Organized Labor and Political Change in Latin America: An Overview

Abstract

This chapter shows that organized labor across Latin America played a significant role in the destabilization of authoritarian regimes and the (re-)turn to democracy during “the long 1980s.” At the same time, political democratization—and the turn from a state-centered to a market-oriented (“neoliberal”) development model that accompanied it—dramatically changed the politico-institutional and socioeconomic context in which Latin America’s labor movements operated. The overall result has been a marked weakening of organized labor throughout the region. The corresponding reduction in the level of contentious labor action in the course of the 1980s and 1990s had ambivalent effects on Latin American democracy: In facilitating a kind of democratization that combined the establishment of democratic institutions with persisting mass poverty and high socioeconomic inequalities, the weakness of organized labor, on the one hand, contributed to democratic stability by reducing the threat perception on the part of the elites. On the other hand, as labor movements did not push democratization further toward less low-intensity, more inclusive, or more social versions of democracy, this clearly had negative effects on the quality of the democratic regimes that emerged.