Economic Restructuring, Neoliberal Reforms, and the Working Class in Latin America

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-164
Author(s):  
Carlos M. Vilas
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms

Labor Movements in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico M. Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Labor

The history of Latin America cannot be understood without analyzing the role played by labor movements in organizing formal and informal workers across urban and rural contexts.This chapter analyzes the history of labor movements in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. After debating the distinction between “working class” and “popular sectors,” the chapter proposes that labor movements encompass more than trade unions. The history of labor movements is analyzed through the dynamics of globalization, incorporation waves, revolutions, authoritarian breakdowns, and democratization. Taking a relational approach, these macro-dynamics are studied in connection with the main revolutionary and reformist strategic disputes of the Latin American labor movements.

Trade union renewal through local partnerships for skill formation

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mads Peter Klindt
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Skill Formation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Employment System ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
Union Renewal ◽  
Multiple Case ◽  
Local Partnerships

This article investigates how unions can strengthen their role in settings that are highly affected by globalisation and liberalisation through engagement in local partnerships for skill formation. We identify a number of capacities possessed by unions that can be complementary to firms and other actors in the local arena and thus be formative for such partnerships. We build our argument by drawing on concepts from the literature on trade union revitalisation, on governance and on political economy. The article’s claims are substantiated by a multiple-case study from Denmark that illustrates how union-based partnerships have successfully facilitated retraining and labour market inclusion for workers who were made redundant during economic restructuring and, due to neoliberal reforms, were cut off from adequate assistance from the public employment system.

scholarly journals Three Waves of Populism in Latin America

2014 ◽  
pp. 153-160
Author(s):  
O. V. Varentsova
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
The Third ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
Hugo Chavez

Contemporary political regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia led by late Hugo Châvez (now by his successor Nicolas Maduro) and Evo Morales are considered by foreign and Russian scholars as part of the third wave of populism. In the 20th century Latin America already witnessed two waves of populism which coincided with significant political transitions, namely a transition from oligarchy to mass politics accompanied by implementation of import substitution industrialization policies, and a transition from authoritarian rule to democracy during the third wave of democratization which triggered neoliberal reforms inspired by Washington Consensus. This article presents common characteristics of Latin American populist regimes that emerged in different historical periods which help identify the origins as well as distinctive features of Venezuelan and Bolivian political regimes. It is stated that the Châvez and Morales left populist regimes resemble classic populist regimes in that they rely on incendiary anti-establishment discourse. Therefore, left populist regimes are characterized by high levels of polarization as well as weak institutionalization and class or indigenous orientation. Election of left populist leaders may lead to institutional deadlock, uneven playing field and transition to competitive authoritarianism.

The Limits of Economic Restructuring

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Coal Industry ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
World War ◽  
Middle Classes

This chapter examines the problems encountered by France, Germany, and Italy as they each embarked on economic restructuring after World War I. A new bourgeois equilibrium seemed attainable in each country during the period; it rested on a consensus that united elites and middle classes against militant working-class claims. Capitalism and bourgeois hierarchies proved more resilient than either defenders or attackers had assumed. Furthermore, the movement of restoration was wider than the three societies. Across the Atlantic, “red scare” and recession were ushering in the era of normalcy. The chapter considers the evolution of leftist objectives in France, Germany, and Italy that accompanied the transition from the turmoil of 1918–1919 to the bourgeois recovery of 1920–1921. It also discusses the strategies of bourgeois defense and the failure of socialization in the German coal industry.

scholarly journals “They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Eva Peron ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Key Resources

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

The Class Struggle, the Proletariat, and the Developing Nations

1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Taborsky
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Third World ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Developing Nations ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third World

The concepts of class struggle and the leadership of the proletariat figure high among the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology and strategy that Soviet theoreticians deem applicable to the developing areas of the world. “A new contingent of the world proletariat — young working class movement of the newly free, independent and colonial countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America — has entered the world arena,” asserted the 1961 Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is this newly emerging proletariat that hopefully is expected to convert the nationaldemocratic revolutions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into genuine socialist revolutions of the Marxist-Leninist variety. Hence, the advancement of the working class and the promotion of class struggle have become major concerns of Soviet strategy and tactics in the Third World.

scholarly journals Super-exploitation: precarity and the proletarian condition through the perspective of Marxist theory of dependency

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Felix ◽  
Adrián Sotelo Valencia
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
The World ◽  
Transformation Processes

<p>In this article we analyse the issue of increasing precarity in the world of work in light of the Brazilian Ruy Mauro Marini’s theses and the concept of super-exploitation. Forged in the domain of a Marxist theory of dependency, the concept was originally formulated to designate specific regimes within Latin American social formations. In this respect, first we review certain global trends in the world of work and transformation processes in dependent countries’ regimes of super-exploitation, going on then to examine the issue’s contemporary emergence as a phenomenon in central capitalist countries. Finally, we discuss the category’s validity, as well as its implications for understanding new morphologies of the working class both in Latin America and across the world.</p>

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