven supply chains (apparel, in El Salvador and Honduras), left unions launch transnational activist campaigns (typically short-term pushes that name and shame brands farther up the supply chain), whereas moderate unions rely on clientelism supplemented with a “radical flank” strategy that involves marketing themselves to businesses as the preferable alternative to their left counterparts. In supplier-driven supply chains (auto, in Argentina and Brazil), left unions mobilize transnational labor networks (long-term alliances with sister auto unions in the home regions of the multinationals), while moderate labor organizations favor microcorporatism, labor–management cooperation at the enterprise level. The choice between radical and moderate paths itself depends in part on the degree of labor protection offered by the state, with unions shut out by the state more likely to adopt left strategies.

Like Mosley, Anner gets points for ambition. His construction of four detailed, interview-based country case studies is unique among the four books reviewed, which otherwise are limited to large-n statistical comparison (Mosley) or case studies of a single country (Dion) or a single ensemble of countries (Kay)—with the exception of Dion's brief detour through three other Latin American countries. Anner explains the evolution of supply chains and the global division of labor in two major globalized industries. He studies multiple strategic outcomes, including both left unions' attempts to change the rules of the game and conservative unions' attempts to forge workable compromises with capital and the state. In addition, he follows major union groupings over 20 years, from the 1980s to the 2000s, showing how changes in economic structure and state stance, in interaction with union learning processes, led to strategic shifts by unions and the consolidation of new strategies. Anner's accounts consequently comprise greater complexity and contingency than those of Kay (whose main outcome variables are the presence or absence of alliances, and their intensity and weight), though they are not as immersed in historical contingency as Dion's century-long narrative.

For the most part, Anner's discussion is clear, crisp, and compelling. The small number of cases does leave open the question of the extent to which the patterns he detects can be generalized to other countries and other sectors. Particularly vulnerable in this regard is his discussion of the transnational labor network strategy, which hangs entirely on one union in one industry in one country (Brazil's CUT [Unified Workers' Central] federation affiliate in the auto industry). In his concluding chapter, Anner discusses generalizability to nonmanufacturing industries, and includes a careful disclaimer: “[The] presentation of four labor responses is not meant to be a rigid categorization of labor's options, where each group fits neatly into one box or another” (p. 168). Still, there is much room between this set of four country-sector case studies and Mosley's large-n analysis (in which labor organizations are not measured as actors except for a transitory sighting in the Costa Rica case study; pp. 221–22) for added country case studies to further test and develop Anner's hypotheses.

When we view the four books as a whole, what do we learn about economic, ideological, and institutional influences on labor outcomes? It is important to keep in mind that the books target distinct types of outcomes—welfare state policies (Dion), labor rights (Mosley), and labor strategy (Kay and Anner)—so that findings are not truly comparable. Nonetheless, on the economic front, all four authors report regularities that are similar in spirit, even if they offer different explanations. Mosley finds collective labor rights positively associated with foreign direct investment and high-tech and capital-intensive industries, and negatively linked with subcontracting (but with the caveats noted here). Anner finds greater traction for labor strategies in autos (more capital-intensive and with a larger FDI component) than in apparel (where the reverse is true), though he frames this in terms of the difference between producer- and consumer-driven supply chains (a distinction that, when you dig deeper, is in fact linked to those same economic characteristics). Kay links back to Mosley's point about cross-border competition in subcontracted industries, except that in her strategy-focused research, she finds that economic competition can spur preemptive union collaboration. Dion directs her gaze at a different boundary, between formal manufacturing and public-sector jobs and informal, largely service jobs, finding both stronger labor organizations and a thicker welfare state in the locus and heyday of formal work.

The four authors' findings on ideology are not surprising but noteworthy nonetheless, not least because they demonstrate that ideology does matter along multiple dimensions. Anner tells us that, as expected, left governments do more to protect workers and left unions are more likely to build transnational alliances. Mosley replicates the first finding, and Kay replicates the second.

On the role of institutions, the books' contributions are more dispersed. Kay generates the most striking observation, that the creation of transnational institutions with some degree of accountability fuels transnational activism. Anner's point that left governments offer more labor protection has a corollary, which is that when states are more supportive, labor is more likely to play an “inside game” of pressing the state for reforms than an “outside game” of building transnational alliances. Mosley informs us that democracy is linked to stronger worker rights, whereas civil conflict is tied to weaker ones (with Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, as Exhibit A). Dion shifts the analysis to how (welfare state) institutions are formed through political bargaining, and then how institutions generate interests in their continuation, as well as interests opposed to them, in path-dependent fashion. Finally, labor relations rules and labor organizations are themselves important institutions in the labor sphere, and so all of these books are telling us something about the complex interactions and feedbacks among institutions.

