The decades of the 1980s and 1990s were the era of structural adjustment policies and market-oriented reforms throughout Latin America. These developments had profound effects on labor markets, workers, and labor organizations. Labor scholars have studied the policy changes and their impact, focusing on the declining power of trade unions, on the weakening of labor-political party ties, and on the passage of labor flexibility reforms in a number of countries.
By most measures, the purported benefits of these flexibility reforms have been limited. Flexibility advocates argued that the reforms were too few or too limited in scope to have their intended effects. Others argued that despite significant changes in labor laws, the results did not measure up to the promised benefits in labor markets or the economy.
This debate provides an entry point for Posner, Patroni, and Mayer, who are veteran observers of Latin American labor politics. Whereas flexibility advocates often argued that more time was needed to assess the impact of reforms, Posner, Patroni, and Mayer claim that enough time has passed to assess the basic propositions of the proflexibility argument, and they find it wanting in each of the cases they examine. Instead of presenting new arguments, they perform the valuable task of confirming or dispelling earlier ones. They do this by adopting a longer time frame and an updated empirical analysis, in most cases reviewing the full terms of left-leaning administrations.
In Labor Politics in Latin America, the authors fill several gaps in the literature on labor reforms to date. First, they explicitly examine the economic impact of flexible labor law reforms in select countries by looking at indicators of employment, informality, and inequality. By updating the data on left governments, they reveal that protective labor reforms can coexist with improved labor market conditions and strong economies. Second, the authors consider both de jure and de facto flexibiliza-tion, whereas the scholarly literature has often addressed these separately. Finally, the authors’ longer-term perspective allows them to show that structural trends produce the continued weakness of organized labor despite the prolabor policies of recent left governments.
The volume contains a historical overview chapter and five country case studies, focusing on the largest labor movement countries in the region: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. All of these, with the exception of Mexico, were also part of the Pink Tide of left governments, although scholars have typically portrayed Venezuela as a more radical left regime. Each of the country chapters is written by one of the book’s authors, and several of these chapters have been previously published as journal articles.
Although Posner, Patroni, and Mayer seek answers to some overarching questions, each chapter also reads as a stand-alone piece. Each country case study begins with a distinct “puzzle” or opening question, specific to its particular circumstances. The Mexico chapter, for example, asks why that country’s “democratic transition” has done little to improve the circumstances of workers and trade union power. The authors forgo explanatory models or tightly drawn comparisons in favor of juxtaposing five case studies that respond to a common set of concerns. This approach has both advantages and disadvantages.
After the introductory chapter, which lays out the project’s goals and justifies the case study selection, Patroni’s “Historical Overview” chapter provides a useful summary of trends in economic development and labor politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It includes an extended analysis of labor flexibilization that helps to anchor the subsequent chapter analyses, as well as an account of later developments in “postneoliberal” South America.
This overview is followed by the Chile case study, written by Posner. Chile is the test case for the proflexibility argument: it is the country where flexibility reforms and market-oriented policies went the furthest, first under the Pinochet dictatorship and later sustained by democratic governments. One would expect to see a decline in inequality and growth of formal employment as a result of flexibilization, argues Posner, yet that has not been the case in Chile, which remains one of the most unequal countries in Latin America. Posner contends that the real goal of flexibility reforms was to diminish the power of workers. His chapter traces the evolution of the government-business sector relationship during and after the dictatorship and shows how business was able to increase its cohesion and autonomy in this period. The continued inequality and precarious conditions for Chilean workers are due in part to the imbalance in the capital-labor relationship, which is itself a result of the absence of significant institutional reforms and labor law change since the Pinochet era.
In the chapter on Mexico, Mayer answers a slightly different question. Despite observers’ claims that a democratic transition, ushered in by the opposition party candidate’s electoral victory in 2000, would help to improve labor conditions, the result has been continuity rather than change between PRI and PAN-led regimes. Mayer attributes this result to the absence of significant changes in labor law and to the consistent reliance on neoliberal policies that further weaken labor. He also details a vivid account of the Felipe Calderón government’s repressive treatment of trade unions, especially those that opposed the administration’s policies.
