This is a very ambitious work, meticulously researched and studiously written, often presenting a dazzling display of intricate information. It is quite unusual for a single author to show such mastery over various country contexts. The book could easily have been written by several authors as it carefully covers and interprets labor laws in six Latin American countries, focusing mainly on the period in which flexibilized labor policies were implemented. Maria Lorena Cook couples countries that share historical and institutional similarities, namely: Argentina and Brazil are chosen as having legacies of state corporate systems; Chile and Peru represent postradical regimes; and Mexico and Bolivia experienced revolutionary pasts. Introductory overviews on labor reform in Latin America and concluding comments on where these countries stand today between flexibility and rights act as bookends for the paired country chapters. This is a skillful exegesis of pertinent documents, voluminous secondary literature, and expert testimony concerning two decades of labor laws after the restitution of democracy in the postauthoritarian period in these countries—unfinished as that process continued to be in Peru and Bolivia (at the time of the book's completion in 2005).

Cook's approach assesses the legal, institutional, and political resources that governments mobilize in labor law policymaking when confronted by trade unions' own more delimited capacity to oppose, delay, or influence policy outcomes. Her argument is that the sequence of labor law passage has an impact on the weakening or strengthening of union structures and employment conditions. Initial democratic transitions favor union interests, whereas later stages of democratic market reforms are largely prejudicial to labor. First-round democratic governments find themselves restoring the rights lost under military dictatorships, whereas subsequent governments, often led by opposing political parties, can more freely institute economic liberalization. Where market reforms preceded democratization (e.g., Chile and Mexico), constraints on labor rights remained significant. On the other hand, we read that union ability to respond is based on union density, monopoly of union peak representation, and political party affiliations.

A major contribution of the book, often confounded in the literature, is the distinction between individual employment laws (protective worker rights that are the main target of job flexibilization laws) and collective labor laws (where large unions bargaining on behalf of wide swaths of workers try to maintain restrictive advantages, as opposed to governments and employers seeking to implement liberalization policies that decentralize collective bargaining). Thus, according to Cook, these opposing forces of market flexibilization and liberalization, on the one hand, and labor protections and restrictions, on the other hand, compete under a variety of domestic and international pressures, processes, and actors. She nicely discusses the multiple flexible labor policies associated with economic reforms in the 1990s: deregulation, eliminating rigidities in labor markets, improving productivity, attracting foreign investments, increasing short-term employment opportunities, lowering employer costs, and fostering greater efficiencies in public administration—all euphemisms for what could also be described by a more jaundiced analyst as working-class exploitation. However, with the return of democracy, organized labor was able to establish or reestablish political party alliances, civil society networking, and even tripartite accords with government and business. This is well documented particularly in the Argentine and Brazilian case studies. Helpful, too, is her depiction of organized labor's ability to defend its core interests while giving ground in areas difficult to defend under the neoliberal juggernaut.

Within each country, the author culls out the critical labor reform legislation, detailing its origins, legislative or decree processes, and to whom it essentially is directed. It is a sobering story that depicts multiple overlapping and comparative strategies geared toward creating temporary employment labor contracts, the ability to dismiss employees with reduced severance pay, decentralized collective bargaining, and privatized public pension plans, as well as some draconian labor laws, particularly in Chile under Augusto Pinochet (pp. 117–20). Cook also encapsulates well the post-Pinochet labor conundrum: “The fact that the economic model was a settled question and that elites shared a commitment to defending the status quo kept labor demands subordinated at a time when ‘foundational’ reforms in the area of labor rights are otherwise typically possible” (p. 134).

Cook's commitment to careful scholarship often prevents her from reaching telling conclusions, however. This surprises the reader and weakens the book's considerable achievements. Unexpectedly, the marshaled evidence does not allow her to make broader normative judgments that encompass the working class writ large. The repeated impact of the International Monetary Fund's intrusive structural adjustment policies are not connected in an overarching way, nor do the words capitalism and multinational corporations find their way into the text; there is no discussion of the strategic alliances between U.S. economic interests and the local employer class and only a brief glance at the impact of NAFTA on Mexican labor. Globalization is mentioned once (p. 1) and then is not heard from again. The recurring shibboleth in studies of the political economy is introduced, namely, that the Latin American import substitution industrialization (ISI) model of development was exhausted (p. 32), without evidence that it would have occurred without the external pressures from international capital intent on opening up new markets. Only in the last paragraphs of Cook's excellent concluding chapter does she engage the other half of the economically active Latin American labor force that is employed in the informal, sometimes underground economy, with few of the rights that the formal, unionized labor sector is defending. Nor do we learn much about the poor, the deep class divisions, and the increasingly inequitable income distribution in Latin America.

Nevertheless, advanced students pursuing labor studies in Latin America, knowledgeable labor law scholars, and professors of Latin American politics who need to authenticate comparative labor policies can approach this book with full confidence that they are consulting carefully researched scholarship, from which they will learn much concerning the crucible of labor reform in Latin America under the aegis of the neoliberal economy.