Working through the Past: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective 9780801455483

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WORKING THROUGH THE PAST

WORKING THROUGH THE PAST Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective Edited by Teri L. Caraway, Maria Lorena Cook, and Stephen Crowley

ILR PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2015 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2015 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Working through the past : labor and authoritarian legacies in comparative ­perspective / edited by Teri L. Caraway, Maria Lorena Cook, and Stephen Crowley.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8014-5351-9 (cloth : alk. paper)   ISBN 978-0-8014-7994-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1. Comparative industrial relations.  2. Labor policy—Case studies.  3. Labor unions—Government policy—Case studies.  4. Authoritarianism—Case studies.  I. Caraway, Teri L., editor.  II. Cook, Maria Lorena, editor.  III. Crowley, Stephen, 1960– editor.  IV. Caraway, Teri L. Strength amid weakness.  HD6971.W8555 2015  322'.2—dc23   2014024934 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies

1

Teri L. Caraway, Stephen Crowley, and Maria Lorena Cook 1. Strength amid Weakness: Legacies of

Labor in

Post-Suharto Indonesia

25

Teri L. Caraway 2. Labor’s Political Representation: Divergent Paths

in Korea and Taiwan

44

Yoonkyung Lee 3. Authoritarian Legacies and Labor Weakness in

the Philippines

64

Jane Hutchison 4. The Peculiarities of

Communism and the Emergence of Weak Unions in Poland

82

David Ost 5. Exceptionalism and Its Limits: The Legacy of

Self-Management in the Former Yugoslavia

103

Marko Grdešic´ 6. Russia’s Labor Legacy: Making Use of

the Past

122

Stephen Crowley 7. State-Corporatist Legacies and Divergent Paths:

Argentina and Mexico

142

Graciela Bensusán and Maria Lorena Cook 8. “Your Defensive Fortress”: Workers and Vargas’s

Legacies in Brazil

164

Adalberto Cardoso 9. Living in the Past or Living with the Past? Reflections on

Chilean Labor Unions Twenty Years into Democracy Volker Frank

179

vi       Contents

10. Transformation without Transition: China’s Maoist

Legacies in Comparative Perspective

197

Mary E. Gallagher

Conclusion: The Comparative Analysis of Regime Change and Labor Legacies

217

Ruth Berins Collier and Andrés Schipani

Notes Works Cited List of Contributors Index

235 247 273 277

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Nancy Mills, then interim executive director of the Solidarity Center in Washington, DC, who generously provided us with space for a workshop for this volume in August 2010. At this workshop, chapter authors presented initial drafts of essays for this volume. These initial discussions were crucial for our project, and we appreciated the insightful comments that Solidarity Center staff shared with us. Ruth Collier offered particularly trenchant comments that helped to give a sharper focus to the volume. From its inception to final publication, this project has spanned several years. We thank the chapter authors for their belief in this volume, for their contributions, and for their patience. The final product has benefited greatly from the detailed comments of two reviewers. We thank Frances Benson of Cornell University Press for her guidance and support as we developed this project and Karen Hwa, Emily Powers, and John Raymond for helping to bring the manuscript to print. Finally, Maria and Stephen would like to thank Teri for the inspiration for the volume, and for taking the lead in shepherding it through its various stages.

vii

WORKING THROUGH THE PAST

Introduction

LABOR AND AUTHORITARIAN LEGACIES Teri L. Caraway, Stephen Crowley, and Maria Lorena Cook

What determines the ability of workers to defend their interests in the contemporary world? Outside of advanced capitalist societies, much of the explanation has centered on the twin epochal changes of the last few decades, namely democratization and globalization, with most arguing that the political opportunities created by democratization are outweighed by the economic constraints imposed by globalization. In this volume we focus on authoritarian legacies, an important factor that is frequently overlooked but is often crucial for understanding the opportunities and constraints workers face across much of the world. For much of the late twentieth century, unions in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia labored under authoritarian regimes that set strict boundaries on their political and economic activities. Although the “workers’ states” of Eastern Europe created unions with near-universal membership, those unions were subordinate to ruling Communist parties, had little to no independent voice, and sought primarily to ensure that workers were productive members of society (Crowley and Ost 2001). In parts of Latin America, authoritarian backlashes in the 1960s and 1970s produced military regimes that repressed the region’s politically active unions (O’Donnell 1973). These dictatorships saw labor as partly responsible for the political instability of earlier democratic regimes and as an ongoing threat (Valenzuela 1989; Drake 1996). In East and Southeast Asia, authoritarian regimes usually subordinated unions in exclusionary corporatist arrangements that sharply constrained the ability of workers to mobilize

1

2       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

collectively. Efforts to organize independently were greeted with violence and intimidation (Deyo 1989; Hadiz 1997). Given the antilabor orientation of many authoritarian regimes, it is perhaps unsurprising that worker mobilization was often an important element of the popular protests that heralded the end of authoritarian rule (Fishman 1990; Seidman 1994; Adler and Webster 1995; Drake 1996; Collier and Mahoney 1997; Koo 2000; Encarnación 2001; Ost 2005; Y. Lee 2011).1 After years and even decades of labor repression under authoritarian regimes, democratization promised more influence and power for unions. With democracy would come freedom of association, which would put an end to state-enforced union monopolies. Enhanced respect for civil liberties would create more political space for organized actors to advocate for their economic interests. Elections would open the way for the restoration or development of mutually supportive ties between parties and unions. These political transformations would make it easier—and safer—for unions to mobilize, both in the workplace and in the broader ­political arena. It was precisely this promise of newfound power for labor that caused some scholars to identify labor as a potential destabilizing factor in fragile new democracies (O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986; Przeworski 1991; Haggard and Kaufman 1995). Despite the greater opportunities for workers to exert their collective power, however, the increased political and organizational freedoms of democracy have brought mixed results. Unionization rates have fallen worldwide in recent years, but the drop has been particularly steep in a number of postauthoritarian countries, and real wages remained constant and even fell for prolonged periods in many of them as well (International Labour Office 1997; Crowley 2004; L. Cook 2010). Where labor had partisan allies, the strength and utility of that bond weakened considerably (Gibson 1997; Burgess 1999, 2004; Avdagic 2004). As Linda Cook (2010) observed in her analysis of labor rights in postcommunist Eastern Europe, labor has “more rights” but “less power.” One reason for this outcome, of course, is that neoliberal market reforms—or in a word, globalization—often accompanied democratization. The market liberalization and structural adjustment policies advocated by neoliberals fundamentally restructured economies and deepened their integration into global markets (Haggard and Kaufman 1995). Capital became increasingly mobile and therefore powerful, while labor remained typically rooted in place (Tilly 1995; Jacoby 1995). The intensification of competitive market pressures, in turn, resulted in substantial job losses in uncompetitive sectors of the economy and prompted employers to pursue greater flexibility in their workforces (Standing 1997; Seidman 2004). In many countries, informal-sector employment has increased and exceeds that in the formal sector (Freeman 2009). Retaining existing

INTRODUCTION     3

union members, much less organizing new ones, has proven difficult in the context of increased precariousness. These processes have affected long-standing democracies in the developing world, such as India and Costa Rica, as well. The “dual transitions” of democratization and neoliberal reform therefore push in different directions for organized labor. Whereas democratization has potentially enhanced labor’s associational power, globalization and market reform have undercut labor’s structural power (Wright 2000). Moreover, globalization weakens not only labor but also potentially its most valuable ally, the state, resulting in a downward spiral as flagging state capacity vitiates the labor rights guaranteed by national law (Tilly 1995). Yet, as Silver (2003) has noted, capital’s endless search for new products and new sites of production also brings with it cycles of protest that create dynamic labor movements. Although labor may be down, it is not out, as evidenced by union resurgence in Argentina (Etchemendy and Collier 2007), union resilience in Slovenia (Feldmann 2006; Crowley and Stanojevic´ 2011), and signs of renewed feistiness in Indonesia (Juliawan 2011; Caraway and Ford 2014). Even in authoritarian China, worker protests have put pressure on the state to accommodate some of their demands (C. Lee 2007; Solinger 2009). Moreover, despite the generally gloomy picture, race-to-the-bottom pressures have not had uniform effects on labor in new democracies, which suggests that unions enter these struggles with different resources in distinct strategic contexts (Candland and Sil 2001). For example, in the realm of collective labor rights, scholars employing discrete measurements and methodologies agree that the gains in labor rights that were made in new democracies have not been completely undone by global economic pressures (M. Cook 1998, 2002, 2007; Cingranelli 2002; Murillo 2005; Murillo and Schrank 2005; Neumayer and De Soysa 2005; Mosley and Uno 2007; Caraway 2009; Greenhill, Mosley, and Prakash 2009). Similarly, with respect to individual labor rights, while some studies have found more flexibilizing reforms in the area of individual rights than collective rights, some countries have nevertheless enacted laws that offered greater protections for individual labor rights (M. Cook 1998, 2007; Murillo 2005; Caraway 2009, 2010a; L. Cook 2010). There is sharp variation among democracies in the level of collective and individual labor rights, and the gap between de jure and de facto levels is wide in most countries (Burgess 2010; Cammett and Posusney 2010; Caraway 2010a; L. Cook 2010; Stallings 2010). Yet enshrining stronger protections into law provides workers and unions with important levers of power that should not be dismissed lightly. Scholars have also shown that despite the perilous politics of dual transitions, unions varied significantly in how they navigated the shoals of neoliberal reforms (Levitsky and Way 1998; Burgess 1999, 2004; Murillo 2000, 2001; Ost 2000;

4       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

Madrid 2003; Tafel and Boniface 2003; Avdagic 2004). Some successfully resisted reforms, others fought reforms, but not very hard (and hence not very successfully), and yet others engaged in “bargained liberalization” (Webster and Adler 1999) or revived national-level social bargaining (Encarnación 1997; Royo 2006). Neither democratization nor globalization, then, has produced homogeneous effects on labor.2 Simply put, a major reason for this variation is that organized labor entered the postauthoritarian era from different starting points (Locke and Thelen 1995). In order to fully understand this variation, we need to explore the deeper historical forces that have shaped labor’s capabilities and the terrain on which it acts. We argue that legacies whose roots lie in authoritarian regimes significantly influence labor’s ability to respond to new challenges and opportunities presented by dual transitions. Unions enter the democratic era with varying organizational resources, membership bases, partisan relationships, ideological baggage, and mobilizational capacities. This inherited set of resources, relations, and capacities considerably shapes the trajectories that labor follows once authoritarianism ends. Similar to Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier’s seminal Shaping the Political Arena (1991), we draw on a historical-institutionalist perspective, centering our analysis on how past institutional configurations, in particular the institutions associated with labor incorporation, endure and affect politics many years after their founding. Although we are explaining distinct outcomes, our approach draws heavily on the theoretical insights from Shaping the Political Arena. Collier and Collier (1991) argued that the “initial incorporation” of labor during the first half of the twentieth century in Latin America—a period during which the state and political actors first recognized labor as a legal actor and potential political force—had important consequences for subsequent regime dynamics. During this period, states and parties fundamentally reconfigured their relationships with unions, establishing new institutions that regulated unions and labor relations. We extend Collier and Collier’s analysis in time by addressing how legacies from predemocratic regimes have shaped labor’s fate from the 1980s to the present, focusing on the impact of past labor incorporation on labor politics after democratic transitions. The temporal and geographic scope of our analysis also means that we place less emphasis on initial incorporation than Collier and Collier and give more attention to recent episodes in which authoritarian regimes refounded labor institutions or grafted new institutions onto old. We argue that the web of formal and informal institutions established prior to democratic transitions has proven to be remarkably sticky and continues to shape labor politics decades later. Given the fundamental transformations many of these countries have undergone and the time that has elapsed since the initial democratic breakthrough,

INTRODUCTION     5

some scholars seeking to explain the problems faced by organized labor have argued that emphasizing legacies can be misleading because “there comes a time when you have to stop blaming the past” and instead focus on more proximate causes, such as the pressure for market liberalization (Meardi 2012, 172; see also Bohle and Greskovits 2006). Although we do not contend that authoritarian legacies are the only—or always the most important—factor that shapes labor’s present, the following chapters demonstrate that in many countries the imprint of the past continues to weigh heavily, interacting with more proximate causes in ways that have both benefited and harmed the development of labor movements. Ignoring the past, we therefore argue, is even more misleading than merely blaming the past. Many works about labor in new democracies draw on authoritarian legacies to explain specific outcomes such as labor weakness, mobilization against economic reforms, and labor law reforms. None so far have systematically addressed how the effects of authoritarian legacies evolve over time, or traced how variations across such legacies affect the distinctive pathways and outcomes that labor has experienced in different settings.3 In this volume, we put legacies front and center and assess their comparative impact on a variety of outcomes relevant to labor in widely divergent settings.4 To this end, we adopt a cross-regional approach to the study of authoritarian legacies. Aside from the inherent appeal of a geographically diverse comparative study, historical and institutional differences among the regions result in qualitatively distinct legacies. A cross-regional approach allows us to consider a broader menu of legacies and thus to develop a richer analysis of how legacies affect labor in new democracies. We focus on three regions—East and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America—where many countries have undergone democratization and for which sufficient comparative work exists to make empirically and theoretically grounded generalizations about regional patterns.5 By expanding the universe of empirical cases, Working through the Past yields important insights about labor in new democracies.