Patroni’s chapter on Argentina places more explanatory importance on economic policies in accounting for what she sees as continued weaknesses in the labor movement. While acknowledging that Argentine labor organizations scored important victories in recovering labor law protections under Néstor Kirchner, she stresses that the harmful impact of economic policies persists. She is therefore less sanguine about the benefits for labor under the left-leaning governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Patroni is also critical of the CGT’s inability or unwillingness to call for grassroots mobilization to protest market-oriented policies and of its role in stifling worker dissent under Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s conservative president, elected in 2015.
Mayer’s account of Brazil adheres more closely to the initial question laid out in the volume’s introduction: why did labor flexibility reforms not have the purported economic and labor market impacts that their advocates claimed? Mayer contrasts the policies implemented under the governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. He finds that flexible reforms under Cardoso did not necessarily produce better economic and labor market outcomes, whereas Lula’s more prolabor policies coincided with a strong economy buoyed by the commodity boom. Mayer concludes that economic and labor market indicators are shaped by multiple factors, and labor regulation alone does not determine their performance.
The last case in the book is also the most distinct—Venezuela. Here the focus is not on labor flexibility; instead, Posner offers a critical examination of what this particular “radical left” regime meant for Venezuelan workers and unions. Posner argues that President Hugo Chavez pursued divisive strategies in regard to labor and did little to strengthen workers’ organizations, appealing instead to unorganized popular masses for support. He characterizes the Chavez regime as populist rather than leftist or socialist. The adverse impacts on labor in Venezuela are not so different from those seen in the other countries covered in the book.
The book’s concluding chapter provides a synthesis of the case studies and off”ers a brief comparative analysis. The authors identify four common trends that help to explain why labor conditions have not improved despite opportunities presented by democratic transitions and the “failure of market orthodoxy” (191). These trends are the adoption of labor flexibility, which produces precarity; economic susceptibility to global competition and boom-bust cycles; weakened party-labor ties; and fragmented labor organizations.
Despite the book’s breadth and richness of detail, the authors’ reluctance to focus more systematically on a narrower set of variables throughout the case studies limits their ability to explain recent developments. Nor is the relative importance of factors such as legal-institutional legacies or state-labor relations versus economic policies in explaining labor “weakness” clearly delineated here. Although the authors state in their introduction that they want to consider “wider structural transformations … within longer timeframes,” this is not always evident in the case studies, most of which do, in fact, focus on state-labor politics (5).
The absence of an explicit comparative framework also means that the cases in the volume are not analyzed in relation to each other. The more skeptical assessment of the Argentine experience might otherwise look very different, for example, given that Argentine unions remained relatively strong and were quite successful at regaining labor protections, compared with other labor movements in the region.
The book’s analysis ends before the return of conservative governments to several of these countries—Brazil, Argentina, and Chile—and before the electoral victory of the left-leaning Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico. Right-wing governments have rolled back the more prolabor laws introduced earlier in Argentina and Brazil, while in Mexico, labor reforms that democratic labor advocates had championed were approved under a PRI government. The former is not surprising, but the latter is.
One way to make sense of this outcome is to consider a dimension that this volume does not address: the role of international actors, institutions, and pressures in creating opportunities for prolabor reform. In the Mexican case, U.S. pressure for stronger labor standards during negotiations on the Transpacific Partnership helped to produce a context amenable to reform. Future research on labor in the region might pay more attention to such factors.
In sum, Labor Politics in Latin America reviews five important country cases that assess how workers and labor organizations have fared in the last three decades of democratization, market reform, and “postneoliberal” politics. The book’s broad coverage and accessibility make it suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Its attention to important issues in labor politics makes it essential reading for scholars and practitioners.
