Labor movements

MAURIZIO ATZENI; RODOLFO ELBERT; CLARA MARTICORENA; JERÓNIMO MONTERO BRESSÁN; JULIA SOUL

Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2019; p. 332 - 344

During the first years of the 21st century several Latin American countries experienced critical political shifts that had important consequences for the dynamics of the labour movement and the life of people in the working class. This regional context of economic and political crises was related to unprecedented collective struggles which determined the political course in some countries towards some variant of popular reformism. However, many of these countries are now experiencing a conservative shift, with consequences on the life of workers and the strategies of the labour movement. In this chapter we identify three groups of countries according to the political course they have recently followed: Mexico and Chile (stable neoliberalism); Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela (stable popular reformism); and Argentina and Brazil (conservative shift). The objective of the chapter is to examine the transformations suffered by the labour movement and the working class ?both understood in a broad sense? and the challenges they face today in the context of these different socio-political trajectories.