Defining Authoritarian Legacies Comparative historical scholars frequently deploy the term “legacy,” but they attach quite different meanings to it. In Shaping the Political Arena, Collier and Collier conceptualize legacies as a dependent variable that is intimately tied to their critical juncture analytical framework (see also Mahoney [2001]). For them, legacies are the outcomes produced by the political dynamics unleashed in the wake of a critical juncture. Labor incorporation constituted such a critical juncture,

6       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

and different forms of labor incorporation produced a set of institutional and political consequences that in turn generated distinct legacies. Far more commonly, however, scholars treat legacies as causal factors— independent variables—that contribute to a specific outcome. Most broadly, “legacy” connotes the continued influence of the past on the present, but it is defined and operationalized in widely varying ways. Some scholars employ legacies as explanatory variables without providing a precise definition of the term (Hagopian 1993; Mahoney 2003; Bernhard and Karakoç 2007), while others define legacy so broadly (including a country’s religious and ethnic diversity, for example) as to make it a synonym for historical background (Pop-Eleches 2007). The term “legacy” invariably implies a causal claim about how past events, institutions, configurations of power, and social relations contributed to particular outcomes in later historical periods. As Elster, Offe, and Preuss (1998, 293) explain, legacies are a “determinant of present outcomes that stem from the (distant) past, such as inherited endowments of actors with material resources, mentalities, and traditions.” Thus, legacies have also become shorthand to describe the “initial conditions” or starting point from which politics unfolded during political transitions (Linz and Stepan 1996; Kitschelt et al. 1999; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Pop-Eleches 2007). For the concept of legacy to be useful, however, scholars must move beyond the obvious if important point that “history matters.” Throughout this work we conceive of legacies as having a historically recent and identifiable genesis rather than the deep historical explanations employed by some who invoke the concept.6 For example, we exclude from our use of legacy the deep legacies invoked in different ways by Braudel (1972–73) and Putnam (1994) to explain seemingly entrenched patterns of behavior across great expanses of time. There are methodological as well as practical reasons for this: we agree with Kitschelt (2003) that analyses that lean heavily on historically deep legacies often end up with interesting correlations, but typically fail to provide a causal mechanism that links past to present. Legacies are not merely historically produced variables or historical background. Such a conceptualization is overly encompassing—it can include just about everything—and usually fails to trace the processes through which the legacies endure and are actively reproduced. We therefore conceptualize legacies as historical rather than constant causes (Stinchcombe 1968). Constant causes operate year after year and produce relative continuity in their effects. An example of a constant cause is the high propensity to strike exhibited by workers in isolated export enclaves (Collier and Collier 1991). Historical causes, by contrast, shape an outcome at a particular point in time and establish a set of institutions that persist and reproduce themselves without the recurrence of the original cause.

INTRODUCTION     7

For our purposes, then, legacies are generated in identifiable periods of time, and their reproduction or reconfiguration can be traced through constantly evolving economic, political, and social contexts (Thelen 1999; Pierson 2004). In other words, we believe that it is crucial to engage in process tracing in order to sketch out the causal mechanisms between what is to be explained and what is doing the explaining, and to demonstrate empirically the processes through which these legacies endure. Moreover, in this volume we focus explicitly on authoritarian legacies rather than historical legacies per se. Scholarship on authoritarian legacies is a distinct subset of the legacies literature. The invocation of authoritarian legacies necessarily presumes that new democracies do not begin their lives with a clean slate—the authoritarian past continues to shape the democratic present. Actors from the authoritarian era, such as political parties, the military, and ruling oligarchies, often exert a lingering and powerful influence in new democracies (Payne 2000; Grzymala-Busse 2002; Robison and Hadiz 2004; Winters 2011). Scholars have also observed that institutional and ideological legacies limit the prospects for reform (Jowitt 1993; Stark and Bruszt 1998; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Cesarini and Hite 2004), and that lingering atomization from the authoritarian period diminishes the influence of civil society actors (Howard 2003). Terms such as “hybrid regimes” and “illiberal democracy” reflect the perceived democratic deficits in new democracies that have often stemmed from authoritarian legacies (Zakaria 1997; Diamond 2002; Levitsky and Way 2002; Robertson 2011). Implicit in the invocation of authoritarian legacies is the understanding that the institutional transformations that occurred after democratization were not simply created by powerful interests out of whole cloth, but rather that these actors’ strategies were crafted from a society’s available institutional and cultural material.7 These inherited features from the past interacted with features of the transition context to shape future political developments in new democracies. In an extensive review of the literature on authoritarian legacies, Cesarini and Hite (2004) uncovered three common conceptualizations of authoritarian legacies: formal structures and institutions inherited from authoritarian regimes; the lingering power and influence of traditional/conservative groups; and cultural or psychological manifestations of authoritarianism. Authoritarian legacies, they argue, are aspects of the past that “survive democratic transitions and intervene in the quality and practice of post-authoritarian democracy” (Cesarini and Hite 2004, 4). Building on Cesarini and Hite, we define authoritarian legacies as actors, formal institutions, informal practices, and cultural or ideological frameworks that newly democratic regimes inherit from authoritarian regimes and that shape politics in the democratic period.

8       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

Of course all societies—whether authoritarian or democratic—are shaped by the past. We focus on authoritarian legacies rather than on all historical legacies affecting labor, however, because in the cases we examine—and indeed, in virtually all postauthoritarian societies—labor institutions were profoundly shaped by the authoritarian period. Authoritarian governments often deeply restructure labor relations. Lacking the legitimation mechanism of meaningful elections, authoritarian systems face unique challenges from subordinate social groups, especially labor, and typically seek distinct means to constrain labor, and sometimes to mobilize labor and seek legitimacy from it. Most notably, authoritarian regimes create institutions that give the state much greater discretionary authority to intervene in and shape labor relations. In addition, given that there are fewer checks on the state’s use of force against its citizens, authoritarian regimes typically use a heavier dose of repression than democracies in disciplining unions. Our emphasis on how authoritarian regimes shaped labor institutions departs to some extent from the Colliers’ focus on initial incorporation. In many of the cases discussed in this volume, initial incorporation took place under authoritarianism. In Eastern Europe, for example, labor relations were forged during the mass industrialization under communism. In other cases, such as Chile and Indonesia, the authoritarian regimes led by General Augusto Pinochet and Suharto refounded labor institutions in ways that fundamentally transformed the institutions created during the initial incorporation. Although in most of these cases initial incorporation took place under the authoritarian regime that preceded the most recent democratization, in Argentina and Brazil initial incorporation occurred during authoritarian-populist regimes in the 1930s and 1940s. The founding labor institutions from this period largely survived later episodes of democratization and authoritarianism, and were then bequeathed to new democracies in the 1980s. The durability of authoritarian legacies in Argentina and Brazil raises the analytic question of how and why these legacies were reproduced across many decades and multiple regimes. In the Philippines, by contrast, initial incorporation occurred under democracy and President Ferdinand Marcos integrated many of these founding institutions into authoritarian-era labor practices. Rather than refounding institutions, he grafted other practices atop preexisting institutions. Here part of the analytic task entails reflecting on why Marcos retained these institutions and on how the changes that he introduced created a distinct set of institutions that were then passed on to the Corazon Aquino administration. These variations among authoritarian regimes further reinforce a fundamental point of this volume: our use of authoritarian legacies as an analytic category is not an assertion that all authoritarian regimes are the same. The differences

INTRODUCTION     9

among authoritarian regimes are crucial to how we theorize about the impact of authoritarian legacies on contemporary labor politics.

Theorizing the Impact of Authoritarian Legacies Our approach to analyzing the impact of authoritarian legacies falls within the historical-institutionalist tradition. We conceptualize legacies as past institutional configurations that “constrain and refract,” but do not determine, subsequent outcomes (Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992, 3). In our case, we focus on how actors, ideologies, and institutions with roots in a prior authoritarian period have a causal effect on outcomes under democracy despite the end of the regimes that created them. Legacies seldom persist as the mere dead weight of the past, however. As historical institutionalists have observed, institutions, once they are created, depend on mechanisms of reproduction, adaptation, or support from powerful actors, or all three, to be sustained (Thelen 1999). This is especially so for authoritarian legacies since, by definition, they are often transplanted into a starkly different environment from the authoritarian past in which they were previously sustained (Cesarini and Hite 2004). If authoritarian legacies are not the mere dead weight of the past, how do they affect labor in new democracies? Perhaps paradoxically, analyzing the impact of legacies is an exercise in explicating political change. The analysis of how and why institutions change has become the primary focus of contemporary debates in historical institutionalism. Early work in this tradition often relied on punctuated equilibrium models whereby change (often the result of external shocks) happened in big bursts followed by long periods of stability (Thelen 1999; Streeck and Thelen 2005a). The critical juncture framework is perhaps the best-known example of a punctuated equilibrium model of change among comparative historical scholars (Collier and Collier 2002). Theoretically, critical junctures are branching points between path dependent processes; they are periods of rupture where contingency and uncertainty make dramatic political change possible (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007). During these “unsettled periods” old rules and practices are much more pliable than in settled periods, when institutional arrangements tend to harden (Swidler 1986). Once clear of the critical juncture, institutions “lock-in” and settle into a new path of relative stability (Thelen 2003; Pierson 2004). In this path-dependent perspective, legacies act like a lamp that illuminates some pathways while leaving others darkened, or a trail along which some walkways are steeper or more slippery and therefore less inviting than others. They are analogous to Weir’s (1992) notion of bounded innovation, where “decisions at one point in time restrict subsequent possibilities by sending policy

10       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

off onto particular tracks, along which ideas and interests develop and institutions and strategies adapt” (251).8 On the one hand, a critical juncture framework seems perfectly suited to our analytical task, since democratization often results from external shocks and produces dramatic change. The institutions forged during the transition—the critical juncture—could fundamentally transform what preceded it and set the institutions on a new path. In this model of change, authoritarian legacies take the form of antecedent conditions that interact with the transition context to crystallize into fundamentally distinct institutional configurations.9 In this volume, Marko Grdešicʹ ’s chapter on the former Yugoslavia (chapter 5) comes the closest to this model of change. Here, the legacy of worker self-management interacted with the distinct economic and political environments in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia to produce dramatically different relations among unions, parties, and the state. In this case, similar legacies had different effects, depending on the context of the critical juncture. The experience of other postcommunist countries can also be interpreted with a critical juncture framework. In this case, the shock of capitalist transformation and insertion into the global economy occurred at a moment when labor unions were generally distrusted and viewed—at times by labor activists themselves—as unneeded holdovers from the Communist era (Crowley 2004; Ost 2005, also chapter 4 in this volume). The result was a massive hemorrhaging of membership. Although the anticommunist legacy may have attenuated over time as unions and workers became acclimated to the new capitalist environment, in the meantime unions had become much smaller and weaker organizations. Thus, the anticommunist legacy combined with the transition to capitalism to cause both a dramatic decline in union membership and to create economies with relatively flexible labor markets that were dependent on foreign capital. Once this path is taken, unions can engage in new organizing, but they do so from a much lower base. On the other hand, as much of the new work on institutional change has emphasized, exogenous shocks may also prompt less obvious, evolutionary changes that force institutions to adapt, innovate, or change in subtle ways (Thelen 2003; Steinmo 2010). Even in more settled periods, institutions are subject to renegotiation, to “drift” in their significance, to the “layering” of new institutions on old, and thus to “gradual transformation” (Streeck and Thelen 2005b; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). The result may be a hybridization, recombination, and bricolage of old and new (Campbell 1997; Stark and Bruszt 1998; Galvan and Sil 2007; Mrozowicki 2011). The chapters in this volume contain many examples of reconfigured legacies produced through an interaction of the old and the new. One reason that these

INTRODUCTION     11

reconfigurations occur is that institutional arrangements reflect distributions of resources and power, so actors fight to defend the inherited institutions that benefit them (Mahoney and Thelen 2010, 8). For instance, Adalberto Cardoso (chapter 8, this volume) relates that in Brazil even the more militant unions defended provisions of the labor code that they had once criticized, in recognition of their protective function during periods of economic and political uncertainty. In Argentina, Graciela Bensusán and Maria Lorena Cook (chapter 7, this volume) show that the Peronist legacy gave unions significant resources with which to defend their interests. Although governments in Argentina tried to weaken union resources during both democratization and the neoliberal reform period, by mobilizing their members and enlisting their historic allies in the Peronist party, unions ensured that important parts of this legacy survived. In this case, as in others in this volume, institutions not only constrain but also enable, providing strategic resources for actors in responding to new challenges and opportunities (Thelen 2003, 213). In some cases, it is not so much labor but newly democratic governments that find utility in defending old institutions. In her chapter on the Philippines, Jane Hutchison (chapter 3) notes that the Marcos regime developed tripartite institutions of labor, employers, and the state as a mechanism for co-opting conservative unions and gaining international legitimacy. The Aquino and subsequent democratic administrations found these tripartite institutions to be useful as well, since their consensus style of decision making allowed for the sidelining of reformist demands from the left. So democratic governments retained and even expanded them. Many union leaders cooperated, since tripartism further entrenched their position as national representatives in a context where they had little connection to their members. Yet seemingly similar institutions have different consequences in distinct settings. In Indonesia, as Teri L. Caraway’s chapter indicates (chapter 1), tripartite institutions from the Suharto era were transformed into institutions that activated rather than pacified labor. This example of institutional drift was made possible by the radical decentralization of the tripartite minimum-wage setting boards, which both allowed members to hold their local leaders accountable and for union leaders to mobilize their membership to pressure local governments to side with workers instead of employers. Another form of evolutionary change is institutional layering, in which new institutions exist alongside the old. For example, in Indonesia and the Philippines, restrictions on strikes persisted alongside the various reforms that restored or strengthened collective rights. In the Philippines, Hutchison attributes the tight control over strikes to the desire of democratic governments to prevent mobilization by radical unions. At the same time, the co-optation of the conservative unions and their distance from members ensured that they would not

12       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

push too hard for further reforms. Caraway focuses less on why these restrictions remained in place in Indonesia and more on how they have channeled labor conflict into protests outside the workplace. In both cases, the evolution of labor law is shaped by legacies from authoritarian rule. Legacies matter, then, for their ability to shape political pathways for years, sometimes decades, after the events that first give rise to them have passed. This does not necessarily mean that legacies survive unchanged. Although in some cases they may persist largely intact, legacies are more likely to interact with elements of new political contexts to produce novel configurations or to transform themselves gradually via evolutionary mechanisms of institutional change.10

