This special issue of International Labor and Working-Class History seeks to understand how Latin America's trade unions and other workers' organizations have responded during the last three decades to the wholesale reorganization of their economies and polities, and how the history of worker organizations in southern Africa in this era is strikingly similar, despite surface differences in political and cultural context. In Latin America, workers faced monetary stabilization and neoliberal policies; the globalization of trade, finance, and production; as well as civil wars and military regimes that eventually gave way to civilian rule.

From approximately 1930–1970, Latin America's modern labor movements became powerful social and political actors that grew with industrialization and the rise of proto-welfare states. Today, the picture is starkly different. With few exceptions, decades of military rule and civil war, debt crisis and hyperinflation, globalization and neoliberal policies have left Latin America's traditional labor organizations and allied political parties severely weakened. During these same decades, new movements organized around a spectrum of social identities (e.g. race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, residential status, and access to land) have taken center stage in struggles for social justice, organizing working people in new ways. We seek to trace the complex pathways through which workers and their organizations got from there to here, and to examine the novel and innovative ways workers have responded to complex challenges on multiple fronts.

In a previous special issue focusing on globalization and the Latin-American workplace (ILWCH 70), we and our fellow contributors analyzed how government adoption of neoliberal policies as well as the broader phenomenon known as globalization had affected workers, and to a lesser extent, unions. There, we observed that the combined effects of the debt crisis, public policies favoring market competition and private enterprise, and changing global corporate policies had eroded job quality, transformed the organization of work, and affected individuals and families involved with international migration. In this issue, that economic and social history forms the crucial context for the largely organizational and political story that we and our fellow contributors wish to tell. A key part of that story, however, is the evolution of Latin-American economies, labor relations institutions, and mass politics during the twentieth century.

In Latin America, labor organization has a long history, stretching back to the artisan guilds and slave brotherhoods of the colonial era. In the mid-nineteenth century, urban artisans inspired by European liberal ideas began to form mutual aid societies. Modern processes of proletarianization and worker organizations emerged during the Liberal Era (1870–1930) of free trade and laissez-faire, when Latin-American economies were incorporated into an Atlantic economy centered on Europe and North America as natural resource exporters. Central governments were consolidated; steamships and railways linked countries and continents; and foreign investment flowed into mining, agriculture, and export processing; attracting immigrant labor from Europe and Asia, who formed a market for the region's first light industries and a social base for new labor organizations and political movements. Major working-class mobilizations inspired by anarchist, syndicalist, socialist, and communist ideas exploded onto the scene in South American countries with strong export industries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Perú, and Colombia, but also in Cuba and El Salvador. In México, urban and rural workers played a crucial role in the 1910 Revolution. The “social question,” in which the “laboring class” became the “dangerous class,” emerged in the early twentieth century in societies dominated by agricultural and commercial elites who had naturalized poverty and rationalized the enormous divide between rich and poor; between themselves and their workers.

These largely urban labor movements emerged in contexts where workers had limited access to the vote (most countries included literacy or property restrictions and/or had corrupt electoral systems that favored elites), and few labor rights, where labor organizations were illegal and worker strikes or protests were often met with repression. The spread of anarchism, and the examples of the Mexican and Russian revolutions provided cautionary warnings that Latin-American elites ignored at their peril.

This setting created a dilemma for oligarchic elites and an opportunity for elite reformers and an emerging middle class rooted in the professions and the civil service, or for provincial entrepreneurs excluded from the ruling elite. Within dissident elites and the new professionals, voices emerged who argued that solving the social question required reform, not repression; and cooptation, not coercion.

