Transformations of Workers’ Mobilization in Latin America

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the transformations of workers’ mobilization in Latin America from the end of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. For that purpose, the link is observed between changing economic connections, state-society relations, and workers’ collective action. The dynamics of mobilization and demobilization are considered from the inter-relationship of three dimensions: forms of organization, repertoires of state–society interaction, and ideological frameworks. The analysis focuses on four periods: 1890–1929: the emergence of workers’ organizations; 1930–1960: the strengthening of labor unions and processes of incorporation; 1970–1990: neoliberalism, democracy, and organizational breakdown; and 1999–2017: the return of the state and the calling into question of neoliberalism, the revitalization of labor unions, and new workers’ movements. In order to provide greater insight, the more industrialized countries (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile) are compared with others less industrialized (the Andean region and Central American countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama). The chapter concludes with three findings: (1) Latin American workers’ mobilization is not reduced to labor union dynamics nor is its role limited to extending workers’ rights; (2) the complex interactions of class, ethnicity, gender, and territory have produced successive waves of politicization of the “worker question”; and (3) beyond the constraints imposed by economic structures and state control, the political subjectivation of workers has evolved in contradictory ways in the different spheres of relationship with the left, populism, the church, and political institutions, as well as a product of the historical vicissitudes of the struggles.