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  • The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility and Rights
  • Dan LaBotz
The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility and Rights. By Maria Lorena Cook. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 231. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth.

This work provides an analysis of the successes and failures of attempts at labor reform in six Latin American nations based upon legal and institutional frameworks, labor's political legacy, and the relative strength of labor organizations. Lorena Cook follows roughly the method of Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, whose massive tome Shaping the Political Arena (1991), also used the paired comparison and analyzed many of the same factors. Cook's book picks up more or less where theirs left off, at the point of the coming of the democratic and market transitions, and the economic and social crises of the 1990s.

Her study focuses on six countries and compares pairs of them on the basis of the similarity between their political legacies. These countries are: the state corporatist systems of Argentina and Brazil, the radical regimes of Chile and Peru, and the revolutionary governments of Mexico and Bolivia. She then examines each of those pairs in terms of its legal and institutional framework and the strength of labor organizations, examining the balance of power among government, state, and unions throughout the latter part of the twentieth century. The result is a study which demonstrates that globalization and the structural reforms of the IMF and World Bank did not succeed in steam rolling Latin American societies, but rather that the specific and complex conditions prevailing in each nation led to quite different results in each case. At the same time it is clear that neoliberal structures and flexibility inevitably made gains and that, even where unions survived and even where the U.N. International Labour Organization (ILO) intervened, workers' rights failed to prevail.

Cook demonstrates a command of the literature of the history, politics and labor systems of Latin America which she puts to good use in following the complicated political machinations and the intricate subtleties of law in the countries she has studies. She goes on to offer a regional overview of labor reform revolving around the two transitions that Latin America has undergone in the last thirty years: the democratic transition and the open market transition, and the relationship between them. She then defines and discusses two of the central labor issues of these transitions: the dominant trend of flexibility and the weaker one of labor rights. She concludes the authoritarian regimes of Chile and Peru imposed extensive "flexibilization"; the strong labor movements of Argentina and Brazil were able to stave off government attempts at reform leading to mixed results; and that the revolutionary legacies of Mexico and Bolivia (for very different reasons) prevented any sort of labor law reform. Yet, as she notes, flexibilization went ahead everywhere anyway because of informal arrangements and de facto developments, while workers' rights languished. Cook concludes her book with a call for national tripartite dialogues that respect collective rights. She argues for an extension of security to all workers even in a more flexible labor market. The possibility of a more radical transformation of society and labor does not arise within the framework of her vision of Latin America. [End Page 460]

Perhaps because of the times it deals with and the times in which we live, this book does not present an exciting intellectual idea or moral vision, as compared for example with the synthetic Marxism of Victor Alba's Politics and the Labor Movement in Latin America (1968), the anti-imperialist argument of Hobart A. Spaulding, Jr.'s Organized Labor in Latin America (1977), or the dependency theory argument revolving around export industries found in Charles Bergquist's Labor Movement in Latin America (1986). The problem is not so much Cook's as ours. The academy, the labor movement, and humanity generally need a new synthesis, a new vision that responds to the times in which we live and offers solutions. This book helps us to better understand our times, but does not offer an alternative vision.

Dan LaBotz...

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