Maria Lorena Cook

The politics of economic restructuring : state-society relations and regime change in Mexico

Rapid economic restructuring during the 1980s and early 1990s had major consequences for state-society relations in Mexico. The de la Madrid and Salinas administrations broke decisively with post-1940 import-substituting development policies by promoting an economic strategy based on the privatization of state-owned firms, systematic market liberalization, and international economic opening. These changes significantly redefined the states role as an economic actor, and they transformed relations between important social actors and the state. The essays in this volume examine three key questions arising from these economic and political transformations. First, what is the longer-term relationship between economic liberalization and political democratization in Mexico? Second, what impact has economic restructuring had on elections and the party system and on the states relationship with organized labor, the private sector, peasant and rural producer organizations, and urban popular movements? How have these different actors responded to the consequences of economic restructuring? Third, what is the significance of the Mexican case for the comparative analysis of economic and political liberalization? This book is the product of a June 1992 conference jointly organized by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the Coordinacion de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. The revised and updated essays by political scientists, economists, and sociologists offer incisive evaluations of contemporary Mexican politics and state-society relations.

Toward Flexible Industrial Relations? Neo-Liberalism, Democracy, and Labor Reform in Latin America

Neo-liberal economic reforms have placed significant pressure on traditional industrial relations systems throughout Latin American. In this context, most countries have revised their basic labor legislation. Yet, despite similar economic pressures, countries have moved in varying directions in revising their labor laws, and industrial relations systems remain highly diverse. This paper focuses on democratization, institutional legacies, the role of organized labor, and the political negotiations surrounding labor law changes to help explain this diversity.

POLITICAL TRANSITION AND LABOR REVITALIZATION IN MEXICO

The July 2, 2000, electoral victory of Vicente Fox of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) as president of Mexico marked an historic turning point in that country’s political development. The ouster from power of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) after seventy-one years promised to rupture the long-time alliance between organized labor, the state, and the PRI. A transition to a democratic political regime would create new opportunities for the struggling independent labor movement in Mexico. More importantly, a political transition would make possible for the first time a shift away from an authoritarian-corporatist system of industrial relations toward a democratic model of labor governance.

Working Through The Past: Labor and Authoritorian Legacies in Comparative Perspective

Excerpt] Democratization in the developing and post-communist world has yielded limited gains for labor. Explanations for this phenomenon have focused on the effect of economic crisis and globalization on the capacities of unions to become influential political actors and to secure policies that benefit their members. In contrast, the contributors to Working through the Past highlight the critical role that authoritarian legacies play in shaping labor politics in new democracies, providing the first cross-regional analysis of the impact of authoritarianism on labor, focusing on East and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Legacies from the predemocratic era shape labor’s present in ways that both limit and enhance organized labor’s power in new democracies. Assessing the comparative impact on a variety of outcomes relevant to labor in widely divergent settings, this volume argues that political legacies provide new insights into why labor movements in some countries have confronted the challenges of neoliberal globalization better than others.

Introduction to a Special Issue on the Impact of Immigrant Legalization Initiatives: International Perspectives on Immigration and the World of Work:

This article is the third in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. The series features articles that analyze the state of research and future directions for important themes the journal has featured over its many years of publication. In this issue, we also feature a special cluster of articles and book reviews on one of the most critical labor market issues across the globe—the legalization and integration of immigrants into national labor markets. Despite the urgent need for immigration reform in the United States, there is a paucity of US research that looks at the impact of a shift from unauthorized to legal immigrant status in the workplace. The US immigration literature has also paid little attention to immigrant legalization policies outside of the United States, despite the fact that other countries have implemented such policies with far more regularity. The articles in this special issue draw on studies of legalization initiatives in major immigrant destinations: Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Together they underscore the importance of cross-national perspectives for understanding the range of legalization programs and their impact on immigrant workers, the workplace, and the labor market. These findings contribute to key questions in migration scholarship and inform the global policy debate surrounding the integration and well-being of immigrants.