The history of these efforts at labor reform varied from country to country. In Uruguay, for example, the dissident elite president José Battle y Ordóñez took the lead in an emerging democracy, whereas in Chile it was professionals like Moíses Poblete Troncoso with the aid of provincial entrepreneurs and middle class military reformers. What they had in common was labor legislation that recognized unions, but regulated their activities, including the right to strike. In other countries, such as Colombia and El Salvador, more conservative elites defeated reformers and repression remained the rule of labor relations. The idea that the state should legalize unions in order to contain their explosive potential eventually took hold in different forms throughout the region.Footnote ¹

The Great Depression catalyzed the adoption of modern labor relations systems that legalized union organization in many Latin-American countries. Latin America, with its dependence on natural resource exports, was the region of the world most severely affected by the depression in international trade. Unable to import needed consumer goods and industrial inputs, it turned to local manufacturers instead. Many governments embraced import substitution industrialization (ISI) policies that were sustained by new political coalitions that included industrial workers and the urban middle class, in addition to the national bourgeoisie and civil servants. Populist political leaders developed alliances with urban workers and civil servants in support of industrialization, unionization, and social welfare measures. Inspired by Keynesian economics, ISI supporters argued that the creation of national industries and a domestic market would shield these countries from future crises in international trade. They would become more economically self-sufficient, and could become modern developed societies with a decent quality of life and social welfare. ISI was also often equated with a “second economic independence” and with joining the “first world” of developed countries.Footnote ²

Political brokering of these industrial and labor policies often involved cutting deals with traditional rural elites, in which agrarian reform and rural unionization were prohibited, but industrialization and urban unions were enabled. They also usually involved populist politics and the creation of corporatist systems of industrial relations in which the state had strong regulatory control over union organization, finances, collective bargaining and the right to strike, while offering workers improved wages, benefits, and working conditions, often in exchange for political loyalty. Argentina under Juan Domingo Perón (1946–1955) was a classic example of these tradeoffs under a charismatic populist leader, but so was Brazil under Getulio Vargas (1930–45 and 1951–54).

A similar dynamic emerged during the Popular Front in Chile (1938–48) under center-left coalitions that included Socialist and Communist parties. Perón and Vargas disciplined workers and tied their unions to the new states and parties that they created, but also relied on worker support for their political success, and so felt compelled to respond to union demands and to fulfill at least a portion of worker aspirations. Unions remained powerful and workers loyal to Perón even after he was ousted by a conservative military coup in 1955; while in Brazil, unions were able to mobilize a strike of 300,000 workers in 1953 and sustain the Labor Party that Vargas founded even after his suicide in 1954.Footnote ³

As Kenneth Roberts points out in his article in this special issue on the shifting relations between unions and political parties in the region, labor movements in other Latin-American countries developed without significant changes in the country's political party structure, and in some cases despite state repression. In both Colombia and Uruguay, unions developed under the aegis of reformers from traditional elite-dominated parties founded in the nineteenth century, although Communists played important roles in unions in both countries by the mid-twentieth century. In Colombia, protective tariffs and an ideology of social Catholic Fordism made possible a paternalistic welfare capitalism in the new textile industries. But in the agrarian export sectors, such as coffee and bananas, where the Communists were active in labor organization, the corporatist labor relations imposed by Liberal governments to coopt social unrest during the economic crisis of the 1930s were replaced by a return to repression under the Conservative governments of the 1940s. The decade of “La Violencia” that followed and took 200,000 Colombian lives, began as a murderous urban conflict between partisans of the two traditional parties, but soon spread to the countryside, where it became as well a social struggle over land that was made newly valuable by the postwar coffee boom. La Violencia was a disaster for the weak Colombian labor movement, but left a legacy of Communist and leftist organization of the impoverished banana workers in Colombia's northwestern Urabá region that was taken up beginning in the 1960s by leftist guerrilla groups, with consequences that still shape that region's labor relations today, as Aviva Chomsky's article in this special issue explores.Footnote ⁴

In Central America, another area traditionally dependent on exports of coffee and bananas, industrialization started later, with the short-lived common market (CACM) created in 1958, and had a lesser economic life before 1990. In El Salvador and Guatemala, the region's economic leaders, Communists and other leftists played central roles in early promising efforts at labor organization, which peaked in Faribundo Marti's abortive 1932 rebellion in El Salvador and in Jacobo Arbenz's democratic Guatemalan “Revolution” that the CIA cut short in 1954. By the 1960s, however, military regimes ruled both countries and repression of labor organizations and mobilizations was the norm. Still, with the support of a Catholic Church influenced by Liberation Theology and guerrilla groups, workers continued to organize and labor unions struggled to survive and became intimately involved in the revolutionary conflicts of succeeding decades, the era of the Cuban revolution.Footnote ⁵

