Continuity Despite Change: The Politics of Labor Regulation in Latin America (Social Science History)

This book explains how skill-driven economic constraints and unions' organizational power have produced long-term continuity in diverse national-level labor codes in Latin America, even in the face of significant efforts at reform by political leaders. As the dust settles on nearly three decades of economic reform in Latin America, one of the most fundamental economic policy areas has changed far less than expected: labor regulation. To date, Latin America's labor laws remain both rigidly protective and remarkably diverse. Continuity Despite Change develops a new theoretical framework for understanding labor laws and their change through time, beginning by conceptualizing labor laws as comprehensive systems or "regimes." In this context, Matthew Carnes demonstrates that the reform measures introduced in the 1980's and 1990's have only marginally modified the labor laws from decades earlier. To explain this continuity, he argues that labor law development is constrained by long-term economic conditions and labor market institutions. He points specifically to two key factors--the distribution of worker skill levels and the organizational capacity of workers. Carnes presents cross-national statistical evidence from the eighteen major Latin American economies to show that the theory holds for the decades from the 1980's to the 2000's, a period in which many countries grappled with proposed changes to their labor laws. He then offers theoretically grounded narratives to explain the different labor law configurations and reform paths of Chile, Peru, and Argentina. His findings push for a rethinking of the impact of globalization on labor regulation, as economic and political institutions governing labor have proven to be more resilient than earlier studies have suggested Matthew Carnes explains why Latin America's pattern of protective labour regulation has been surprisingly resistant to fundamental reform over the course of the last century, especially during the period of intense pressure from globalisation. He develops a theory based on two factors - the skill distribution in the economy and the organisational capacity of labour - to explain the remarkable continuity in national-level labour codes