Authoritarianism and Its Aftermath: Legacy Unions, Labor Law, and Ideology In this volume we are specifically concerned with labor legacies: legacies that constrain and enable labor’s capacity to mobilize and to advocate for its organizational interests and worker welfare. Since labor enters the newly democratic era from different starting points—in part as a consequence of authoritarian legacies—a crucial first step in demonstrating the effects of legacies on labor’s fate in new democracies is to give some sense of how labor incorporation varied and why these variations matter. As Collier and Collier (2002) argued, labor incorporation had profound consequences for the political trajectories of Latin American countries. We argue that the form of labor incorporation also affects the potential for the development of strong unions in new democracies. Authoritarian regimes—whether populist, conservative, or communist—provided an assortment of legal and institutional assets to state-backed unions as a means to both control and secure support from labor movements. Although incorporation involved placing some constraints on unions, states also commonly offered inducements to elicit labor’s cooperation (Collier and Collier 1979). The balance of inducements and constraints varied dramatically from country to country. The mode of labor incorporation affected not only unionization rates but also labor law, links with political parties, organizational resources, the relationship between unions and members, the role of unions in the workplace, and the ability of unions to mobilize independently of the state and their partisan allies. These different regional models of incorporation can be described in the broadest terms as exclusionary corporatist (Asia), inclusionary corporatist (Latin America), and state paternalist (Eastern Europe).11 In exclusionary forms of labor incorporation in noncommunist Asia, states aimed to demobilize unions. Ruling parties opposed high rates of unionization,

INTRODUCTION     13

but they granted state-backed unions monopoly or near monopoly status. Even though virtually all unionized workers belonged to state-backed unions, these unions organized an insignificant share of the workforce (usually far less than 10 per­ cent). The benefits that unions derived from state sponsorship were meager and usually consisted of modest financial subsidies and office space. Union officers were not deeply integrated into ruling party structures. In these countries, unions entered the democratic era as depoliticized and enfeebled organizations that had weak links to their membership base and were dependent on employers and the state. In Communist countries, workers were incorporated into a system best described as state paternalist. State-backed unions enjoyed monopoly status, union membership was virtually universal, and unions functioned as “transmission belts” between Communist parties and workers (Pravda 1986; Thirkell, Petkov, and Vickerstaff 1998).12 Unions were subordinate to the Communist Party, which controlled the economic as well as the political spheres in the near absence of a private sector, a capitalist class, and an independent civil society. Workers were meant to work for the good of society as well as their wages, and the state’s distributive mechanisms were to provide for their social needs. Unions were also central to social needs provision. Party sponsorship guaranteed unions with basic institutional support, such as buildings for office space and routine dues collection, and unions invested these funds in services of benefit to their members, such as summer camps, vacation facilities, and emergency credit. At the enterprise level, the primary tasks of unions were to motivate workers to fulfill the plan and to distribute valuable benefits and services to workers. Unions in postcommunist countries, therefore, entered the democratic era with extremely high density, but they were dependent on employers, had little experience mobilizing their members or engaging in collective bargaining, and had no history of independence from the ruling party. In inclusionary corporatist systems found in Latin America, ties between ruling parties and unions were also close, but unions retained greater capacity to act independently. Ruling parties in inclusionary corporatist systems considered unions to be a supporting pillar of the regime, and the state both facilitated the growth of union membership and provided its union partners with significant institutional advantages over other unions. Unionization rates were lower than in state paternalist systems, but higher than in exclusionary models. Although unions rarely enjoyed a legal monopoly, labor laws favored established unions and permitted significant state intervention in labor relations, which states used to defend and discipline their union allies. The combination of labor-based parties and preferential treatment for unions allied with the dominant party, along with labor laws that allowed independent unions but favored established

14       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

and state-allied unions, are the defining features of the inclusionary corporatist model. Of the three illustrative models, unions in inclusionary corporatist systems entered the democratic era with the greatest mobilizational capacity. But they, too, depended on state-proffered benefits to maintain their membership base, which often resulted in weak ties to their membership. Laws favoring established unions also presented formidable challenges for new unions that sought to compete with state-backed unions. This model defines some of the largest and most industrialized Latin American countries—Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina—even if it does not represent all or even most countries in the region. Variations in labor incorporation matter because their legacies shape the conditions under which unions enter the newly democratic terrain. In the remainder of this section, we focus on three specific legacies that are especially likely to affect labor in new democracies: the survival of former state-backed unions (legacy unions), labor law, and ideology.

Legacy Unions Perhaps one of the most obvious legacies of authoritarianism is that state-backed unions did not merely vanish with the transition to democracy. Caraway (2008) coined the term “legacy union” to describe unions allied with the previous authoritarian regime that survive in the democratic era.13 Legacy unions are still the largest labor unions in almost every postcommunist country, as well as in Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Even in cases where independent unions have overtaken legacy unions, such as in South Korea and Poland, legacy unions are still one of the two largest unions in the country (Caraway 2012). Although legacy unions share a number of common features—a dependence on the state and employers and weak links to members—there are also important differences among them. They vary in terms of the size of the membership they inherit, whether they enjoy a union monopoly, and the resources that regimes provide them. Inheriting legacy unions that organized a large proportion of the workforce would seem to be a positive thing for labor’s influence in new democracies. Yet legacy unions can negatively affect the strategic context in which unions that emerge after democratization struggle to gain members. The continued influence of legacy unions potentially impedes organizing efforts by new unions that might better represent worker interests. Given their history of dependence on state backing, legacy unions often have both weak links to their members and minimal experience publicly advocating for them. Consequently, a large proportion of the organized workforce in new democracies belongs to unions that at best are conservative and inexperienced and at worst exploitative and corrupt.14 The extent to which legacy unions can be

INTRODUCTION     15

a positive or a negative force for workers in new democracies depends on their capacity to transform themselves. The incentives to reform vary in part based on the transition context and on the extent of the unions’ inherited advantages. Legacy unions often inherit an array of material resources that make it possible for them to survive without transforming themselves. In some cases, legacy unions also inherit significant legal advantages, the most important of which are labor law provisions that favor established unions and hence provide some protection from new challengers. Despite these inherited advantages that could block reform, democratization also puts pressure on legacy unions to change.15 A greater degree of freedom of association brings with it not only competition from new unions for membership but also the chance for thwarted reformers inside legacy unions to defect and establish new unions. Labor laws and state authorities’ close relationship with legacy unions could block the exit option, of course, but the symbiotic relationship between unions and the state was usually weakened or shattered when authoritarian regimes fell. Such dynamics remind us that legacy unions, like legacies generally, do not persist by inertia but need to be reproduced. As Stephen Crowley shows in his chapter on Russia (chapter 6), powerful actors can refashion legacies to their advantage. Early in his presidency, Vladimir Putin pushed through labor reforms over the objections of Russia’s independent unions by co-opting Russia’s dominant legacy union. He secured its support for a more flexible labor code by exploiting that union’s historical dependence on the state and by incorporating provisions into the new labor code that gave the union a virtual legal monopoly on workers’ representation. Russia’s legacy union thus survived by cultivating new political partners and fighting to gain new advantages in exchange for giving up some past prerogatives. The survival of the legacy union in Indonesia demonstrates another pattern through which legacies shape the organizing terrain in new democracies. The cutoff of state sponsorship disrupts the primary feedback mechanism that sustains legacy unions. Such disruptions, in turn, create pressures for institutional evolution (Thelen 1999). To survive, Indonesia’s legacy union needed to find new guarantors, as did the legacy union in Russia, or else transform itself so that it could compete in the new environment. Yet not only has the Indonesian union failed to develop a sustained relationship with power brokers, it has not enacted the internal reforms that would allow it to thrive without state sponsorship (due in part to inherited procedures for leadership selection that allow past leaders to thwart reform). The result has been disintegration (Caraway, this volume). In other places legacy unions were not so toxic a legacy. In parts of Latin America, labor incorporation took place under inclusionary populist (albeit

16       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

authoritarian) regimes. These regimes were followed by periods of democratic and military rule, including right-wing authoritarian governments in the 1960s and 1970s. The authoritarian governments of this period did not sponsor legacy unions; they targeted unions and persecuted their members.16 Consequently, unions in Argentina and Brazil had a more antagonistic relationship with recent authoritarian regimes (see Bensusán and Cook, and Cardoso, in this volume). In the former Yugoslavia, self-management created autonomous workplaces, making state-backed unions less central than in other Communist countries (Grdešicʹ , this volume, chapter 5). David Ost (this volume, chapter 4) shows that Poland’s legacy union was less imposing than in other parts of Eastern Europe because the state-backed union lost its monopoly in 1980, was dissolved in 1981, then resurrected later in the decade as a rival to the then-underground Solidarity union. It thus emerged from authoritarian rule as a much weaker but more independent organization. These variations in the nature of legacy unions affect how such unions navigate the newly democratic terrain as well as new unions’ capacity to organize under democracy.

Labor Law The system of labor law inherited from authoritarian regimes is another important legacy that shapes labor politics in new democracies. Democratization typically produces strong pressures to reform authoritarian-era labor codes that repressed collective labor rights (M. Cook 2007). Legally sanctioned union monopolies in exclusionary and state paternalist systems were often the first item on the chopping block. But in inclusionary systems where state-backed unions did not depend on monopoly status for their hegemony, aspects of the labor code that favored already established unions remained unchanged. These unreformed labor laws shaped the terrain on which unions organized during the transition and beyond. They could strengthen legacy unions that colluded with management, as they did in Mexico, by making it hard for challengers to displace legacy unions in the workplace. The laws could also provide unions with ample resources that would prove important in defending their members. Provisions of populist-era labor laws in Argentina that centralized collective bargaining, provided for its extension to nonunionized workers, and gave unions control over social welfare funds granted former state-backed unions market and organizational power that would be the envy of unions in much of the world (M. Cook 2007). The relative strength of Argentine unions today is due in part to the persistence of these labor laws. Even where labor laws are significantly changed, the starting point for reform negotiations is usually the labor code inherited from the authoritarian regime.

INTRODUCTION     17

The contours of labor law at the time of transition thus shape the battles to come, determining what some actors want to change and what others wish to keep. In Asia, the labor codes of many countries were both protective and repressive—they protected workers by strictly regulating individual labor contracts, but repressed collective labor mobilization (Koo 2000; Caraway 2004). After democratization, conservatives in countries with “protectively repressive” labor laws could not oppose the recognition of freedom of association for long, which proved to be an advantage for workers. Individual protections inherited from the authoritarian past also put workers in a stronger position during labor reform negotiations, since unions only needed to defend existing rights (and mobilize their members for this purpose), while employers (and perhaps the state) were put in the position of taking away those protections. Most authoritarian regimes also placed restrictions on the right to strike. In these cases, unions aimed to reduce strike limits while employers (and often the state) preferred to maintain them. The key point is that the battle of labor reform is fought on a strategic terrain determined in large part by labor laws inherited from the authoritarian past.

Ideology Labor incorporation entailed not only the structuring of labor relations through law and state or party-union relations but also their legitimation through various ideologies. These systems of labor incorporation sometimes invited ideological backlash and resistance that redefined how citizens and workers viewed the role of unions in society, or else they generated radical views that questioned the subservience of workers to the state. Ideological legacies are therefore helpful in explaining how actors define and pursue their interests, both why actors do what they do and why they fail to do certain things. Following Swidler (1986), ideological legacies can also be viewed as part of a society’s cultural tool kit, materials to be fought over and to fight with, from which powerful actors might construct new institutional arrangements. These ideological legacies can be as sticky as more tangible organizational and legal legacies.17 In much of Eastern Europe, but particularly in Poland, an ideological backlash against unions grew out of the “workers’ states.” Moreover, the task of the postcommunist transformations was not simply to transition from authoritarianism to democracy, as challenging as that is, but also from communism to capitalism, a transition that Polish workers themselves were instrumental in bringing about. The problem for workers there was not just a “communist legacy” but also an “anticommunist legacy” that led both workers and many union leaders to doubt the relevance of unions in a capitalist democracy (Crowley and Ost 2001; Ost 2005). The dilemma, then, was not only institutional but also ideational. The

18       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

traditional political orientations of Left and Right made little sense, and neither did the questions of what political alliances unions should seek or what sort of alternatives they should strive for. In the former Yugoslavia, a rather different legacy of self-management, one that was perceived as more legitimate, provided unions with a more advantageous tool kit that they could use to defend their position during democratic transitions. In Russia, even when Communist-era policies were discredited at the macro level, workplace norms about the responsibilities of a firm to its workers—the “moral legacy of an ‘immoral economy’ ”— gave workers a moral foundation on which to contest privatization (Sil 2001). Understandings of the past can also shape how actors define realistic or desirable goals and allies. The legacy of fear inspired by harsh authoritarian regimes and the strength of the outgoing authoritarian coalition may make democratic actors more willing to compromise on their agenda for fear that pushing too hard could jeopardize the democratic transition (Haagh 2002). In his chapter on Chile, Volker Frank (chapter 9) demonstrates how ideological legacies kept the democratic Concertación government from enacting prolabor policies and legal reforms during the crucial initial transition period, despite its alliance with unions. Ost’s chapter makes a similar argument about Solidarity in Poland. These failures to act have enduring consequences, since in these cases labor’s best opportunity for shaping institutions—during the critical juncture—was lost. Ideological legacies can shape the availability of labor’s coalition partners as well. In the Philippines, the rise of a powerful Communist Party during the 1980s simultaneously divided progressive forces, impairing their capacity to push for change, and unified political elites in opposing deeper reforms (Hutchison, this volume). In both Korea and Indonesia, the virulent anticommunism under authoritarianism eradicated organized traces of the Left and delegitimized leftist ideas. The absence of Left parties, in turn, limited the potential coalition partners for labor. In Indonesia, unions also internalized the Suharto regime’s labor-relations philosophy, which posited that unions should not be involved in politics. But ideological legacies can also be empowering, as Yoonkyung Lee demonstrates in her discussion of Korean and Taiwanese unions (chapter 2). The Korean Confederation of Trade Union’s (KCTU) militancy and lack of leftist political allies led it to reject collaboration with nonprogrammatic parties. The KCTU formed an independent labor party instead, despite an unfavorable electoral system that made it tough to win seats. After persuading the Constitutional Court of the unconstitutionality of the electoral system, the KCTU’s labor party eventually gained a prominent place in Korea’s legislature. By contrast, the legacy of mutual trust between parties and unions in Taiwan led both the legacy union and the

INTRODUCTION     19

largest independent union to continue to collaborate with their partisan allies. As a result, Taiwanese unions felt no need to establish an independent labor party. This discussion of labor incorporation under authoritarian rule provides a rough map of the distinctions among countries, both within and across regions. The chapters in this volume further reveal important differences within these three forms of labor incorporation as well as interesting similarities across forms of incorporation. The key analytic point is that differences in labor incorporation under authoritarianism generate variations in labor legacies. These are inherited by labor in new democracies, producing distinct starting points from which unions navigate the new democratic political terrain. In creating its future, then, labor must work through the past.