Throughout Latin America, the 1960s and 1970s were a crossroads that reshaped the fortunes of the region's workers and their labor unions in a military mold. Economically, this era saw the exhaustion of the easy light industry phase of import substitution and the difficulty sustaining the next phase of heavy industry, with its high technology and machinery costs, in a context of stagnant growth, balance of payments deficits, financial constraints, and accelerating inflation. Brazil, the region's industrial leader, which had extracted a steel mill complex from Washington in exchange for its Second World War support, had difficulty of sustaining the final phase of ISI, the production of capital goods, during these same decades. The OPEC oil price hike of 1973 gave rise to a final ISI spurt financed by petrodollar loans, which a second oil price jump in 1979 and the 1981 increase in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve Bank converted into the Latin-American debt crisis of the 1980s, a “lost decade” in which little new foreign capital reached the region, hyperinflation eroded wages and savings and industrial bankruptcies and unemployment soared. Although this crisis had many causes, protected industrialization (ISI) caught the blame, and country after country embraced its opposite: the neoliberal opening of the economy to foreign imports and investment codified in the 1990s by the Washington Consensus of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the US Treasury, and made a precondition for loans and access to the US market. These policies brought the privatization, downsizing, and weakened unions that form the context for the articles that are the core of this issue on labor organization in Latin America.Footnote ⁶

The difficult economic panorama faced by Latin America after the Korean War was compounded by the international political landscape, which was defined by the Cold War. In addition to supporting friendly regimes, the US-trained Latin-American military officers and disseminated an anticommunist “national security doctrine,” which in the era of the Cuban revolution expanded the military purview to “internal security,” including the economy and labor relations. The result would be military regimes in most of the countries of the region.Footnote ⁷

Latin-American workers and their unions bore the costs of these economic difficulties and political conflicts. Their advances in wages and mobilization had been spurred by an expanding economy that ended with the Korean War and support from populist leaders or leftist parties that clashed with both elite and middle class interests when the economic expansion ended. As labor mobilization intensified in defense of wages and working conditions eroded by inflation and protests spread from urban workers to rural workers and peasants, both industrial and agrarian capitalists called for a rolling back of labor rights, increasingly with the support of an urban middle class weary of populist politics and searching for scapegoats for the erosion of its own living standards and prospects.

Worker mobilizations and organizations also clashed with US ideological and geopolitical interests in the region. Organized labor was one of the central fronts in the Cold-War ideological conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the postwar period, this led to splits in many Latin-American labor movements between communist and anticommunist leaders and unions. In Chile, US pressure ended the center-left coalition governments and led to the crushing of miner strikes. In Guatemala, the outcome was a US “covert action” that overthrew the elected leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz, ended its “Guatemalan revolution,” and handed power to a military dictatorship whose repression targeted labor leaders and activists and rolled back labor rights and union organization. In Bolivia, where leftist miners had played a central role in the 1952 revolution and retained considerable power in the governments that followed, Washington worked to undermine union influence, by dividing peasants from urban workers and rebuilding the Bolivian armed forces for an eventual seizure of power. With the success of the Cuban revolution in 1959, these tensions increased further, as Latin-American elites and military officers read national conflicts and labor mobilizations through the prism of revolution and the lens of national security.Footnote ⁸

During the decades that followed, in country after country, economic difficulties and social conflicts that would lead workers to mobilize and radicalize politics through support for radical populist leaders, leftist parties and/or leftist guerrillas culminated in military coups and dictatorships that made union leaders and worker activists targets of a brutal repression. Despite this repression, workers tried to defend their interests as best they could, in some countries with the aid of the Catholic Church or leftist guerrillas. Moreover, their unions often played important roles in the political transitions that culminated in the restoration of democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. Notwithstanding their central roles in the struggle for democracy and the political prominence of labor leaders in several countries as a consequence, Latin-American unions were increasingly unable to defend their members from the impact of neoliberal reforms that opened their countries to the full force of the globalization of production, capital, and labor as the 1990s advanced. This weaker position of workers and unions was often shared by the political parties that had represented them in the past, as Kenneth Roberts shows in his article, while other center-left parties survived by embracing neoliberal policies in practice.