Three of these books draw solely on Latin American data, and the fourth caps its argument with a case study of Costa Rica. Is Latin America distinctive? Are labor dynamics completely different in, say, China, Indonesia, or Nigeria? In Mosley's estimates, Latin America has the worst regional effect except for the neighboring Caribbean. But these effects control for democracy and civil conflict, one or both of which would cut against labor rights in China, Indonesia, and Nigeria in many (in some cases all) of the years under study. Certainly, casual observation suggests some parallels in the Chinese case. As China has climbed the industrial value chain, labor has become more powerful and has been granted more rights, consistent with Mosley's and Anner's stories. Echoing Anner and Kay, there has been a division between moderate unions closely tied to the state and to the enterprises themselves (the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which has a monopoly on union representation) and worker-rights NGOs that mobilize transnational solidarity.

Finally, we can ask, with Anner (p. 169), “Did these new labor strategies make a difference in the lives of workers and the structures of capital?” To the extent that we are concerned about labor rights, should we be optimistic or pessimistic? As is usual in social science, the answer is “it depends.” All four authors agree that the labor consequences of neoliberalism and globalization are not inevitable, but that different settings (economic, political, institutional) offer different types and scales of opportunities.

On the glass-half-empty side of the ledger, these volumes chronicle many defeats for organized labor. Kay spotlights transnational union cooperation in bringing complaints to the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), the body charged with administering the “labor side-agreement” to NAFTA. But unions were not able to score any major victories within NAALC. Dion traces Mexico's arc from growing labor strength and expanding formal sector welfare to a reversal on both fronts (though with some expansion of need-based welfare). Anner acknowledges that transnational labor victories in globalized apparel production are often transitory, because employers typically react to the successful establishment of a union and improvement in wages and working conditions by closing the plant, often to relocate elsewhere. Mosley shows (as summarized on p. 121) that average labor-rights scores declined across the world during 1985–2002.

Still, there is a glass-half-full side to labor's track record in Latin America and worldwide as well. These researchers uncover unexpected projections of labor power: The authoritarian Mexican government had to heed unions' demands; a free trade agreement expected to splinter transnational labor solidarity actually created new footholds for such solidarity. Anner documents that across Latin America, unions of both left and right creatively developed new strategies for changed circumstances, innovating even during periods of dictatorship and civil war. Transnational strategies incubated by left unions in collaboration with unions and NGOs in the global North have, to some extent, succeeded in rewriting the rules of the game: For example, apparel producer codes of conduct have (in limited fashion) raised sector-wide standards in production destined for Europe and the United State in ways that transcend the closures of individual plants. And the panoply of case studies in these books reminds us that politics is plastic. Mosley finds a positive labor rights effect of a left government that is comparable in size to Latin America's regional disadvantage relative to the most positive estimated regional effect (which happens to be in North Africa and the Middle East). If the left ideology bounce continues to hold, the “pink tide” that has swept Latin America since the end of Mosley's analysis would be expected to lift the region's labor rights. Even if the long-term trend line of workplace rights in the global South remains negative, these books point to opportunities, levers, traditions, and capacities that worker organizations, in alliances both transnational and domestic, can use to expand and consolidate labor rights.

What opportunities and levers does this research reveal for social scientists studying labor in the global economy? What are particularly important parts of the picture to flesh out? I would point to four. The first is methodological: More comparative case studies like Anner's are needed to fill the analytical space between single-country case studies like Dion's study (and in many ways Kay's, though three countries are involved) and large-n analyses like those of Mosley. The other three types of needed research directions focus in related ways on qualitative turning points and tipping points that make political outcomes so contingent.

To start with, how and in what circumstances does political action make lasting changes in the economic structure? South Korea's land reform and Cuba's nationalization of industry wrought such changes, but to some extent so did the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) in the United States, by helping to spark a drive for productivity (to reduce the use of now-expensive labor) that rapidly shrank the importance of manufacturing employment in the US economy. While we still need to understand more about coups d'état (Korea) and revolutions (Cuba), instances of shifts within a reform framework are particularly interesting. A related second question about turning points: How can we better understand the moments of political innovation that, even without changing the economic structure, make it no longer dispositive? For example, Cardenismo in Mexico gave Mexican unions a voice and a place in the polity that conferred leverage but also limits, as Dion shows; in Bolivia, the recent shift in the axis of labor mobilization and in the anchor of populist coalitions from a shrinking industrial-extractive working class to a majority indigenous population created the basis for new political victories. What political innovation could allow the informal majorities of the Latin American, and world, workforce to build a robust voice? Finally, how do politics and policy, either intentionally or unintentionally, change the political balance of forces, as when the Mexican welfare state created new vested interests (Dion) or free trade treaties created new arenas for transnational action (Kay)?

These four books address the four research needs in various ways, but our understanding of labor politics in the context of new forms of globalization is still at its beginnings.