Conclusion: Legacies as Assets and Liabilities The key argument of this volume is that authoritarian-era legacies matter for labor in new democracies. Whereas most analyses of authoritarian legacies tend to assume that these act primarily as constraints, one of our central findings is that legacies can function as both assets and liabilities. Rather than summarize the chapters in this volume, here we highlight their insights on how legacies empower or constrain workers in new democracies. Taken together, the chapters reveal the multiple ways that authoritarian-era legacies provide or limit resources, aid or constrain key social actors, and interact with democratic and market transition contexts. Within particular regional or subregional contexts that shared similar modes of labor incorporation, the analyses show how differences in legacies and in transition contexts had profound consequences for how workers and unions fared in new democracies. Teri Caraway’s chapter on Indonesia analyzes why organizationally weak unions that play a marginal role in formal politics have been remarkably effective in securing collective gains through mass mobilization. Caraway traces labor’s organizational weakness to the legacy of exclusionary corporatism that bequeathed Indonesia with low levels of unionization and conservative legacy organizations resistant to reform. In formal politics, the eradication of the Left under Suharto and the continued domination of the major political parties by Suharto-era elites limited the supply of viable partisan partners for unions after democratization. Legacies of economic unionism also led most unions to reject forming partisan alliances. Despite these unfavorable organizational and political legacies, however, other legacies have empowered labor. The survival of weak protections for the right to strike and the powerful tradition of wildcat protests pushed unions

20       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

in the direction of relying primarily on demonstrations rather than collective bargaining to achieve collective goals. Tripartite institutions—also a legacy of the Suharto era—unified Indonesia’s fragmented unions behind collective goals. These two legacies facilitated the unification of workers in the large demonstrations that were critical to labor’s victories. Yoonkyung Lee’s chapter comparing South Korea and Taiwan outlines how authoritarian legacies simultaneously enable and constrain labor in new democracies in counterintuitive ways. She grapples with the important question of why unions adopt distinct political strategies in new democracies. Lee shows that the legacy of party-union links under authoritarian rule explains why unions in South Korea and Taiwan, despite many similarities, followed distinct paths of political representation after the transition to democracy. Paradoxically, the more extreme exclusion of labor under authoritarian rule in South Korea turned out to be an asset that opened new political possibilities for labor after the transition to democracy, propelling the KCTU to establish a labor party rather than to seek accommodation with existing parties. In Taiwan, by contrast, unions followed the path of least resistance by maintaining ties to parties that were established under authoritarian rule. Although it would be erroneous to call Taiwan’s legacy a liability, since having partisan allies can also be an asset, the KCTU’s direct access to the legislature without the mediation of nonlabor parties provided it with a stronger independent voice in national politics. Jane Hutchison’s chapter offers a gloomier picture in which legacies have constrained rather than empowered workers. Despite almost thirty years of democracy, unions in the Philippines are perhaps weaker now than they were after the fall of Marcos. Hutchison traces labor’s predicament to the layering of preauthoritarian and authoritarian legacies. The Marcos regime left important elements of preexisting labor-relations institutions in place—most importantly, enterprise unionism and highly fragmented federations with tenuous links to their members. Unions therefore emerged from authoritarian rule organizationally weak. In addition, the emergence of leftist labor organizations during the Marcos period both exacerbated interunion divisions and laid the foundation for a radical flanking move by the newly democratic government, undercutting the leftist labor organizations by incorporating conservative labor leaders into tripartite institutions. At the same time, preauthoritarian legacies of decentralized violence and authoritarian legacies of direct police and military repression of nonviolent political organizing created an extremely dangerous context for independent labor organizers who might challenge the conservative unions and advocate more strongly for worker interests. In his chapter on Poland, David Ost makes clear that to categorize unions in postcommunist societies as either leftist or conservative is often misleading. The

INTRODUCTION     21

Communist system in Poland generated the spontaneous rise of Solidarity, arguably the strongest workers’ movement in history. Yet while workers were central to bringing down the old regime, unions found themselves considerably hampered by its legacies. The ideological valorization of labor under communism produced ironic results for workers in postcommunist Poland, since, according to Ost, “the ideological legacy consisted in the collapse of support for the very idea of organized labor or trade unions.” Solidarity retained significant symbolic clout and was nominally in control of the government for a time, but it pushed neoliberal policies that directly threatened workers. Thus for Ost the ideological legacy is crucial. In Poland this was largely an anticommunist reaction to the previous regime, although this ideology grew out of specific institutional and structural arrangements from the past. Significantly, Polish workers did not seek simply to replace dictatorship with democracy. In the hope of living better they also sought to replace communism with capitalism, inadvertently deepening their subordinate status as a result. Given Solidarity’s key role in this process, Ost finds, paradoxically, that it initially behaved more like a “legacy union” than the Communist-created National Association of Trade Unions (OPZZ), which had to struggle against its rival to claim legitimacy. Marko Grdešic´’s chapter affirms that there is no single “communist legacy,” but that a single labor legacy—in this case, Yugoslav self-management—can either enable or constrain depending on the political and economic environment in which it is planted. In Slovenia that legacy, when combined with favorable economic and political conditions, allowed for the transformation of the institutions of self-management into a unique postcommunist neocorporatism. Meanwhile, in increasingly nationalistic Croatia and Serbia, that same legacy was converted from an asset for labor into a liability, as unions and institutions of self-management came to be seen as holdovers from the old regime. The legacy of self-management spurred labor mobilization in all three cases, but with crucial differences in timing: in Slovenia labor mobilized during the critical juncture of the postcommunist transformation in order to forge privatization policies and other institutions that favored workers, whereas in Croatia and Serbia those mobilizations followed in the wake of nationalist wars and were rearguard attempts to confront what workers perceived as the corrupt results of past privatizations. In Russia, which had neither the potentially favorable experience of Yugoslav self-management nor the profound anticommunism of Poland, the constraints left by the Communist labor legacy are nevertheless distinctly visible, as the chapter by Stephen Crowley confirms. There, in collaboration with the Russian state, Russia’s legacy union continues to dominate. However, rather than acting as a constant presence or one that fades over time, the legacy union, after losing official favor with President Boris Yeltsin, was given renewed prominence under

22       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

Putin, a process that coincided with Putin’s considerable restrictions on civil society and democracy. Putin co-opted the legacy union at the expense of smaller alternative unions in order to contain labor protest. In so doing, he provided very few institutional channels through which workers might express their grievances, which instead occasionally erupt in the form of “extreme measures.” This problem is compounded by another legacy affecting labor, namely, the tenuous fate of Russia’s many one-industry towns or monogorods built in the Soviet era. Long starved of investment, a number of these industries (along with their towns) are teetering on bankruptcy. Here legacies constrain labor action, but at the cost of allowing grievances to fester. Turning to Latin America, Graciela Bensusán and Maria Lorena Cook examine Argentina and Mexico, two countries that follow very different trajectories despite similar legacies that originate with labor incorporation under inclusionary state-corporatist regimes. The authors focus on legal and institutional legacies and on the divergent ways in which institutional differences shape unions’ contexts and opportunities, leading to greater constraints on Mexican unions than on those in Argentina. The comparison reveals that despite broad similarities (state oversight, dominant unions, labor-based parties, limits on new unions), differences in legal and institutional design confer more power to employers in Mexico than in Argentina, a power held in check until economic liberalization. For instance, in Mexico a critical feature of institutional design allows employers to “choose” their bargaining counterpart, thus ensuring subordination to the wages, working conditions, and forms of collective representation set by the employer. In contrast, the lack of a similar feature in Argentina facilitates the greater autonomy of unions vis-à-vis employers. Bensusán and Cook show how these legacies enabled Argentine unions to recover after neoliberalism, yet continued to exclude competitors to dominant unions, while Mexican unions overall continued to erode after neoliberal and democratic transitions. In Brazil, labor legacies facilitated periods of state control and labor movement division, yet they also enabled militant unionists to operate—indeed, to flourish—within the prevailing legal and institutional structure. Adalberto Cardoso focuses on legal legacies and explains why the labor code that originated in the state-corporatist era under President Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s and 1940s has proven remarkably resilient. Vargas’s initial incorporation of labor through the legal structure resonated with individual workers’ aspirations and bound workers to the capitalist project that Vargas was trying to create. This legal structure would survive challenges by both military regimes and by reformers associated with the “new unionism” that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, reformers managed to occupy key positions within the labor structure

INTRODUCTION     23

during the dictatorship. Although Brazil’s legal legacies fostered divisions in the labor movement and enabled the state to exercise control, they also commanded the adherence of workers via the promise of inclusion. This aspiration to inclusion came from laws that guaranteed (on paper, at least) formal-sector workers a range of social benefits. Even the more militant unions that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and were initially critical of the legally sanctioned subsidies to unions (because of their tendency to reinforce union bureaucracies that were out of touch with rank-and-file needs) ended up defending the labor code, seeing in it elements that guaranteed protection to unions during periods when they were most vulnerable. In Chile, authoritarian-era labor legacies served to constrain unions during and after the democratic transition. Compared with the other Latin American cases represented here, the origins of Chile’s authoritarian legacies are also more recent in memory, especially as they relate to labor law. Volker Frank focuses on the legacies of authoritarian-era labor laws and the reluctance of new democratic governments to change these during the transition. This resistance to reform reflects the lingering presence of powerful ideologies from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–90) that continued to inform the new democratic governments. Frank’s chapter illustrates how these ideological legacies—reflected in a commitment to maintaining market economic reforms and weak unions—helped to reproduce the legal constraints on workers’ collective interests and actions that originated under the dictatorship. Chilean unions, already weakened by the political repression and market reforms of the military regime, were unable to persuade their party allies to reverse important constraints on union formation, collective bargaining, and strikes. In this case, and in contrast to Brazil or Argentina, labor legacies offer little to protect workers or buttress unions in democracy. Finally, two chapters consider the comparative implications of authoritarian legacies. In the first of these, Mary E. Gallagher (chapter 10) analyzes the evolution of labor-state relations in authoritarian China. She shows that even under a Communist authoritarian regime, transformations in labor relations take place. China has undergone a market transition without a political transition, which sets it apart from the other Communist cases in this volume, where these transitions happened simultaneously. Gallagher reflects not only on how market liberalization has unsettled Maoist-era labor institutions but also on how it might affect the authoritarian legacies that China would inherit if it were to democratize. The conclusion, by Ruth Berins Collier and Andrés Schipani, reflects on the volume’s contributions and offers a comparative assessment of the impact of authoritarian legacies on labor in new democracies. Collier and Schipani highlight

24       TERI L. CARAWAY, STEPHEN CROWLEY, AND MARIA LORENA COOK

the dual nature of authoritarian legacies, which empower labor under some conditions and weaken it under others. In particular, they point to tensions between democracy and authoritarian legacies that strengthen unions. The chapter also outlines processes of continuity and change across the cases and regions, noting that change is most dramatic in the Eastern European cases and least dramatic in the Latin American cases. Their chapter sets out a path for future research.

1 STRENGTH AMID WEAKNESS Legacies of Labor in Post-Suharto Indonesia Teri L. Caraway

In Indonesia, the annual minimum wage negotiations give unions the opportunity to end the year with a bang. Every year, unions flex their muscles in hopes of winning significant wage increases. The negotiations in 2011 were especially raucous, with unions mounting massive demonstrations in several major industrial cities in Indonesia. On the island of Batam, thousands of workers calling for higher wages clashed with police. In the cities of Bekasi and Tangerang, tens of thousands of workers shut down industrial zones and blocked toll roads to demand the implementation of negotiated wage increases. In the capital city, Jakarta, the mere threat of a citywide strike was enough to cause the mayor to revise the minimum wage upward, over the objection of employers. The newspapers hailed—and often lamented—a new era of labor militancy. The mobilizational effectiveness of Indonesia’s unions is surprising. By conventional measures of labor strength, Indonesia’s unions are feeble. Scattered across dozens of competing federations and thousands of unaffiliated enterprise unions, they organize only about 3 percent of the total work force. Union membership has declined since the early transition years as a consequence of shifts in employment, the increased flexibilization of the workforce, and union busting.1 In the political arena, the major political parties have not built institutionalized links to labor, and union efforts to engage political parties have yielded meager results. But Indonesian unions have developed an impressive mobilizational capacity that has allowed them to secure among the strongest legal protections for workers in the region, to block efforts to pass more flexible labor laws, and to 25

26    TERI L. CARAWAY  

wage successful battles to raise regional minimum wages and to pass a new social security law. In short, Indonesian unions have demonstrated a remarkable ability to achieve collective goals at the local and national levels despite their organizational weakness and minimal clout in formal politics. This strength amid weakness can be explained in part by legacies inherited from the Suharto era. Exclusionary corporatism under Suharto, and the authoritarian context in which it existed, contained ideological, institutional, organizational, legal, and political infrastructures that survived the transition to democracy. Although many of these legacies have been negative, some have provided sources of unexpected strength to Indonesia’s unions. These legacies intertwined in complex ways with each other and with new features of Indonesia’s democratic polity, creating a tapestry of forces that structured the terrain on which contemporary labor politics unfolds. This chapter focuses on how authoritarian legacies have shaped three important characteristics of contemporary labor in Indonesia: its organizational weakness, its marginal role in formal politics, and the relative importance of demonstrations (as opposed to strikes surrounding collective bargaining negotiations) in achieving collective goals.