This left it to workers and their organizations to develop new ways of coping with the impact of neoliberalism and globalization. At times, this led to innovative new union strategies and tactics, as Sonia Guimaraes and Mark Anner argue in their articles on Brazil and El Salvador. But, as Salvador Sandoval's article on Brazil concludes, it has also led to the emergence of new forms of labor organization and struggles, particularly for workers who have lost their formal-sector unionized jobs and are trying to survive either by working in the informal sector or by leaving the urban labor market altogether and returning to the countryside from which they or their parents migrated decades ago in search of good industrial jobs in the formal sector of the then expanding ISI economy.

Within this general Latin-American story, the experience of workers and their unions varied with the particular history of their country and industry, even though they might be variations on a regional theme. In Colombia, for example, “La Violencia” of the 1948–1958 decade left a legacy of instrumental violence that has informed labor relations to this day, along with union links to leftist guerrillas who could protect their leaders and members, and guerrilla movements that still are central protagonists in the banana region of Urabá, although sometimes in surprisingly new ways, as Aviva Chomsky's article explains. In El Salvador, a class conflict that harks back to the abortive Communist rebellion and military massacre of 1932, produced a pattern of military regimes and elite intransigence that undermined efforts at peaceful reform in the 1970s and led to the civil wars of the 1980s, in which the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí Nacional Liberation Front (FMLN) fought the Salvadoran armed forces to a stalemate, despite massive US aid, before settling for a peace accord that created a democratic political space but left the elites in control of the economy and government policy towards unions, with their leftist links. This history forms the backdrop to Mark Anner's article on labor unions and international solidarity in El Salvador and Brazil.

In Brazil, on the other hand, a somewhat different pattern prevailed, and unions followed a different trajectory, despite a repressive military regime that ruled the country for two decades. Brazil was one of the first countries in the region where the social tensions from the exhaustion of the easy phase of ISI came to a head and led to political polarization and military dictatorship with US support. As urban and rural workers mobilized, divisions emerged within the military and President João Goulart intensified his nationalistic rhetoric and radical populism. In 1964, the military took power in a mostly bloodless coup, with the support of Washington and Brazil's elites and middle class. Imbued with the new national security doctrine, they would remain in power for two decades, although they remained divided between “hard-” and “soft”-liners, whose alternations in power would make possible differing scenarios for workers and unions.

Although labor leaders and activists were targeted by the dictatorship, it neither abolished unions, nor ended the corporatist labor relations system. Moreover, although the Brazilian generals shared with Chile's General Augusto Pinochet his anticommunism and repressive politics, they did not embrace his neoliberal agenda and resource-based export economy orientation. On the contrary, even Brazil's military hardliners were nationalists who equated industrialization with “greatness” and wanted Brazil—the region's largest country in area, population, and GDP—to become the great power of South America. As a result, they promoted the rapid industrial growth of 1968–1973 known as “the Brazilian Miracle,” led by the automobile industry, that enlarged the country's infrastructure and doubled the size of its industrial working class. Moreover, when the OPEC price rise of 1973 threatened Brazil's ability to sustain the final stage of ISI—the design and production of capital goods that would make Brazil a self-sustaining industrial economy—the military regime embraced a debt-led strategy that would allow the economy to continue growing, at the cost of a multiplying foreign debt and accelerating inflation. Their economic nationalism also led them to maintain public control of strategic natural resources such as energy and key services like telecommunications, as Sonia Guimaraes' article makes clear. Within this context, industrial workers in the formal sector, like the auto workers, received relatively decent wages, although most Brazilians remained poor and the country the most unequal in the world's most unequal region.

