International industrial restructuring has fomented a decline in unionization in Latin America and has forced labor organizations to pursue new forms of activism. Due to the segmentation of the production process and the dispersion of the locations of production sites, the coordination of collective action has become more difficult. At the same time, labor law reforms have failed to respond to the challenges presented by market-oriented industrial reforms. As a result, labor activists are resorting to new or modified forms of labor organizing, ranging from domestic cross-class collaboration to international alliances and sporadic campaigns with labor and nongovernmental organizations. The sources of this variation in new labor actions can be found not only in contemporary political and economic contexts, but also in labor histories and ideational influences. An exploration of labor actions in the Salvadoran export apparel sector and the Brazilian automobile industry illustrates these processes.

The article presents a narrative of technological change, privatization, and globalization as they have affected Brazil's telecommunications industry. It is divided into three parts: A) A brief account of process of privatization in the telecom industry in Brazil; B) An analysis of the changes in work and employment relations in the industry; and C) A discussion of the implications of these changes for unions, focusing on problems they face and the strategies they are adopting to overcome their difficulties. A final section presents the implications of the article's findings, which are based on semistructured interviews with industry managers and workers and published company and union documents.

This article examines recent changes in working-class collective actions. First it explains which were the main causes for the decline of traditional labor union militancy resulting from effects of economic stabilization, neoliberalization, and globalization on those key segments of labor movement that accounted for the backbone of union militancy as in the case of the automotive workers, bank workers, steelworkers, and civil servants of the Brazilian economy during the decade of the 1990s. Secondly, the article analyzes the emergence of alternative forms of worker contention among the urban informal sector and the rural workers through the landless workers movement, which also have been affected by the processes of neoliberalization and globalization, but unlike the workers in the formal sector, these continue to contend for worker entitlements and introduce new forms of worker organization different from the conventional union organizations upon which is based the Brazilian labor movement.

This article examines how globalization and violence have shaped workers' organizations in the Urabá banana zone in northern Colombia from the 1960s to the present. Early unions found allies in leftist political and guerilla organizations. The banana growers relied on the neoliberal state and rightist paramilitaries to unleash an extraordinary wave of violence to crush the leftist unions. They also wooed the right within the unions by pleading a set of common interests in reforming the global banana trade to the benefit of Colombian producers. By the 1990s, a newly right-dominated union in Urabá proved adept at labor-management collaboration in the interest of their joint regional stake in the industry, but it also promoted international labor unity aimed at pressuring banana transnationals to accept minimum labor standards.

Following the onset of mass politics in early twentieth-century Latin America, party systems were distinguished by different patterns of labor incorporation. In some countries, political competition was realigned by the emergence of a mass-based, labor-mobilizing populist or leftist party. In other countries, party systems remained under the control of traditional oligarchic parties or elite personalities who provided little impetus for labor mobilization. Countries with labor-mobilizing party systems were more deeply embedded in the state-led model of capitalist development known as import substitution industrialization in the middle of the twentieth century, and they suffered severe economic trauma when this development model collapsed in the debt crisis of the 1980s. Economic austerity and free-market reforms undermined the social foundations of these party systems, which experienced sharp declines in trade-union density and widespread electoral volatility during the waning decades of the twentieth century.

Why have labor movements in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa increasingly been marginalized from the economic debates that are taking place in their countries, even though they have supported ruling parties? Policy reforms such as trade liberalization, privatization, and revisions to labor legislation in all three countries partially account for the loss of power by organized labor as many scholars have claimed. Yet, these policy “adjustments” have also interacted with long-run, structural changes in production, distribution, and trade of goods as well as with processes of democratization to undermine the position of trade unions across much of southern Africa. The article explores this puzzle by first examining the different historical trajectories of organized labor in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa. It then analyzes how policy reforms, global restructuring, and democracy had similar consequences across all three cases; collectively, they produced declines in trade-union membership and weakened the influence of organized labor. Although trade unions face a number of daunting challenges, the conclusion traces emerging opportunities for labor to recover from its current malaise.

From the 1980s to the 2000s around much of the world, organized labor scrambled to adjust to two international regimes, both propelled by the hegemonic United States and its allies: neoliberal economies and neoliberal democracies. The first framework undercut the power of unions by discouraging interference with market mechanisms from either social actors or governments. The second code of conduct hampered labor by prescribing low-intensity democracies with little mass mobilization or socioeconomic redistribution. The second model sustained the first. Thus weakened working-class movements wrestled with the dilemma of being largely unable to use democratic mechanisms to alter prejudicial economic policies.

As the editors note in their introduction to this special issue of the journal, for more than 500 years, indeed since the conquest, Latin-American economies and societies have been profoundly affected by developments in the world system. Over the past century alone, watershed moments such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the oil shocks and international debt crisis of the 1970s and 80s, have rocked Latin-American economies, transforming development paradigms and with them the circumstances of the many millions who inhabit the region. Today, a quarter century has passed since Latin-American economies embarked, unevenly yet largely irreversibly, on the path of market-oriented reform. Designed to stimulate growth through insertion into global markets, structural adjustment programs swept Latin America in the wake of the debt crisis and were followed by a panoply of measures that sought an enduring restructuring of economies in the region. The pursuit of these so-called Washington Consensus policies did away with the inward-oriented strategies that had shaped development in the region throughout the postwar period. However reluctantly, Latin America staked its future on a renewed engagement with the world economy, and became a player in the highly contested processes of globalization that are reshaping societies and economies around much of the planet.

This article considers the ways in which three local activists sought to inspire women workers to become active and loyal trade unionists at the start of the twentieth century, at a time when the great majority of female workers in Britain was unorganized. It employs evidence of tactics used by organizers of the all-female trade union, the National Federation of Women Workers in Coventry, in the industrial West Midlands of Britain in the years before the First World War. This in turn encourages consideration of the extent to which the aims and policies advocated by the Federation's national leadership suited the economic and social characteristics in the regions of Britain. It offers an opportunity to look beyond the dominant and charismatic personalities who shaped and dominated the union's national headquarters and instead considers the successes and failures of local women who attempted to establish a regional branch of the Federation.

“‘If Business and the Country Will Be Run Right:’ The Business Challenge to the Liberal Consensus, 1945–1964,” by Kim Phillips-Fein, looks at the mobilization of conservative businessmen against the liberal political economy that emerged from the New Deal and the Second World War. These businessmen were sharply critical of the expanded federal government and strong labor unions throughout the postwar period. They sought to challenge the liberal economic order by helping to build think tanks critical of liberalism, by fighting labor unions, and ultimately by participating in political activities like the right-to-work campaigns of 1958, the gubernatorial bid of William F. Knowland in California that same year, and the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. By demonstrating the development of a network of conservative businessmen during this period, the article challenges the idea that “consensus” is the appropriate framework for thinking about postwar political economy. It also suggests the centrality of issues of political economy in the rise of conservatism in the postwar United States.