Legacies of Exclusionary Corporatism I: Organizational Weakness Organizational weakness is one of the defining features of labor in post-Suharto Indonesia. Despite a flurry of organizing activity in the early transition period, unions organize a small share of the total workforce (Ford 2000). Union members are scattered across multiple competing confederations and federations, and many plant-level unions are unaffiliated to national federations. The government recorded approximately 3.4 million unionized workers in 2010, which is about 2.8 percent of the total workforce and 8.3 percent of the waged and salaried workforce.2 About 70 percent of these workers belonged to federations that were affiliated to one of the four national confederations. The largest confederation is the former state-backed union, the All-Indonesia Workers’ Union Confederation (Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia), followed by the Confederation of Indonesian Workers (Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Indonesia, KSPI), the Indonesian Prosperous Labor Union Confederation (Konfederasi Serikat Buruh Sejahterah Indonesia, KSBSI), and the Alliance of Indonesian Labor Unions Confederation (Konfederasi Aliansi Serikat Buruh Indonesia, KASBI). KSPI is composed of federations formed by defectors from the All-Indonesia Workers’ Union (Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia, SPSI), new federations established since the fall of Suharto, and a teachers’ association.3 The two other

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confederations, KSBSI and KASBI, have high profiles but small memberships. KSBSI was established during the late Suharto years as an independent union, and since the early transition years has survived on foreign aid rather than through strengthening its membership base. Dozens of independent unions from around the country, many with connections to labor nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), came together under the umbrella of KASBI, Indonesia’s youngest and most radical confederation. Of the ninety nationally registered federations, fifty-four are not affiliated with a confederation. In addition, there are hundreds if not thousands of independent enterprise unions. The enterprise unions are a mix of worker-established organizations and yellow unions (company unions).4 In this section, I demonstrate that specific legacies inherited from the Suharto era have contributed to labor’s organizational weakness. Exclusionary corporatism under Suharto entailed both a low level of unionization and the consolidation of all organized workers into a state-backed union that was deeply compromised by its collaboration with and colonization by the regime. Hobbled by an inherited organizational structure that impaired its ability to transform itself, the organization with the largest membership has proven incapable of playing a leading role in national labor politics. The weakness of Indonesia’s largest union in the private sector, combined with the intense fragmentation of newly formed unions and the poor enforcement of laws that protect the right to organize, have produced a small and fractured labor movement in Indonesia. In addition, the survival of other legacy organizations has stifled independent organizing among civil servants, teachers, and state enterprise workers. The roots of labor’s organizational weakness lie in the system of exclusionary corporatism put in place by President Suharto, who came to power in the bloody aftermath of a thwarted coup attempt in 1965. In the wake of the coup, the military and conservative forces in society carried out a systematic eradication of the Left, murdering hundreds of thousands of suspected Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and sympathizers, and detaining hundreds of thousands more (Crouch 1978; Roosa 2006). Indonesia’s most powerful union, All-Indonesia Center of Labor Organizations (Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia, or SOBSI), had links to the PKI, and its leaders and members were swept up in the massacres that followed the failed coup (Hawkins 1971). Atop this bloody foundation, Suharto erected a potent system of labor control whose legacy continues to affect union power today. The Suharto regime’s system of labor control aimed to demobilize and depoliticize the working class (Schaarschmidt-Kohl 1988; Hadiz 1997; Ford 1999). The regime’s animosity to the organized Left assured that it would not attempt to use labor as a support base. Instead, the regime attempted to deter working-class mobilization through creating pliant organizations that it controlled. The organizational

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form of Suharto-era labor relations began to take shape in 1973, when the regime consolidated the surviving noncommunist unions into a state-controlled federation, the All-Indonesia Labor Federation (Federasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia), which was renamed the All-Indonesia Workers’ Union (SPSI) in 1985. The state granted SPSI a de facto monopoly on organizing in the private sector and thwarted efforts to form independent unions.5 Although the state jealously guarded SPSI’s monopoly, it provided minimal financial support to the organization (Hadiz 1997). SPSI received modest financial subsidies from the Ministry of Manpower, the president, and the State Secretariat. The state also required employers to use the checkoff system and to provide unions with secretariats in the workplace, which assured that SPSI had some minimal resources at the plant level (Hadiz 1997). National, regional, and local governments also donated buildings and office space for district, provincial, and national secretariats, and the government permitted foreign labor organizations to conduct programs with the union (Hadiz 1997; Caraway 2008). The subsidies and aid received, however, were insufficient to provide functionaries with adequate salaries, so most sought additional work (Hadiz 1997). The difficulties of funding the organization’s activities made union leaders easy targets for collusion with employers and local officials (Indonesian Documentation and Information Centre 1981–86; Kammen 1997). A 1986 ministerial decree required employer consent to establish unions, and the price of that consent was often employer meddling in leadership selection (Lambert 1999).6 SPSI’s dependence on employers and the state, and the blurry lines between management and the union, earned SPSI a reputation for being less than resolute in its advocacy for workers. When Suharto fell in May 1998, newly democratic Indonesia inherited a deeply incapacitated state-backed union that had organized a tiny fraction of the working class. With only about one million members (Manning 1993), union density on the eve of democratization was a paltry 2.7 percent of the total labor force (Quinn 1999). SPSI nevertheless had an extensive membership base, both geographically and by economic sector. It could have become a platform for organizing after state controls were lifted. But playing this role would have required SPSI to undergo radical internal reforms. The evolution of SPSI in the early transition period, specifically why SPSI did not transform itself, is therefore a central cause of labor’s organizational weakness in contemporary Indonesia. Part of the reason that SPSI did not transform itself is that it enjoyed strong ties to state authorities and collusive relations with employers that partially shielded it from competition from rival unions. The fragmentation of its rivals also reduced SPSI’s incentives to reform (Caraway 2008). But a less obvious reason that the union did not reform is that reformists within the organization were thwarted. Despite SPSI’s checkered past, some

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plant-level units and federation branches at the local level quickly seized the opportunity presented by democratization to breathe life into the organization. Understanding SPSI’s internal evolution thus requires explaining why reform did not spread from these locals to higher levels of the organization, and why reformist locals remained affiliated to SPSI despite failing to achieve reforms at the national level. Two characteristics help to explain SPSI’s internal evolution in the early transition period—the decentralization of finances and the absence of effective institutions for dealing with leadership disputes. SPSI inherited a relatively decentralized organization in which union finances—primarily dues and property—were controlled by plant-level and branch leadership.7 Dues, if passed up the chain at all, were much less than stipulated by SPSI’s constitution. The decentralization of finances could be managed while Suharto was in power, as SPSI’s central leadership received handouts from the state. SPSI lost its direct subsidies from the state early in the transition, however, which put the national secretariat into a financial tailspin from which it never recovered (Caraway 2008). SPSI also lacked institutions for dealing effectively with leadership disputes. Under Suharto, the state routinely interfered in leadership selection. National congresses were carefully orchestrated events that provided formal approval to candidates selected by, or considered acceptable to, the regime (Hadiz 1997). Unseating the central leadership required state backing. As long as Suharto was in power, SPSI was the only game in town, so battles were fought out within the union, with various factions seeking state sponsors to back them. Once Indonesia recognized freedom of association, however, leaders locked out of power could exit SPSI. Predictably, some leaders exited SPSI soon after the fall of Suharto. The defectors founded a new union, SPSI-Reformasi. Although some defectors hoped to establish a more vibrant union, the exodus was at heart a power struggle between contending factions in SPSI.8 Unfortunately for SPSI-Reformasi, SPSI’s central leadership raised the costs of defection considerably by preventing SPSI-Reformasi from claiming union assets. SPSI held on to bank accounts and secretariats and prevented SPSI-Reformasi from obtaining seats on important tripartite institutions. Many of the defectors returned to the fold; most of the others soon left SPSI-Reformasi and established independent federations that later affiliated with the newly formed KSPI confederation. Once the dust settled from the SPSI-Reformasi defections, SPSI’s leadership could have turned its attention to transforming itself into a more dynamic organization. The first step would have been to reform its leadership selection process so that younger cadres from the most active branches could rise through the ranks. Even though many of SPSI’s federations began to permit the direct

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election of their presidents and gave plant-level organizations the determining voice in these elections, they also continued to utilize methods from the past that allowed the sitting leadership to stack the deck.9 Federation statutes authorized protocol committees to determine the procedures for selecting leaders at national congresses, and sitting union officials appointed its membership. From this perch, union leaders wrote the nominating and selection rules. Not surprisingly, instead of opting to elect all of the leadership directly, protocol committees stuck with the old practice of appointing a nominating committee (tim formatur) that handpicked the remaining union officers. Protocol committees also had the power to craft nominating rules so as to disqualify potential challengers to the sitting president. Since only one office—the presidency—was open for direct election, resources were concentrated on that single race rather than dispersed across numerous positions. And since the elected president had great influence over the allocation of other union offices, candidates raised money to bribe delegates through promises of positions on the executive board. Not surprisingly, only death or ill health has resulted in leadership turnover. At the confederation level, the old guard’s control over leadership selection was tighter still. Historically, SPSI combined unitary and federation structures, and it retained this dual character even after it became a confederation. The confederation had branches in every district and province where federations had members, and these confederation branches received the lion’s share of the votes at the confederation’s congresses. At the 2005 national congress, for example, federations received five votes each for a total of ninety votes, while the confederation’s district and provincial branches held 316 and thirty-two votes, respectively. Confederation representatives, in turn, were selected through voting formulae that undercut the influence of large federations. At the district level, for example, federations received one vote for every one thousand members in the district, with a maximum of five votes. A federation with five thousand members would have the same number of votes as a federation with forty thousand members. Malapportionment was deepened further because all confederation branches received the same number of votes at the national congress, regardless of the number of members in the geographic area, and because all federations received the same number of votes regardless of the size of their membership. So rural backwaters with few members or atrophying federations received equal representation with large industrial areas and federations with many members. This degree of malapportionment can hardly be accidental. The confederation constitution effectively allowed the leadership to pack the congress with representatives that were loyal to them. Still, it is puzzling that SPSI has not been hit by another wave of defections by reformist locals. There are several reasons why they have not left the organization. First, these reformed SPSI branches and workplace units stuck with SPSI

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through the SPSI-Reformasi defections and were dedicated, even proud, members of SPSI. They continued to hope that the organization could be reformed from the bottom up and were unwilling to surrender it to the current leadership. Affiliates that flirted with exit were also likely given pause by the experience of SPSI-Reformasi. Second, since the federation branches were autonomous financially, they were free to carry out their activities without intervention from the confederation leadership. The confederation and federation offices could not exercise more control over locals because they feared that such pressure would result in more defections. The locals, then, simply ignored their national leaders. Third, affiliation to SPSI still had some benefits. Exiting the union may have required them to surrender property belonging to SPSI, and SPSI had stronger political connections than other unions, at least in the early years of the transition. Two of SPSI’s former leaders, Bomer Pasaribu and Jakob Nuwa Wea, were appointed as minister of manpower and transmigration, the key labor portfolio in Indonesia, during the presidencies of Abdurahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri. These appointments enhanced SPSI’s national profile. SPSI has, in short, become a headless giant. The national leadership, detached from its membership base, has limited influence over its locals. With no effective central coordination, reform is an entirely local affair and there is no means of harnessing the energy of dynamic locals to transform SPSI nationally. Of course, many plant- and district-level organizations are not reformist, and some federations, most notably in the plantation sector, show few signs of changing their spots. Many of these leaders continue to collude with employers and treat the union as their personal fiefdom. If challenged by other unions, they rely on employer and sometimes state support to thwart them, which allows corrupt leaders to hold on to members (Caraway 2008). The survival of these unreformed SPSI units both crowds out new organizing and impedes fundamental reforms in SPSI, both of which contribute to the organizational weakness of labor in Indonesia. SPSI’s spin-off federations have been more successful in transforming themselves. Although many plant-level unions are still hobbled by the same problems as SPSI, a younger generation of leaders has taken over many of them. This takeover was made possible, in part, by foreign funders, such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, tying financial support to altering union constitutions so as to empower the plant-level unions in the leadership selection process. The reform of the leadership selection process made it possible for younger leaders to mobilize plant-level organizations and thereby seize the reins of power in their organizations. Some of these spin-off federations—for example, Serikat Pekerja Nasional and Federasi Serikat Pekerja Metal Indonesia—are among the largest and most active federations in Indonesia. In addition to SPSI, two other legacy organizations have influenced labor’s organizational power in the post-Suharto era—the Civil Servants Corps of the