The inflation and economic crises of the last decade of military rule, moreover, created discontent among formal-sector workers as well, and led them, with the help of the Catholic Church, to form autonomous pragmatic unions, independent of the corporatist links with the state or the ideological ties to political parties of the past. This “New Unionism” of younger workers mobilized spectacular strikes in São Paulo's automobile and metallurgical plants, which persuaded employers to distance themselves from the military regime and its captive labor leaders, and accept worker demands for direct, plant-level negotiations. The success of these strike movements led first to the formation of a new National Workers' Confederation (Central Única dos Trabahaldores [CUT]) that figures prominently in the articles of Mark Anner, Sonia Guimaraes, and Salvador Sandoval, and then to the formation of the Worker's Party (PT), which after two decades of largely local experience today leads Brazil's government. Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, the leader of those metalworker mobilizations and the founder and first head of both the CUT and the PT, is today Brazil's president, although as the articles on Brazil in this issue reveal, that has not led to stronger unions or greater worker power, nor even to a reversal of neoliberal policies and Brazil's openness to globalization.Footnote ⁹

On the contrary, the two articles in this issue that focus on Brazil and the two that deal in part with Brazil, show how difficult it is for worker organizations to maintain their position and defend worker interests even in a Brazil that is the fifth-largest country in area in the world and the sixth in population, whose economy is one of the world's ten largest; a Brazil whose “new unions” were both powerful and protagonistic during the 1980s; a Brazil, moreover, that is governed by the Worker's Party that played a key role in the creation of the World Social Forum and whose president is himself a former worker and union leader. The case of Brazil is not only the most important in Latin America, but ought to also be the best case scenario for the region's workers and unions. This justifies our special focus on Brazil in this special issue on worker organization in Latin America in the age of neoliberalism and globalization.

The contributions to this volume by Sonia Guimarães and Salvador Sandoval take this story in new directions. Guimarães examines the complex story of privatization and restructuring in Brazil's telecom industry. While initially following a US model of privatization that we would anticipate would discourage unionization in the industry, the author finds that unions had mixed results in the face of the industry's transformation. While privatization certainly meant the loss of many benefits and the reorganization of work, it compelled unions to rethink their relationship to workers in general and to aggressively organize workers in growing new segments of the industry, particularly subcontractors. It also led Brazilian unions to seek international collaboration with other unions representing workers in a large Spanish transnational corporation. Additionally, the pattern of industrial restructuring provided unions with some unexpected new opportunities with globalized and highly capitalized subcontracting firms. These opportunities included negotiating profit-sharing and developing more stable employment relationships for their workers. Nonetheless, workers are certainly in a more precarious position today than they were before privatization and their unions are much weaker.

Sandoval provides the most novel discussion of new forms of organizing workers who are no longer union members and who some might not consider workers. He argues that the CUT was unable to effectively respond to currency stabilization and neoliberal policies mandated by the IMF and the Washington Consensus, and to the profit-seeking foreign investments that followed, restructuring Brazilian industry in the process and downsizing the industrial labor force. As a result, other groups came to the fore as unions weakened and their mobilizations waned in importance during the 1990s. Sandoval focuses in particular on organizations that incorporated or represented workers who have been downsized or are otherwise unemployed, such as the movements of landless workers, street vendors, and illegal van drivers.

The Movement of Landless Workers (MST) has organized aggressive and innovative land seizures and played a role in shaping agrarian reform policy, while street vendors have organized to negotiate major concessions from municipal governments in order to stabilize their access to downtown streets, sales space, and benefits. Illegal van drivers have also organized and staged major mobilizations to defend their right to work where official urban public transportation is inadequate. Sandoval argues that these new, more dynamic forms of mobilization have taken the initiative from the once-vanguard trade unions, creating new arenas for the defense of working people and emerging as new models of worker organization that are being emulated by other movements and in other countries of the region.

