In recent decades, Latin American countries have sought to modernize their labor market institutions to remain competitive in the face of increasing globalization. This book evaluates the impact of such neoliberal reforms on labor movements and workers’ rights in the region through comparative analyses of labor politics in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Using these five key cases, the authors assess the capacity of workers and working-class organizations to advance their demands and bring about a more just distribution of economic gains in an era in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. In particular, their findings challenge the purported benefits of labor market flexibility—the freedom of employers to adjust their workforces as needed—which has been touted as a way to reduce income inequality and unemployment. In-depth case studies show how flexibilization as well as privatization, trade liberalization, and economic deregulation have undermined organized labor in all of these countries, leading to the current internal fragmentation of unions and their inability to promote counterreforms or increase collective bargaining. This assessment concludes that even with substantial variation among countries in how reforms have been implemented, most workers in the region have experienced increasing precarity, informal employment, and weaker labor movements. This book provides vital insights into whether these movements have the potential to regain influence and represent working people’s interests effectively in the future.

The sociology of Latin America, established in the region over the past eighty years, is a thriving field whose major contributions include dependence theory, world-systems theory, and historical debates on economic development, among others. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America provides research essays that introduce the readers to the discipline's key areas and current trends, specifically with regard to contemporary sociology in Latin America, as well as a collection of innovative empirical studies deploying a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The essays in the Handbook are arranged in eight research subfields in which scholars are currently making significant theoretical and methodological contributions: Sociology of the State, Social Inequalities, Sociology of Religion, Collective Action and Social Movements, Sociology of Migration, Sociology of Gender, Medical Sociology, and Sociology of Violence and Insecurity. Due to the deterioration of social and economic conditions, as well as recent disruptions to an already tense political environment, these have become some of the most productive and important fields in Latin American sociology. This roiling sociopolitical atmosphere also generates new and innovative expressions of protest and survival, which are being explored by sociologists across different continents today. The essays included in this collection offer a map to and a thematic articulation of central sociological debates that make it a critical resource for those scholars and students eager to understand contemporary sociology in Latin America.

Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

We are currently witnessing some of the greatest challenges to democratic regimes since the 1930s, with democratic institutions losing ground in numerous countries throughout the world. At the same time organized labor has been under assault worldwide, with steep declines in union density rates. In this timely handbook, scholars in law, political science, history, and sociology explore the role of organized labor and the working class in the historical construction of democracy. They analyze recent patterns of democratic erosion, examining its relationship to the political weakening of organized labor and, in several cases, the political alliances forged by workers in contexts of nationalist or populist political mobilization. The volume breaks new ground in providing cross-regional perspectives on labor and democracy in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond academia, this volume is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners concerned with the relationship between labor and democracy.

Covers the relationships between labour movements in the United States and in Latin America from the Mexican War of 1846 up to the founding of the Pan-American Federation of Labor in 1918. Deals with the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and with the aid given by US trade unionists and socialists to the Mexican revolutionists.

Mark S. Anner spent ten years working with labor unions in Latin America and returned to conduct eighteen months of field research: he found himself in the middle of violent raids, was detained and interrogated in a Salvadoran basement prison cell, and survived a bombing in a union cafeteria. This experience as a participant observer informs and enlivens Solidarity Transformed, an illustrative, nuanced, and insightful account of how labor unions in Latin America are developing new strategies to defend the interests of the workers they represent in dynamic global and local contexts. Anner combines in-depth case studies of the auto and apparel industries in El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil, and Argentina with survey analysis. Altogether, he documents approximately seventy labor campaigns—both successful and failed—over a period of twenty years. Anner finds that four labor strategies have dominated labor campaigns in recent years: transnational activist campaigns; transnational labor networks; radical flank mechanisms; and microcorporatist worker-employer pacts. The choice of which strategy to pursue is shaped by the structure of global supply chains, access to the domestic political process, and labor identities. Anner's multifaceted approach is both rich in anecdote and supported by quantitative research. The result is a book in which labor activists find new and creative ways to support their members and protect their organizations in the midst of political change, global restructuring, and economic crises.

Depicts the rise and fall of the militant labor movement in modern El Salvador.