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Republic of Indonesia (Korps Pegawai Republic Indonesia, KORPRI) and the Indonesian Teachers’ Association (Persatuan Guru Indonesia, PGRI). Both survived the Suharto era intact and are on sound financial footing because dues were automatically deducted from the paychecks of all state employees. The continued hegemony of these associations has saddled workers in the public sector and in state enterprises with conservative organizations that resist reform and crowd out new organizing.10 Most teachers employed in the public sector remain captive in PGRI. The Suharto-era leaders of PGRI, most of whom were not even teachers, retained control of the organization after the transition to democracy, registered the organization as a union in 1999, and later affiliated with the KSPI confederation. With hundreds of thousands of members, it could potentially be very influential, but its old guard leadership has failed to transform PGRI into a viable union, in spite of the substantial investment in training that it has received from the international trade union confederation, Education International. Few local chapters have registered as unions and none have negotiated collective bargaining agreements. The Independent Federation of Indonesian Teachers (Federasi Guru Independent Indonesia) has had little luck breaking in to PGRI’s lock on teachers in state schools, having met with greater success with teachers working in private schools. Civil servants continue to be trapped in KORPRI, and its leadership has thus far not attempted to transform it into a union. One reason for this may be that Indonesian law, while recognizing the right of civil servants to organize, has yet to produce legislation that outlines the legal means of doing so. However, despite the lack of legal clarity, PGRI has declared itself to be a union, so the more likely explanation is that civil servants and KORPRI’s leadership have chosen not to pursue unionization as a means of advocating for their interests. Part of the explanation may be that civil servants do not think of themselves as “workers” and hence see no need for a union, but perhaps more important, KORPRI is also hobbled by its calcified leadership. KORPRI seldom makes the news and shows few signs of advocating for better pay and working conditions for civil servants. Although democratization has opened political space for new organizing efforts in the civil service and state enterprises, the task of organizing in these sectors is hampered by the presence of legacy organizations. Teachers and civil servants worry that joining an alternative organization could result in transfers to less attractive locations or impede career advancement because the head of the work unit is often also the head of PGRI or KORPRI. Many state enterprise workers, by contrast, did break away from KORPRI. Soon after the fall of Suharto, the minister for state enterprises authorized state enterprise workers to form trade unions (Ford 2000). Managers of state enterprises used KORPRI as the shell for establishing management-controlled unions,

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thereby preempting the formation of independent worker organizations. Many state enterprise unions have affiliated to one of several state enterprise federations, but some have remained unaffiliated. Privatization, or the threat of it, has provided the impetus for workers to transform some of these employer-dominated bodies into organizations that behave more like unions. Even so, state enterprise workers are seldom active in the union coalitions that form around important local and national issues. Labor’s organizational weakness is due largely, but not entirely, to Suharto era legacies. The fragmentation of the new independent unions is also an important cause of this weakness, and it is Indonesia’s new labor laws, not legacies from the past, that facilitated this fragmentation. The first major piece of labor legislation enacted after the transition, the Trade Union Act of 2000, encouraged fragmentation by establishing low thresholds for union formation, permitting multiunionism at the plant level, and creating a union registration process that facilitated both the formation of yellow unions and the ability of disgruntled leaders to kidnap their membership and establish new unions without member consent (Caraway 2006). The organizational challenge faced by new unions, moreover, has been immense. Even though the Trade Union Act forbids unfair labor practices and imposes criminal penalties on employers that violate workers’ freedom to associate, the law is poorly enforced. The lax enforcement of the law is in part a product of the decentralization of labor law enforcement. In tandem with the revival of freedom of association and the return to democratic elections, Indonesia also undertook an ambitious effort to decentralize governance. With decentralization, local labor offices (Disnaker) were no longer accountable to the national ministry but to district (kabupaten) or town/city (kotamadya) governments. Local governments determine the budgets for Disnaker, and adequately funding these offices is a low priority. Disnaker consequently have insufficient resources to enforce labor laws (Tjandraningsih, Nugroho, and Tjandra 2008). At the same time, the police, who play an important role in assembling freedom of association cases, and labor court judges, who can order the reinstatement of workers fired for engaging in union activities, have shown little enthusiasm for doing so. In the more than ten years since the passage of the Trade Union Act, only one employer has been convicted of unfair labor practices in criminal court. During the same period, dozens of union leaders have been jailed under antiquated provisions in the criminal code based on complaints filed by employers (Caraway 2010b). Labor courts seldom consider antiunion discrimination allegations in their rulings; in the overwhelming number of cases where union leaders have demanded reinstatement, the courts have authorized their dismissal. Employers can therefore bust unions with little fear of legal repercussions.

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In addition to weak law enforcement, the increased flexibility of Indonesia’s labor market has also contributed to the organizing challenge that new unions face. Most union members are permanent workers. The spread of short-term contracts has made it tougher to recruit new members, since contract workers fear that joining a union will result in nonrenewal of their contracts. In addition, many union members, enticed by the promise of large severance payments, have agreed to give up their permanent status, which has in turn undercut the membership base. A large percentage of short-term contracts violate Indonesian law, but the penalties for violating the law are weak—employers must pay severance or convert the worker to permanent status—and Disnaker offices do not make a serious effort to enforce these provisions of the law. Aside from increased labor market flexibility, other transformations in Indonesia’s economy since the fall of Suharto have not hampered the ability of Indonesia’s unions to organize. Most unionized workers are still employed in large-scale manufacturing, and the relative share of employment in manufacturing, agriculture, and services has held fairly steady, with manufacturing’s share of employment hovering around 19 percent.11 Employment in mediumto large-scale manufacturing has increased modestly since 2004, but employment has shifted among sectors, causing some unions to shrink but giving others new organizing opportunities.12 Unions have expanded their membership in the service sector (especially banking, hotels, and retail) since democratization. Although the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia hard in the late 1990s, it has largely escaped the most recent global downturn and has experienced growth rates of 4–5 percent annually. In sum, exclusionary corporatism bequeathed low levels of unionization to Indonesia and conservative legacy organizations resistant to reform crowded out new organizing in both the private and public sectors. In addition to these legacies, additional features of Indonesia’s transition have contributed to labor’s organizational weakness. Indonesia’s new labor laws, although a significant improvement over Suharto era regulations, facilitate fragmentation and are poorly enforced. Poor enforcement and increased labor market flexibility have both hobbled new organizing efforts and resulted in membership losses.

Legacies of Exclusionary Corporatism II: Weakness in Formal Politics Another notable feature of contemporary labor politics in Indonesia is the absence of strong links between the major political parties and unions. Political parties do not depend on unions as vote getters, even in union-dense districts,

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and until recently most unions have preferred to maintain their partisan neutrality. The few labor-oriented parties have performed poorly at the polls. Of the forty-eight parties that competed in the 1999 elections, four claimed to represent labor’s interests, but only two of these had links to unions—the National Labor Party (PBN) and the Indonesian Workers’ Party. PBN’s leader, Muchtar Pakpahan, was the founding chair of SBSI, and Wilhemus Bhoka of the Indonesian Workers’ Party worked with SPSI during the Suharto era (Ford 2005). PBN garnered 0.13 percent of the vote, and the remaining three combined just 0.17 percent. Parties were required to win at least 2 percent of the vote to contest future elections, so neither survived. In 2004 only one labor party contested the election, Pakpahan’s reconstituted Social Democratic Labour Party, which won only 0.56 percent of the vote (Ford 2005). To understand why unions have such a low profile in formal politics in Indonesia, we must look to the past. Legacies inherited from the Suharto era, most importantly the weak institutional links between labor and political parties, economic unionism, and the obliteration of the Left, have shaped both the opportunities that unions have to partner with political parties and their desire to engage in formal politics. One of the most important legacies from the Suharto era is the severing of the historic links between unions and political parties. Under Sukarno—Suharto’s predecessor—the major political parties had ties to labor unions (Tedjasukmana 1958; Hawkins 1971). The formation of SPSI and the restructuring of Indonesia’s political parties cut these institutional links. In the same year that the regime restructured unions, it also consolidated Indonesia’s multitude of remaining legal parties into just two parties—the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan) and the Indonesian Democratic Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia) (Crouch 1978). These “opposition” parties coexisted with the state’s Golkar Party. None of the parties cultivated SPSI as a base of support. Some SPSI officials belonged to these parties, but they held peripheral positions in them and could at most hope to be awarded the occasional seat in the powerless national legislature (Hadiz 1997). Forcing all of the surviving unions from the Sukarno era into a single organization and restructuring political parties were crucial steps in cutting the ties between parties and unions. Equally important was the regime’s promotion of economic unionism, which was enshrined in the regime’s labor relations ideology, Pancasila Industrial Relations (Hubungan Industrial Pancasila, HIP). HIP portrayed political parties as “outside” interests that divided workers along ideological lines, and it framed union involvement in politics as a dangerous distraction from the real work of unions: organizing workers for national development and negotiating peacefully with employers to improve wages and working conditions (Ford 2010). “In New Order Indonesia, this meant not that unions

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should avoid being controlled by political parties, as European social democrats had long argued, but that labor should not be involved in politics at all” (Ford 2010, 525). The state spread this ideology through compulsory courses for trade unionists, and the Ministry of Manpower developed materials that outlined the basic principles and practices of HIP (Ford 1999). Economic unionism endured after Suharto’s fall because many in the labor movement, perhaps unconsciously, internalized its basic tenets. As Ford (2005) has argued, not only SPSI but also many labor activists that opposed Suharto were deeply suspicious of political parties and eschewed union participation in formal politics. The lingering influence of economic unionism is evident in SPSI’s refusal to ally with any particular political party despite having two of its past leaders serve as ministers in the Wahid and Sukarnoputri administrations, and in the care that most unions take to confine their participation in politics to demonstrating, lobbying, and organizing the occasional multicandidate forum. In interviews conducted with a variety of union leaders around the country over the last decade, most were emphatic that unions had no business dealing with parties and that doing so would tear unions apart and distract them from workplace issues.13 Even SBSI, which formed a party, never convinced the majority of its membership that doing so was a good idea, and the existence of the party was a constant source of friction among its leadership. The obliteration of the Left is another legacy of the Suharto era that continues to shape labor politics today. Under Suharto’s rule, the Left had no organized presence for three decades. Hundreds of thousands were murdered, hundreds of thousands more imprisoned. Families of political prisoners faced discrimination, and the regime systematically distorted the history of leftist organizations, in particular the Communist Party of Indonesia. After thirty years of dictatorship, those who survived were elderly and without an institutional base. In the late Suharto years, young Indonesians influenced by Marxist and socialist thought formed the People’s Democratic Party (Partai Rakyat Demokratik), but it was driven underground and remained a small organization. Democracy opened the door for a revival of the Left, but other, more conservative actors from the Suharto era had a head start. Suharto era elites entered the democratic era with deep pockets and control over existing organizations; they have not just survived but have flourished in democratic Indonesia (Robison and Hadiz 2004; Hadiz 2010; Winters 2011). Using the material power they accrued under Suharto, they fund and often directly control most of the major political parties. Elections have become mechanisms for regulating political competition among oligarchs, defending wealth, and dividing spoils. None of the parties with seats in the legislature have a Left or even social democratic orientation. Institutions put in place since the fall of Suharto, moreover, have provided governing

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elites with tools for impeding the development of grassroots parties that would make better bedfellows for labor. The law on political parties requires new political parties to establish branches in the majority of Indonesia’s localities, and parties must win at least 3.5 percent of the popular vote in national legislative elections in order to vie for power in the subsequent election. These laws have impeded the formation of grassroots parties of limited financial means and have locked in oligarchic dominance of Indonesia’s political party system. In sum, Suharto era legacies have structured both the opportunities that unions have to enter formal politics as well as their desire to play such a role. The eradication of the Left under Suharto weakened the organized forces that were the most likely partners for Indonesia’s unions. The revival of the Left has been hampered by the survival of Suharto era elites, who quickly adapted to the democratic rules of the game, and significantly by legislation that sets high hurdles for establishing new political parties. Although the supply of viable partners is limited, Indonesian unions are relatively uninterested in developing partnerships with political parties. The adherence to economic unionism has endured beyond the Suharto years, so most unions remain allergic to participation in formal politics.