Mark Anner, on other hand, devotes his article not to what Brazilian workers are doing for themselves in the face of neoliberalism, but rather to how Brazilian unions are using transnational alliances to confront the challenges of globalization. Anner compares transnational labor alliances in Brazil's auto industry with similar strategies in El Salvador's garment industry. In this way, he expands the discussion of the evolution of Brazilian unionism in the face of new challenges during the 1990s, while shifting the focus to the transnational arena of labor conflict. This change is significant in that it points to an important shift in union strategies since the 1980s, and highlights an increasing search for innovative ways in which labor can respond to the global reach of transnational capital by both activists and scholars. The growing academic discussion of transnational labor activism builds on the important work of transnational activist networks. Scholars examining transnational activism in the broadest sense have explored how the growth of international nonprofit organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and global communications and transportation have allowed local labor activists with little power in their national setting to gain support—and strength—from international activists.Footnote ¹⁰

Anner offers an innovative twist on this now widely-adopted and accepted analysis through integrating his discussion of transnational activism with the study of the productive structure of transnational firms. He does so by utilizing the concept of global commodity chains developed by world systems analysts to understand how profit gets generated, distributed, or captured at different nodes of a global design, production, distribution, and marketing network. Gary Gereffi and his colleagues distinguish between buyer driven commodity chains, in which power and profit are concentrated in the retail and design segments of the chain (with clothing as the prototypical industry); and producer-driven commodity chains, where power and profit are captured by producers (with automobiles as the paradigm).

Building on this insight, Anner argues that El Salvador's garment unions were more likely to seek support among consumers in the US because of the buyer-driven structure of the industry, while Brazil's auto union activists were more likely to seek ties with European trade unions because of that industry's producer driven character. He thus moves beyond the transnational activist scholarship by integrating work on global commodity chains. Yet, he takes a further step by arguing that ideological divisions within national labor movements inherited from the Cold War era shape union leaders' likelihood of seeking transnational allies: in both countries, conservative unions avoided international alliances while leftist unions sought them. He builds this analysis through an extraordinary narrative of how progressive Salvadorean activists teamed up with local human rights advocates and the New York-based National Labor Committee to organize support for assembly plant workers among consumers in the US. He also offers the surprising story of how Brazilian autoworkers responded to Volkswagen's greenfield strategy of new plant development (discussed differently by Sandoval for metallurgical workers). They exploited Volkswagen's transnational character to develop a model of international collective bargaining. Through international exchanges promoted by Volkswagen that encouraged workers to learn German, Brazilian union leaders were able to develop connections with German unionists who helped them more effectively bargain in the face of the auto industry's restructuring in Brazil. Anner's parallel stories demonstrate how international activist networks, the shape of transnational production networks, and local labor histories have intersected to shape the possibilities for innovative transnational labor activism.

Aviva Chomsky offers a more ambiguous case of transnational activism and a cautionary tale of union survival in a repressive and violent context: Colombia. Her analysis of banana workers in the northwestern Colombian region of Urabá seeks to understand why these workers shifted from the left to the right in recent years, and why they promote ostensibly progressive union politics in the international arena while siding with right-wing paramilitaries in the local setting. Her analysis of contemporary banana workers in the context of globalization points out that the banana industry has always been global and transnational firms have consistently pitted workers in different countries against one another and utilized violence and union busting tactics against worker mobilizations. Thus, today's neoliberal globalization resembles previous eras of globalization in many regards.

Chomsky roots her discussion of today's banana workers in Colombia's troubled and violent post-Second World War history. From 1948–1958, the civil war known as La Violencia took on a class character through the expulsion of peasants from estates and a struggle over coffee lands. After the violence subsided, Colombia's Communists created the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) incorporating peasant guerrillas from La Violencia, while Maoists formed the People's Liberation Army (EPL) in the 1960s. Rightist paramilitary groups also evolved from landlord sponsored militias active during La Violencia.

The FARC and EPL began to support the banana unions in Urabá, where workers had been victimized by low wages, terrible living conditions, and landlord sponsored violence. While guerrilla support, a national process of labor unification, and peace accords in the 1980s initially helped the unions unify and gain power, this success was short lived. After the peace accords, paramilitary violence intensified against the union and the FARC's unarmed political wing, including those elected to local public office. During the 1990s, moreover, a fratricidal war developed between the EPL (which accepted a government amnesty and laid down its arms) and the FARC (which did not). After the paramilitaries had killed most of the veteran union activists, a younger union leadership linked to an EPL that had lost its ideology, joined the political establishment, and decided to ally with the paramilitaries.

