For Juan Manuel Palacio, one of the editors of Labor Justice across the Americas, the aim of this volume is to bring together labour history and legal history, an overlap that has all too often been overlooked in the related scholarship. By thinking simultaneously through labour and legal history, the volume's authors point towards a new way of conceptualising the historical process of state formation across the Americas, while remaining cognisant of the particularities of each country. As a whole, this volume succeeds in these efforts, and it does so in part due to the broad and helpful introduction and opening chapter by Palacio, as well as the short and provocative conclusion by Leon Fink.
The chronology of labour courts roughly maps into two phases. The first, from the turn of the century through to the 1920s, marks some of the first attempts at working through the rise of the social question and increasingly militant labour organising via some types of legal institutions that offered help regarding labour disputes, workplace accidents and a host of other issues. Influenced in part by different political or religious ideas and through international connections within the Americas and beyond, especially through the International Labour Organization (ILO), this first period is marked just as much by its inroads into this new realm of the state as it is by its limitations and failures. In the second period, from the Great Depression through to the Second World War, many of these initial attempts were reformulated and the place of labour departments within the state grew in importance. In the broadest of strokes, this common chronology functions across the chapters.
In a book with ten chapters covering much of the hemisphere, the specificities of each country covered cannot be elaborated upon in a book review. Still, there are some overlapping aspects – to which Palacio calls attention (pp. 35–7) – that should be emphasised. One is that of the ILO, and in particular the figure of Moisés Poblete Troncoso. Poblete Troncoso, a Chilean lawyer who studied at the University of Chile, published, alongside Oscar Álvarez Andrews, Legislación social obrera chilena in 1924 while working as the director of the Oficina del Trabajo, one of these early state institutions tasked with studying and intervening to improve the lives of working people. A few years later Poblete Troncoso authored a report on social legislation in Latin America at the request of the ILO. In 1936, at an ILO conference in Santiago, a Peruvian delegate asked Poblete Troncoso to conduct research on ‘indigenous workers’ in Peru. In his 1938 report, Poblete Troncoso not only argued for the need to improve the economic situation of indigenous people, but also located indigenous people in ‘practically all imaginable jobs’ (p. 173). An essay on the role of Poblete Troncoso within the ILO and the new labour legislation and state bureaucracies of the Americas could easily have made its way into the volume as a microhistory of the transnational elements of labour justice, and the work of Juan Carlos Yáñez Andrade would be as worthwhile a beginning point as any.
Rossana Barragán Romano's chapter covering Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru is an example of what this volume does so well: showing both chronological similarities and differences. While any one of the chapters could easily be expanded into book-length treatments, Barragán has taken on the task of working through three countries in one essay, and does so quite well through the shifting dynamic of inclusion/exclusion of indigenous peoples. Diego Ortúzar and Angela Vergara's chapter on Chile excellently blends archival material covering various parts of Chile with a broader take on the trajectory of the twentieth century. Leon Fink successfully disaggregates labour and political parties for the case of the United States. Angela de Castro Gomes and Fernando Teixeira da Silva take their time in explaining corporatism and analysing large amounts of quantitative data in their chapter on Brazil. For the case of Costa Rica, Ronny J. Viales-Hurtado and David Díaz-Arias reveal how labour militancy resulted in continued reforms in labour's favour throughout the 1920s. Viales-Hurtado and Díaz-Arias also point to the central place of labour organising to ‘confront’ the neoliberal challenge (p. 136). Other essays in this volume cover Canada, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.
There is one thing I find somewhat odd in this volume. Transnationally and comparatively across the Americas, many of the authors refer as well to an Atlantic world as a key geographic unit. Yet, at the same time, much of the Americas sit on the Pacific, and two of the cases outside of the Americas that consistently return as particularly influential to this history are Australia and New Zealand. This is a small quibble and tangential to the central arguments of the book, but it also points to an Atlantic assumption that can sometimes distort the geographical imagination of the Americas.
As Fink succinctly writes in the conclusion, the various iterations of labour courts in the Americas were always built on a certain amount of exclusion and, while this is certainly still the case, labour courts are ‘one key element of the hemisphere's larger political history’ (p. 265). This is a superb volume that examines this ‘one key element’ across the Americas, its relationship to labour movements and national and international politics, and the difficulties they faced in each country. Labour historians, legal historians, students of state formation and those interested in politics, broadly construed, will find much of value in this important book.