Legacies of Exclusionary Corporatism III: The Politics of the Street Despite their weakness in formal politics, unions have demonstrated an impressive ability to mobilize thousands of workers in order to achieve collective goals at the local and national levels. Worker protest commonly occurs in Indonesia—in fact street politics is perhaps where Indonesian unions have had their greatest impact (Juliawan 2011). Many of their most notable achievements—securing the passage of a revised Manpower Act and then blocking efforts to amend the law, winning substantial increases in the minimum wage in many localities, the passage of a new Social Security Law, and stricter rules on outsourcing—have come via politics in the streets. Part of the reason that unions have resorted to the street, of course, is that they lack strong links to political parties. But equally important is the weakness of unions in the workplace. National data on collective bargaining coverage are unreliable, but observers of labor relations in Indonesia note that many unionized workers are not covered by collective bargaining agreements. These agreements provide workers with minimal benefits beyond what is already guaranteed by national law, and many do not set wages (International Labour Office 2011a).14 The difficulty and riskiness of striking is one reason for the weak

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bargaining position of Indonesia’s unions. Workers have therefore resorted to demonstrations outside the workplace to achieve many goals that they cannot obtain through negotiations in the workplace or through formal politics. Given the fragmentation of Indonesia’s unions, however, their ability to unify around collective goals requires explanation. Legacies from the Suharto era are a central part of the explanation for both the reliance of workers on demonstrations rather than strikes and the successful coordination of these mass demonstrations. One of the ironies of the Suharto regime’s industrial relations ideology, HIP, was that it encouraged unions to pursue economic unionism but delegitimized the main weapon that workers had for pressuring employers in the workplace—the strike. Referring to the national ideology, Pancasila, and borrowing from organic statist and revisionist ideas, HIP philosophy stressed harmony in the workplace (Hadiz 1997; Ford 1999, 2009). In its earliest incarnation, HIP recognized some conflicts of interest between workers and employers but stipulated that these differences were to be worked out through consensus building, not by resorting to strikes and lockouts. By the 1980s, however, HIP denied the existence of any conflict between employers and workers, so strikes were inevitably blamed on outside forces that incited workers (Ford 1999, 2009). In addition, throughout its history, Indonesia’s labor laws have thrown up many roadblocks to strikes. Even during the comparatively prolabor Sukarno years, unions had to inform state authorities before striking, and once workers had indicated their desire to strike, the state’s dispute resolution apparatus kicked in to resolve the dispute. After going through this two- to three-week process, unions could strike legally, but employers could also take the matter to the local tripartite dispute resolution committee, essentially a form of compulsory arbitration that undercut the effectiveness—and legality—of strikes. Sukarno also banned strikes in vital industries. Suharto left these laws in place and layered atop them decrees designed to further discourage strikes (Caraway 2004). Under Suharto, the state repressed protests and strikes, and strike leaders faced dismissal, intimidation, interrogation by the military or the police, and physical violence (Indonesian Documentation and Information Centre 1981–86; Yayasan Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Indonesia 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1997; Hadiz 1997; Kammen 1997). Military involvement in labor control was pervasive and especially severe in the 1980s, when General Sudomo headed the Ministry of Manpower (Tanter 1990). Sudomo developed a series of institutions to detect and prevent industrial disputes, creating formal channels through which labor union leaders and business cooperated with intelligence operatives in the area of labor relations—a menacing twist on tripartite corporatist arrangements (Tanter 1990). Despite—or perhaps due to—such repressive practices, a massive wave of worker protest swept through Indonesia in the early 1990s. This wave of protest

1. STRENGTH AMID WEAKNESS     39

was in part a product of the inability of Indonesia’s repressive system of labor control to deal adequately with the structural transformations produced by its labor-intensive export-oriented manufacturing boom (Kammen 1997). But perhaps equally important was that several other developments gave workers greater freedom to act collectively without facing the vicious repression of the Sudomo years. First, the new minister of manpower and transmigration advocated a less repressive approach to labor control and was willing to make some economic concessions to workers (Hadiz 1997). Second, a number of independent unions had formed in industrial areas, and numerous labor NGOs and student groups established close relationships with worker communities in industrial areas (Ford 2009). Third, labor rights abuses in Indonesia came under increased scrutiny by the international community, and the United States was threatening to cut off important trading privileges (Glasius 1999). In these protests, most of which were wildcat actions unconnected to collective bargaining, workers made overwhelmingly legalistic demands (Cahyono 1997; Kammen 1997). Workers used the protests as a means of appealing to the state to enforce the labor laws that employers violated with impunity. With no officially sanctioned means of making collective demands, the unjuk rasa (literally demonstration of feelings) became the archetypical means for workers to express their demands and grievances in the late Suharto years. Since democratization, the involvement of the security apparatus in repressing strikes has diminished considerably, but a large proportion of strikes are still unrelated to collective bargaining. Law enforcement remains weak, so workers often resort to strikes as a means of demanding that employers meet their legal obligations. Despite the labor law reforms enacted since the fall of Suharto, striking legally is still difficult. Although the Manpower Act of 2003 formally recognized the right to strike and simplified the procedure for striking,15 traces of past law seeped into the ministerial regulation that further outlined the procedure for calling strikes. The regulation required workers to meet with employers at least twice over a two-week period or to obtain written documentation that the negotiations had deadlocked. These additional provisions imposed conditions on strikes that are difficult to meet in practice, as employers can refuse to meet or to acknowledge in writing that meetings took place. Documenting a refusal to meet, moreover, is difficult. These provisions echo previous law in that they require unions to jump through a series of hoops over a period of about three weeks before they can strike legally. Consequently, many strikes continue to be illegal and employers routinely fire workers who go out on strike. Both the labor dispute resolution committees and labor courts that replaced them regularly authorize mass dismissals—as well as selective dismissals of union leaders—for strikes that they deem to be illegal.16 The labor courts do not apply consistent standards for determining whether a strike is legal, which makes exercising the right to strike extremely risky.

40    TERI L. CARAWAY  

The demonstration, however, has morphed into a powerful tool for Indonesia’s workers. Under Suharto, unjuk rasa were seldom coordinated across workplaces, since they were wildcat strikes and SPSI was far too meek to mount coordinated actions outside the workplace. After the fall of Suharto, the fragmentation of Indonesia’s unions presented a significant obstacle to developing such coordination, but another legacy from the Suharto era, tripartism, helped to coordinate Indonesia’s fragmented unions. Suharto era discourse about harmonious labor relations not only frowned on strikes, it also bolstered tripartism (Ford 2005). The most important tripartite institutions under the New Order regime dealt with minimum wages and labor disputes. The labor dispute resolution committees were established in the 1950s and continued to operate under Suharto. In addition, Indonesia initiated a minimum wage policy in the mid-1970s, and minimum wage negotiations became a regular feature of labor relations in the 1990s, largely as a response to the worker protests described above (Manning 1998). Under Suharto, the minister of manpower and transmigration set provincial wages after receiving recommendations from governors, who in turn received input from provincial tripartite committees (Lembaga Penelitian SMERU 2001). As a consequence of the decentralization process that unfolded after democratization, minimum wage negotiations were decentralized to the district level (Lembaga Penelitian SMERU 2001; Tjandra, Soraya, and Jamaludin 2007). Although the level of negotiations changed, the tripartite structure of the committees endured. Local committees set minimum wages, subject to approval by the elected executive at the district or city level and then by the provincial governor. At first, SPSI continued to dominate these bodies, but the new unions demanded, and eventually received, representation on them. Every locality adopted different methods for determining union representation on these committees, but most union-dense areas have incorporated all unions with credible membership bases. Minimum wage negotiations are held yearly and are a central focus of union activism at the local level; they have become more important than collective bargaining for wage setting in the formal sector. The negotiations serve a number of important functions, perhaps the most important being that they help to (re)produce symbiotic ties between members and local union leaders by giving members a transparent way to hold their leadership accountable—everyone knows the negotiations are taking place and that union leaders sit on the wage-setting bodies—and for leaders, in turn, to mobilize their membership to advance collective interests beyond the workplace setting.17 Importantly, unions must work collaboratively to achieve these goals. In union-dense districts, unions have formed ad hoc networks that are activated during minimum wage negotiations. These networks are also activated when other core interests are threatened,

1. STRENGTH AMID WEAKNESS     41

for example during efforts by the national government to enact, and later to amend, the Manpower Act. In sum, the survival of weak protections for the right to strike combined with the powerful tradition of the unjuk rasa pushed unions in the direction of using demonstrations to achieve collective goals. Tripartite institutions, most importantly the minimum wage councils, helped unions to overcome their fragmentation and to coordinate large demonstrations that have been critical to their victories.

Conclusion Legacies from the past have had a significant impact on contemporary labor politics in Indonesia. Labor’s strength amid weakness cannot be understood without probing the ways that the past continues to shape the present. The exclusionary corporatist system bequeathed to Indonesia low levels of unionization and legacy organizations controlled by aging leaderships tainted by their cooptation by employers and the state. The survival of unreformed legacy actors left many workers captured in ineffective organizations that impeded the entry of new unions that might have represented workers more effectively. The central role that unreformed legacy organizations continue to play has deeply affected the structure, power, and effectiveness of Indonesia’s labor movement. In formal politics, legacies of economic unionism and the obliteration of the Left under Suharto contributed to the marginalization of unions in formal politics. Most unions had no desire to work closely with parties, and conversely none of the major parties held Left or social democratic ideologies that would have facilitated the development of such ties. Despite this weakness in formal politics, unions have nonetheless achieved many collective goals at the national and local levels. This, too, is in part a consequence of the enduring impact of the past. Mass demonstrations at the workplace to protest noncompliance with the law—rather than strikes related to collective bargaining—became labor’s most potent weapon in the early 1990s. The continued difficulty of mounting legal strikes after democratization pushed unions to transform this tradition of workplace protest into collective protest outside the workplace. Tripartite wage negotiating institutions that brought unions together at the local level were vital in helping unions to overcome their fragmentation and to unite effectively in large protests to pursue their goals. On a concluding note, it is worth reflecting on whether and how these legacies might be undone. The influence of legacy organizations is following two paths. As a confederation, SPSI grows weaker every year. The national leadership is

42    TERI L. CARAWAY  

embroiled in yet another leadership dispute, which has further alienated reformist locals. In some areas, dynamic locals will continue to play an important role in labor relations, and in others conservative leaders will continue to collaborate with management and function as agents of labor control. SPSI is unlikely to recover at the national level. Its patchwork of reformist and retrograde affiliates will persist, likely under the name of SPSI, but the organization has ceased to function meaningfully as a confederation. The national leader with the greatest public profile, Andi Gani, is the son of the former SPSI president, Jakob Nuwa Wea—which adds a new layer of meaning to legacy union! The other legacy organizations, PGRI and KORPRI, are more tenacious because they are ensconced within the state apparatus. The legacy of economic unionism has already begun to fade. Leaders of some major federations have concluded that achieving their goals requires them to be active in formal politics. In the 2009 national elections, two of the largest national federations, Indonesian Metalworkers Federation (Federasi Serikat Pekerja Metal Indonesia, FSPMI) and the National Workers Union (Serikat Pekerja Nasional), dealt directly with political parties, offering to mobilize voters in exchange for placing union officers as candidates on party slates. Both federations entered into political agreements with the Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera), a new Islamic party that formed after the fall of Suharto and, significantly, that has few ties to past centers of power. The Prosperous Justice Party has performed well in elections, winning greater than 5 percent of the vote. FSPMI also encouraged local chapters to cut deals with other political parties to run union candidates on local slates. Most unions continue to be wary of developing stronger ties to political parties, but if some unions are successful in the 2014 elections, more unions are likely to embrace formal politics. As for the impact of the obliteration of the Left, this legacy may be more difficult to overcome because electoral and party laws have locked in the advantages of established parties. Although democratization has allowed Left-oriented groups to form in Indonesia, the political party and electoral laws developed since democratization make it difficult for them to establish themselves as political parties. In the meantime, the large parties remain unprogrammatic patronage machines, and unions are too fragmented to entice the parties to establish more institutionalized links to them. The most powerful political parties have remained aloof from unions. Local elections in union-dense districts offer some possibilities for the development of alliances, and recent reforms allow independent candidates to run for mayor and regent, which opens up possibilities for unions to run candidates (or support other independent candidates). At the same time, party identification among voters has weakened considerably since 1999, which creates incentives for parties to develop stronger platforms to attract

1. STRENGTH AMID WEAKNESS     43

voters, which may provide an opening for unions. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future, breaking into the party system means collaborating with existing parties, which value unions solely for their potential to deliver votes, not as important constituencies. Given the likelihood that unions will continue to have difficulty establishing stronger links to political parties, and given that their power in the workplace is unlikely to strengthen due to the difficulty of striking and the poor enforcement of labor law, unions will continue to use protest beyond the workplace to achieve many of their collective goals. The 2011 wage negotiations were the liveliest (and bloodiest) in years, with unions ramping up their demands to insist that minimum wages meet a higher standard—an adequate standard of living rather than a minimum standard of living. The memory of the disruptions surrounding the 2011 negotiations helped unions to secure large increases in many localities in 2012 as well. The government, seemingly aware of the importance of the minimum wage negotiations in cementing worker solidarity and provoking street protests, has floated the idea of recentralizing the negotiations or holding them every other year. Any effort to do so will undoubtedly be greeted with massive street protests and will therefore be abandoned. Yet the resolution of labor relations matters in the streets, rather than through bipartite negotiations in the workplace or through state institutions, or both, runs the risk of creating enormous instability and unpredictability in Indonesia’s labor relations. Foreign investors and domestic employers have protested loudly over the government’s siding with workers in recent disputes over minimum wages. The impulse to contain street politics will be strong.

2 LABOR’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION Divergent Paths in Korea and Taiwan Yoonkyung Lee

Political representation of organized labor has largely been an unsuccessful project in East Asian democracies compared to polities in other regions. Most obviously, the reign of Communist parties in mainland China and North Korea (and nearby Vietnam) posed obstacles to the emergence of labor parties in Korea and Taiwan where the general population lived with an anticommunist hysteria during the Cold War decades. Speaking for labor was equated with being procommunist and thus with supporting the enemy state across the border. Yet, starting in the late 1980s, when these two countries made a transition from labor-repressive authoritarian rule to democratic politics, labor issues surfaced as an important democratic agenda that required political rectification. Moreover, the economic liberalization that soon followed political democratization sharpened labor’s focus on socioeconomic issues due to rising labor market fragmentation. The political path that labor movement groups chose to redress labor grievances diverged in democratizing Korea and Taiwan. Organized labor in Korea chose a new path. It formed its own party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), in 2000; gained elected seats in the national legislature in 2004; and, despite its minority party status, is actively participating in the opposition coalition against the current conservative government.1 Organized labor in Taiwan, by contrast, chose to stay on an old path. It continued to rely on established parties to get a voice in institutional politics. The question that guides this study is why labor movements in Korea and Taiwan chose such diverging paths in gaining political representation within their 44

2. LABOR’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION     45

democratizing political context. Given that Korea and Taiwan share common experiences such as Japanese colonialism, national divisions, decades-long authoritarian regimes, the ideological dominance of anticommunism, export-oriented economic development, and political democratization in the late 1980s, it is puzzling that a labor party has emerged as a significant political force in Korea while labor’s political voice is largely buried in the party politics of established players in Taiwan. This sharp contrast in organized labor’s political representation originates from the legacies of the authoritarian period when the terms of interactions between labor unions and political parties were set. Legacies from the authoritarian era constitute critical opportunities and constraints that labor confronts in choosing how to gain greater political influence in new democratic settings. In this chapter I begin with a discussion of the democratic transition period when alternative labor movements began to emerge and contrast the emergence of the DLP and its electoral performance in Korea with the reliance of Taiwanese labor unions on existing political parties. I then critically examine why traditional theories of party formation (political cleavages and electoral institutions) cannot fully explain the divergent fate of labor parties in these East Asian cases and offer an explanation by identifying the specific historical and institutional legacies formed under authoritarianism. A detailed empirical account that explicates how these legacies have shaped the development of labor unions and their course of political representation follows. I conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical implications of this comparative study.