10. Transformation without Transition: China’s Maoist Legacies in Comparative Perspective

The politics of Chinese labor and the interaction between China’s authoritarian political system, dualistic labor market institutions, and “state corporatist” industrial relations are issues of incredible importance. Chinese labor trends not only affect outcomes in China but also in other countries with which China is actively engaged economically, through trade and foreign direct investment and through competition for the same. Many studies of Chinese labor politics have increased our general knowledge of the topic and explicated important facets of labor relations in post-1978 China for those unfamiliar with Chinese political institutions (Walder 1986; Lu and Perry 1997; Lee 1998, 2007; Chan 2001; Gallagher 2005; Frazier 2002, 2010; Hurst 2010; Solinger 1999). However, China’s trajectory from a relatively isolated, state-socialist, planned economy to the second largest economy in the world with the largest inflows of foreign direct investment in the developing world by far and diverse patterns of regional development and ownership have remained largely left out of analysis of labor issues in comparative politics. Scholars of Latin American labor politics have frequently expanded their sights to cross-national comparisons, especially to cases in East and Southeast Asia, but differences of regime type and transition paths have generally excluded both China and Vietnam from most studies (Haggard and Kaufmann 2008; but see Chan and Norland 1999 on the China-Vietnam comparison). The varieties of capitalism literature (Hall and Soskice 2001) has similarly not been used frequently to explore the Chinese case (but see McNally

Bringing the Worker Back in

This collection of “new studies of work” from Mexico represents one of several directions in research on labor and work in Latin America in recent years. Although firm-level, national, and transnational studies remain important, this research stream centers on individual workers, their web of relationships, and the reconfiguration of spaces of work, identities, and processes.

Bringing the Worker Back in New Studies of Work in Mexico

This collection of “new studies of work” from Mexico represents one of several directions in research on labor and work in Latin America in recent years. Although firm-level, national, and transnational studies remain important, this research stream centers on individual workers, their web of relationships, and the reconfiguration of spaces of work, identities, and processes.

Politics after Neoliberalism: Reregulation in Mexico. By Richard Snyder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 268p.

Richard Snyders well-crafted study substantiates what most political scientists suspected all along: that neoliberal reforms lead to new institutions of market governance, rather than to unregulated markets. Snyder sheds light on this understudied topic by examining the reregulation of the coffee sector by four state governments after the Mexican government dismantled the Instituto Mexicano del Café (INMECAFE), the state-owned enterprise that dominated the coffee industry during the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1980s, when deregulation began, INMECAFE was providing production supports, price controls, and government-managed marketing channels for nearly 200 thousand small coffee producers. Most of these producers were located among the poorest states in southern Mexico.

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minority practice, involving an estimated 8.4 million workers (more than half of whom are in the public sector) out of a total of 21.9 million (Millward et al. 1992:91). Similarly, there has been an important decentralization of bargaining to the firm level as industry-level agreements have collapsed, most spectacularly in engineering. It should be added that developments in the National Health Service and among local authorities since the 1990 survey was conducted have thrown into question even the basic continuity of public sector industrial relations institutions. The evidence on the practice of workplace industrial relations in Britain since 1979 casts doubt on the emphasis on stability and continuity of shopfloor industrial relations that pervades the industrial relations literature, and that Marsh largely endorses. It also challenges the assumption that industrial relations exists in a sphere that is largely insulated from politics. Margaret Thatchers Conservative government, whatever one thinks of its goals, was far more successful in reshaping industrial relations than is usually acknowledged. Since 1979 the institutional foundations of both the political and economic power of British trade unions have been seriously eroded. In this respect, the abandonment of voluntarism by British trade unions in the late 1980s-in their endorsement of the European Social Chapter, a national minimum wage, statutory union recognition, and the Labour Partys framework of individual rights for workers in place of collective immunities for trade unionsshows a recognition that they can no longer rely on their own industrial strength (if they ever could). Instead, they need legislative support from the state.