Ironically, the union became a key player in an international code of conduct in the banana industry with management's blessings. Chomsky concludes that transnational labor activism actually benefits Colombia's banana growers, because it has the potential to raise labor costs for lower price competitors in Ecuador and Central America. She argues that paradoxically, in some settings, labor transnationalism, often considered unions' best hope in a globalizing world, may benefit management more than labor. This is particularly the case in the brutal context of Urabá, in which union leaders are tied to management-sponsored paramilitaries and hence are unlikely to challenge managerial authority. Chomsky's analysis suggests that labor internationalism in itself may not cure labor's ills, offering comparative insights relevant for Central-American countries that experienced civil wars much like Colombia's.

Kenneth Roberts offers the broadest and most pessimistic reading of labor politics in the region. Moving beyond his important monograph on the decline of left politics and weakening of union-party ties in Perú and Chile, Roberts now turns his attention to the fate of both progressive and more conservative parties as it relates to the decline of organized labor in the region.Footnote ¹¹ In examining how party systems weathered the storm of currency stabilization, the 1980s debt crisis, neoliberalism, and globalization, he finds two contrasting patterns. In those countries that had strong leftist or populist parties tied to organized labor prior to the onset of the debt crisis, union density was higher and import substitution industrialization policies were more robust.

Once hyperinflation and the debt crisis hit during the 1980s, these countries suffered the most severe losses of industry and employment and the deepest declines in unionization, and their labor-linked political parties were weakened the most. In contrast, elitist, multiclass parties with roots in the nineteenth century were relatively shielded from the effects of the debt crisis on their economies, unions, and parties. This is largely because from the 1930s to the 1970s, they had limited industrial development, weak union movements, and had only timidly strayed from free-market policies.

Roberts takes this argument a step further by examining electoral volatility in recent years. Here, he also finds contrasting patterns between elitist and labor mobilizing party systems. While there was less fluctuation in the outcomes of legislative and presidential elections in elitist cases, electoral volatility was high in countries with legacies of mass-based labor parties. He attributes this volatility to the fact that many labor and populist parties shifted to the right after their elections, thus confusing and disappointing their historic mass bases. Labor and populist parties became more like US catch-all parties, seeking short term gains by appealing opportunistically to distinct sets of voters and often favoring media rather than mass-based electoral strategies.

Roberts points out that this rise in electoral volatility differs sharply from the stability of the vote for social democratic parties in Europe. He thus concludes that economic stabilization and neoliberalism sharply undercut the persistent ties between unions, labor parties, and state centered industrial and social welfare policies, with long term negative impacts for unions across the region. His analysis suggests that while individual unions are developing innovative responses to neoliberalism, at present, they will receive little support for policy changes from national officials, although the recent leftward shift in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Argentina suggests a hopeful countertrend to this discouraging regional picture.

Most of the articles included in this issue were first presented at a mini-conference we organized at the 2004 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress on the theme of labor and globalization in Latin America, with the support of the Ford Foundation-LASA Special Projects Fund.Footnote ¹² The idea behind the conference was to address the complex economic, social, political, and cultural changes in the world of work and labor politics wrought by globalization in the region. Taken together, these articles move forward our understanding of union politics in contemporary Latin America and offer insights that may be relevant as well for other world regions. Unions and their political allies have suffered under harsh economic and social policies, yet some organizations have developed innovative strategies to organize hard-to-reach workers in subcontracting firms and the informal sector and to develop transnational alliances. These new strategies emerged as a result of unions' adaptation to new circumstances, the development of alternative organizations outside organized labor, or in response to changes in the shape of an industry's productive structure.

