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Labouring against Neoliberalism: Unions and Patterns of Reform in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2003

RAÚL L. MADRID
RAÚL L. MADRID
Affiliation:
Raúl L. Madrid is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Abstract

In recent years Latin American countries have enacted sweeping privatisation measures and major trade, financial and tax reforms, but they have moved much more slowly to reform their pension systems and labour laws. This pattern of reform partly reflects differences in the intensity of organised labour's opposition to the reforms. Organised labour has undertaken greater efforts to block labour law reforms and, to a lesser extent, pension reforms, because these measures impose severe losses on more unions than other types of reforms. These greater efforts, moreover, have had significant effects on policy outcomes. The article shows how organised labour reacted quite differently to various types of market-oriented reforms in Argentina and Mexico in the 1990s, and describes how the reaction of the unions helped shape the fate of the reform proposals.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 2003 , pp. 53 - 88
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The author thanks Robert Barr, Katrina Burgess, Scott Mainwaring, James McGuire, Kurt Weyland and two anonymous JLAS reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article.