In Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s, labor-backed political parties in power adopted market-oriented reforms that strained the parties' alliances with their union base, generating a “loyalty dilemma” for labor leaders. In response, unions in all three countries initially pursued strategies of demand making based on norms that had traditionally governed their interactions with the party (“norm-based voice”). Over time, however, labor leaders' responses to the loyalty dilemma diverged. Katrina Burgess explains why. She argues that whether unions chose norm-based voice, norm-breaking voice, or exit depended on two main factors: the relative power of the party and workers to punish labor leaders for disloyal behavior, and the party's capacity to act autonomously from its own government.

Burgess posits that both punishing power and party autonomy depend, in turn, on a set of institutional foundations. She identifies four institutional arrangements as important for determining the punishing power of workers and the party: 1) the legal framework governing industrial relations; 2) the structure of the labor movement; 3) party system type; and 4) the party's mechanisms for filling party posts. In the case of party autonomy, Burgess looks at the location of supreme authority within the party (e.g., chief executive or national executive committee of the party) and the existence of intraparty spaces for dissent as the main institutional factors.

Drawing on this framework, the author is able to explain why in Mexico the largest national labor confederation, the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), remained allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and even collaborated in keeping down wages during the reform period. In Mexico, the party's ability to punish labor leaders was stronger than workers' punishing power, and the PRI lacked autonomy from the government. In Spain, in contrast, the General Workers' Union (UGT) eventually broke with the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in response to workers' willingness to punish the UGT in factory council elections. In Venezuela, the party was able to distance itself from its own government during the neoliberal reform administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez. Venezuelan workers' power to punish labor leaders was also stronger than in Mexico, but more constrained than that of Spanish workers. This explains the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers' shift from norm-based voice to norm-breaking voice, and then back to norm-based voice, once the party took a stand against the Pérez government.

Burgess succeeds in presenting a comparative argument that is at once spare and sophisticated. She both underscores the persistence of organized labor as an important political actor and shows how this watershed era of neoliberal reform is reconfiguring labor's role. The author's writing is concise, yet Parties and Unions in the New Global Economy is rich with essential details, especially in the discussion of the historical “bargains” that labor confederations in each country developed with their party allies. These sections are critical to our understanding of the origins of union-party ties, and they provide a better sense of what labor leaders stand to lose when they confront the loyalty dilemma.

Burgess's explanations of the institutional and legal frameworks that govern unions and provide the contexts for labor-party alliances in each country are also excellent. They reveal an impressive depth and breadth of knowledge regarding these countries' histories of labor-party-state relations. The author successfully integrates the nuanced historical analysis found in the best national case studies with the attention to broader relevance that good comparative research offers.

Although she focuses on the neoliberal reform periods in each country, since these are what pose the loyalty dilemma for unions in the first place, Burgess also updates her analysis through the mid-2000s. This enables readers to see the implications of union choices made during the critical juncture of the reform period. In Mexico, the CTM retains its alliance with the PRI even as another party's candidate has won the presidency for the first time in the country's history, yet the expansion of independent union activity may eventually increase workers' choices and their ability to punish trade union leaders. With the presidency of Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan labor faces important political and institutional changes and the likelihood that union-party ties will become weaker than before. In Spain, the UGT has maintained its autonomy from the PSOE, even through two administrations of conservative government under the opposing Popular Party. Burgess cautions that it is too soon to predict how union-party relations will evolve, particularly in Mexico and Venezuela, which are in the midst of profound political and institutional transformation. However, she does suggest that union-party ties are likely to become more fluid, contingent, and issue based, rather than to retain the relatively rigid commitments forged in the twentieth century.

What does this mean for workers and unions? Burgess suggests that the more fluid and contingent ties between unions and parties may have a positive overall effect on interest representation. At the same time, she clearly appreciates the dynamic and open-ended nature of this process, including its risks: “The hope is that the collapse of the old arrangements will prompt the emergence of more representative organizations and give working people a stronger voice in their own future. The fear is that it will leave them even more marginalized and underrepresented than before” (p. 165).

Another possible future scenario, however, is that the recent backlash against market reforms in some countries may reinvigorate labor-party ties. For example, in Argentina (a country outside of Burgess's study but which shares the basic features of her cases), union-party ties appear to have been strengthened after the recent economic and political crisis, and after a period of strained alliance during President Carlos Menem's implementation of market-oriented reforms in the 1990s. The loyalty dilemmas posed by the neoliberal-reform period may prove to have been transitory, as some labor-based parties now move to adopt policies with broader popular backing.

This is not a quibble with Burgess's argument or framework, however. In this fine book, she manages to give us the analytical tools to decipher the complex dynamics of union-party relations as these evolve in response to the challenges of globalization in the coming years, an admirable contribution.