Nevertheless, unions exposed to punishing violence may crack under the pressure, as in the case of Colombia, where leftist activists were assassinated and their successors sided with the ruthless paramilitaries responsible for their murder. The transnational activism of these unions rings hollow as it appears to benefit mostly management and does little to change the everyday hell of war-torn Urabá for banana workers. Furthermore, in traditional hotbeds of progressive labor activism in the region, unions and mass-parties have been battered by neoliberal policies and the parties emerged from the process with economic and labor policies similar to those of their traditional elitist counterparts. Thus, in Latin America, a region that has experienced far-reaching and complex changes in recent decades, individual unions are charting new courses in a hostile environment.

Surprisingly, despite the difference in political context—including decolonization, civil war, and the antiapartheid struggle—the story of labor organization in Southern Africa in recent decades is strikingly similar to Latin America. As Anne Pitcher reveals in her comparative analysis of Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa, privatization, neoliberalism, and globalization also reshaped labor relations in southern Africa and their impact on workers and unions was comparable to Latin America.

In Zambia, for example, the trajectory of Frederick Chiluba—from head of the union of workers in the country's leading industry to national union head to national president—is eerily similar to that of Lula in Brazil, as are the neoliberal policies both presidents pursued in office. In Mozambique, as in Chile, socialists became neoliberals in government, yet expected workers and unions to sustain them politically anyway. In South Africa, where COSATU, the national union, was formally part of a governing triple alliance, with representation in the government and on key commissions, the results have been equally disappointing for workers and their unions.

For Pitcher, democracy, which—as in Latin America—the labor unions helped bring about, has itself become part of the problem for unions, legitimating a multiplicity of interests and voices (the “pluralist paradox” she cites) and replacing “the language of collective action” with the “language of individual rights.” Unions in southern Africa, she concludes, have yet to devise effective strategies to deal with these dramatic and complex changes in their economic and political landscape.

Finally, this special issue is fortunate to have the benefit of two expert commentaries on the issues it raises by respected senior scholars known for their comparative and interdisciplinary analysis, Paul Drake and Eric Hershberg. Extending Roberts's and Pitcher's arguments, Paul Drake notes that unions across the world have been unable to take advantage of opportunities available under new democracies. Globalization undermines stable job and employment opportunities, neoliberal labor laws discourage unionization, and the moderation of most prolabor parties and coalitions has meant that democracy has offered workers' organizations few benefits.

Eric Hershberg argues that a range of structural and institutional changes emanating from the global economy have undermined the quality and supply of jobs as well as the prospects for unions. Neoliberal policies and globalization have, for the most part, produced low-quality jobs in sectors that offer inadequate employment opportunities, thus forcing a greater segment of the workforce into the informal sector. Additionally, labor laws and firm strategies have favored labor flexibility: making hiring and firing inexpensive and loosening job descriptions. In some cases, the latter strategy can benefit a minority of workers in high value-added sectors, but this is an exception to the rule of low quality jobs. He further argues that the inadequate supply of jobs in agriculture and manufacturing has led families to migrate to cities or abroad, or to send additional members to work in the informal sector. Finally, in addition to discouraging unionization, flexible labor arrangements and laws promote individualism among workers or lead them to identify with their employer's interests; both undermining unions' future prospects. The dim prospects for unions in this context lead Hershberg to conclude that, “globalization may turn out to be bad for democracy” as well.

These commentaries by Drake and Hershberg reinforce the overall conclusion of this special issue that on balance globalization has been bad for labor organizations and labor parties in Latin America. Workers in the region and their organizations and leaders have responded to the challenges of globalization with creativity and pragmatism. They have invented new kinds of labor organizations and devised new strategies for existing labor unions, organizing subcontracted workers and displaced workers in the informal sector, and forging alliances with European and North American unions and activists. Yet, despite this creativity and pragmatism, as well as lowered expectations and a readiness to compromise, labor organizations are far weaker today than they were two decades ago. In an earlier ILWCH special issue (#70), we concluded that globalization had brought more costs than benefits to Latin-American workers. This issue comes to the parallel conclusion that globalization—and neoliberalism, its Latin-American ideological expression—has been negative as well for the organizations that represent those workers. Our authors identify and assess innovative labor strategies that are rays of hope in this bleak picture, but overall the creativity and ingenuity of worker organizations in Latin America—and southern Africa—have been no match for the power of global capital.