This chapter argues that democratic developing countries were more likely to open their economies during the late-twentieth century if they violated workers' basic rights to organize and strike. The more democracies adopted such labor repression, the more likely they were to embrace free trade. The more democracies respected workers' rights, in contrast, the more likely they were to maintain high tariffs.

This chapter shows how labor repression played a crucial role in the history of free trade in many democratic developing countries. While the regression analyses in the previous chapter show that my argument is robust to alternative explanations and generalizable across more than 100 developing countries, this chapter begins to fill in the missing pieces - the causal mechanisms - that link democracy, labor repression, and trade liberalization.

Argentina transitioned from military dictatorship to democracy in 1983 and elected Raul Alfonsin as President. Alfonsin attempted to lower Argentin's tariffs and pass other neoliberal policies, but his economic reforms were blocked by a series of thirteen general strikes launched by the CGT, the labor union confederation led by Saul Ubaldini. When Alfonsin left office in 1989, Argentina's average tariffs still stood at 25 percent, only three percentage points lower than they had been in 1982, the last year of the military regime. By 1991, however, Alfonsin's successor, President Carlos Menem, was able to low tariffs to just 12 percent. This chapter tells the story of how Menem used labor repression to overcome union opposition and quickly open Argentina's economy.

In the mid-1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi attempted to lower India's tariffs and open the country's economy to global competition. Gandhi's trade policy proposals led India's protectionist labor unions to launch a series of general strikes that helped to block these reforms; Gandhi left office in 1989 with India's average tariff still above 80 percent. This chapter continues this story into the 1990s, when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao launched a new attempt at trade liberalization. By 1996, Rao managed to lower India’s average tariffs to 37 percent - a major success compared to Gandhi's efforts, but relatively gradual liberalization compared to many other democratic developing countries. This chapter draws on archival research to illustrate how Rao used labor repression to weaken union opposition to his economic reforms.

This chapter tests my argument that the more democracies used labor repression to weaken union opposition, the more they moved toward free trade. It uses quantitative data on tariffs, democracy, and respect for labor rights from 126 developing countries from 1985 to 2010.

This chapter introduces the idea that developing countries with democratic governments repeatedly opened their economies while cracking down on labor unions.