The Analytic Puzzle: Shared Exclusionary Corporatist Legacies, Different Political Paths When authoritarian regimes in Korea and Taiwan came to an end and democratic politics began to be institutionalized in the late 1980s, labor protest surged and union organizing increased. Authoritarian regimes had imposed exclusionary corporatist systems that repressed labor through measures such as disbanding collective bargaining and union organizing and violently cracking down on workers’ collective action.2 From the autocrat’s developmental perspective, labor had to be tamed to maintain the competitiveness of the national economy that relied on the export of labor-intensive products. Moreover, the growing number of industrial workers, if organized, was viewed as posing a formidable political opposition to the autocratic regime and therefore either had to be co-opted or depoliticized. With political liberalization, however, the long-repressed workers’ demand for economic (decent wages and working conditions) and political (union rights and political participation) rights erupted.

46    YOONKYUNG LEE

In both Korea and Taiwan, the state had directly organized and sponsored a single national center as a way to preempt labor revolt and co-opt the upper strata of industrial workers. To stand apart from state-backed labor federations, labor activists formed independent unions in both countries. In opposition to the state-sponsored Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), the democratic union movement (minju nojo undong) in Korea formed the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1995.3 Similarly in Taiwan, the independent union movement (zizhu gonghui yundong) organized a new national center, the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU), in 1998 against the state-sponsored Chinese Federation of Labor (CFL).4 Labor unions in Korea and Taiwan shared multiple similarities. The average union density for 1987–2010 is 12.5 percent for Korea and 9.9 percent for Taiwan.5 Organized labor is divided into two competing national centers. As of 2009, about 45 percent of unionized workers were members of the FKTU and about 36 percent belonged to the KCTU (19 percent of unions were unaffiliated).6 Taiwan’s CFL remains dominant, representing 55 percent of unionized workers, while the TCTU represents 35 percent.7 Enterprise unionism is widespread in both countries—enterprise-level unions exercise exclusive authority in bargaining for wages, signing collective bargaining agreements, collecting union dues, calling strikes, and settling disputes on behalf of their members.8 In both countries, the majority of the union membership comes from large enterprises in sectors such as heavy industry, banking, and transportation. Table 2.1 summarizes the organizational features of the old and new unions in these two democracies.

TABLE 2.1  Union organizations in Korea and Taiwan

Union density

KOREA

TAIWAN

12.5%

9.9%

Union concentration

2

FKTU: 45% KCTU: 36%

Union structure Sectoral basis

Enterprise unionism Heavy industry, banking, and transportation

2*

CFL: 50% TCTU: 35%

Enterprise unionism Heavy industry, banking, and transportation

Sources: Korea Ministry of Labor, Labor Statistics (http://laborstat.molab.go.kr); Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, Labor Statistics (http://www.cla.gov.tw). Notes: Union density: An average for 1987–2010 For Korea = (union members/paid employees) x 100 For Taiwan = (union members in industrial sector/paid employees in industry sector) x 100 Union concentration = Number of national peak unions and the membership share of national unions * In Taiwan there are six national unions but only the CFL and the TCTU are significant actors. Union structure: The level of unions that holds the authority to conduct wage and collective bargaining Unions’ sectoral basis: Industrial sectors from which national unions draw the majority of their members

2. LABOR’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION     47

Despite these similarities, these union actors differed in their pursuit of greater political representation in the democratizing environment. Korean labor unions pursued an independent path by forming their own political parties. Opposition parties such as the Reunification Democratic Party led by Kim Young Sam and the Party for Peace and Democracy led by Kim Dae Jung briefly aligned with other dissident circles in a prodemocracy coalition.9 Still, organized labor and progressive intellectuals chose to form their own parties, the Hankyoreh Party and the People’s Party (Minjung-dang), to contest the first democratic election for the national legislature in 1988 (Im 2009). In their view, only a third party could properly represent the interests of the working people and raise distributional issues in the newly given political space. However, they failed to win any seats, with disappointing electoral results throughout the 1990s. Despite these initial failures, labor unions, especially those under the KCTU, continued with their strategy of forming their own political party. It was the KCTU’s political strategy to field its own candidate for the presidential election in 1997 and to establish its own political party before the 2000 general election (Im 2009). In the 1997 presidential race, Kwon Young-kil, KCTU chairperson, appeared on the ballot as the candidate of the People Victory 21 party and earned about three hundred thousand votes (1.2 percent of the total votes). Although the result was disappointing, it was this electoral experience that nurtured the formation of the DLP in 2000. Along with other social movement forces, the KCTU, as a national umbrella union with 750,000 members, provided a firm organizational basis for the labor party. About 40 percent of the DLP membership and a substantial proportion of the party leadership come from KCTU unionists.10 The electoral performance of the DLP has gradually improved in both national and local races, especially after the 2002 electoral reform that introduced some proportional representation. In the legislative election of 2004, the DLP finally earned ten seats in the National Assembly and emerged as the third largest party. The labor party gained two seats from single-member districts, one in Changwon and the other in Ulsan. These two cities are huge industrial towns with concentrated heavy industry and export manufacturing facilities and became the capital of the labor union movement in democratized Korea. Winning two district seats from these industrial towns reflects the strength of union support as well as the importance of having the party’s supporters concentrated in district areas. In addition to these two district seats, the DLP also secured eight seats by earning 13.1 percent from the proportional representation vote for parties. However, a factional split that formed the Progressive New Party in 2008 depressed the DLP’s electoral record in the 2008 legislative election.11 Table 2.2 summarizes the DLP’s electoral performance from 1997 (including the People Victory 21) to 2010.

48    YOONKYUNG LEE

TABLE 2.2  DLP’s electoral performance: 1997–2010 YEAR

ELECTION

CANDIDATES

ELECTED

VOTE SHARE

1997 1998 2000 2002

Presidential Local National legislative Presidential

Young-kil Kwon 50 21 Young-kil Kwon

0 23 0 0

.2% — 1.2% 3.8%

----------------------------------Electoral reform----------------------------------------

Local 2004

National legislative

218 123

District: 35

—

Proportional: 11

8.1%

District: 2 Proportional: 8

2006

Local

799

District: 71

— 13.1% —

Proportional: 10

12.1% 3% 5.7%

2007 2008

Presidential National legislative

Young-kil Kwon 103

0 District: 2

2010

Local

447

District: 112

—

Proportional: 31

7.4

Proportional: 3

Source: Compiled by author based on information available at the DLP homepage, www.dlp.org, and the National Election Commission homepage, http://www.nec.go.kr/.

The DLP differs markedly from established political parties in Korea, which are marred by organizational underinstitutionalization and nonprogrammatic competition. Parties frequently split and merge, fail to build stable party membership, and rely on regionalist appeals instead of programmatic differentiation to mobilize voters (Y. Lee 2009). These weaknesses in party politics have hampered democratic accountability between voters and their representatives. The labor party is distinctive because it is institutionalized, has an increasing membership base, and competes on clearly defined policy programs. Whereas the average longevity of political parties in posttransition Korea is only 4.4 years (Y. Lee 2011), the DLP has lasted for twelve years as of 2012, next only to the Grand National Party (GNP) at fourteen years.12 The DLP was formed in a bottom-up manner based on party membership and clearly defined decision-making procedures. The DLP membership grew about tenfold over the last ten years, reaching one hundred thousand due-paying members in 2007.13 This rapid rise of party membership is phenomenal because the DLP’s figure is comparable to the membership of the largest party, the GNP.14 The labor party has also actively participated in the lawmaking process in the National Assembly. The DLP legislators proposed twenty-five bills per legislator in 2004–07, compared to an average of ten bills by the legislators of other established parties (Democratic Labor Party 2009).

2. LABOR’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION     49

What is most significant about the DLP in democratic politics in Korea is its constant presence as a third party that represents a progressive labor agenda in an otherwise conservative national legislature. In terms of its elected seats, the DLP is still a minority party. However, the party commands greater symbolic political influence. For instance, the labor party was one of the most active parties when opposition forces formed an anticonservative coalition against the GNP in the 2010 local election, the 2012 legislative election, and the 2012 presidential election. Also, DLP candidates continue to appear as the third candidates in televised programs and other media debates as agenda setters for the expansion of social protection policies. In contrast to Korea, Taiwanese labor unions chose to address their grievances by fortifying their alliances with existing political parties. The CFL, traditionally incorporated into the Kuomintang (KMT)’s ruling apparatus, continued to maintain its relationship with the conservative party. The newly formed TCTU has sustained a close linkage with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). For the TCTU unionists, independence meant breaking out of the KMT’s grip on union affairs (Ho 2006). Political forces and union activists that opposed KMT rule therefore organized together. The new union federation was formed with the support of the DPP and these unions supported the DPP candidates in local, legislative, and presidential elections. Labor unions’ support for Chen Shui-bian, the DPP presidential candidate, was critical to his election to the presidency in 2000. While the two major labor federations pursued a strategy of aligning with established parties, there were also attempts to organize separate labor parties in Taiwan. Two prolabor parties were formed in the postdemocratic transition period but both failed to gain enough electoral support. Similar to Korea, labor activists and dissident intellectuals formed the Labor Party (Gong-dang) in 1987 and the Workers’ Party (Laodong-dang) in 1989. These two parties, however, have never become viable political forces. The Labor Party nominated candidates in eight constituencies in the 1989 Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s legislature) election, but none were elected, including the party leader, Wang Yi-hsiung, who ran in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s major industrial town, which is comparable to Ulsan in Korea (Schafferer 2005, 125). The Workers’ Party was formed in 1989 by political dissidents who split from the Labor Party. It also filed three candidates in the 1989 election but failed to win a seat. Luo Mei-wen, the leading figure of the Workers’ Party and a former union leader in the Far Eastern Company in the Hsinchu County, was also unsuccessful.15 The Labor Party still exists but since the early 1990s it has refrained from running candidates in national elections. These failures in establishing labor parties in Taiwan, as I will argue below, were tied to the fact that the major force in the democratic union movement had already chosen to pursue its interests through an alliance with the DPP, not via its own political party.

50    YOONKYUNG LEE

Political Cleavages, Electoral Institutions, and Partisan Cleavages In understanding the emergence of political parties, scholars have argued that parties emerge as a result of the right mix of political cleavages and electoral institutions. Sociologists have viewed political parties as reflections of prevailing social cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), while institutionalists have tied the fortunes of political parties to the opportunities provided by a specific electoral system (Duverger 1954; Downs 1957; Cox 1997). Political elites capitalize on social cleavages that divide voters into opposing blocs and form political parties to capture these voters. However, not all social cleavages are “translated” into political parties because institutional design can advantage certain electoral players over others. The prevailing political cleavage in democratizing Korea and Taiwan equally stifled labor’s distributional agenda but electoral institutions offered more openness to new parties in Taiwan than in Korea. However, it was labor unions in Korea that were able to form a viable labor party while their counterparts in Taiwan were not. This puzzling outcome of labor’s political representation indicates that political cleavages and electoral institutions alone cannot provide full explanations for the divergent path organized labor has chosen in these two democracies. This section discusses the limitations of existing approaches that stress political cleavages and institutional rules and instead proposes that historical institutionalism can enlighten our understanding of labor party emergence by identifying the conditions set by authoritarian legacies. Political cleavages are understood as broad, unresolved dividing lines that overarch a number of related political and economic issues.16 Left-Right or authoritarian-libertarian divides are common examples of political cleavages that represent different worldviews, policy programs, and lifestyles. In democratizing polities, political parties often compete along a democratic-authoritarian (status quo) cleavage, but this cleavage is replaced by new divisions when procedural democracy settles in (Moreno 1999). The major cleavage that replaced the initial democratic versus authoritarian divide was regionalism in Korea and ethnic identity in Taiwan (C. Lee 1998; Fell 2005). Four decades under authoritarian regimes that heavily relied on anticommunist ideological indoctrination created an infertile ground for political parties to mobilize around a leftist agenda, not only during the authoritarian era but also after democratic elections resumed. As an alternative, political elites in Korea seized on regional disparities between Kyeongsang (the region that most benefited under authoritarian regimes) and Jeolla (the region that was most disadvantaged under authoritarian regimes) and

2. LABOR’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION     51

mobilized voters accordingly. In Taiwan, the opposition parties appealed to native Taiwanese (the suppressed population under KMT rule) against the KMT, which represented the interests of the émigré regime from mainland China. These prevailing, nonprogrammatic cleavages in party competition in Korea and Taiwan presented an equally negative environment for the emergence of labor parties. Long-suppressed labor issues needed political representation, but under the existing political environment, with a prevailing political cleavage system that was conservative and nonprogrammatic in nature, it was an uphill battle for labor to insert its agenda into electoral politics. Here, electoral institutions were important factors in channeling political cleavages into party politics. A majoritarian system, that is, a plurality rule combined with single-member districts, is known to be most impermeable to new electoral entrants such as organized labor in new democracies (Lijphart 1994; Cox 1997).17 Electoral rules that incorporate proportional representation, on the other hand, are more open to new and minority candidates and parties because the translation of vote shares into seat allocation is more “proportional” (Lijphart 1994).18 The implication of electoral institutions for new labor parties is straightforward. Proportional electoral systems are more likely to facilitate the emergence of new minority parties, like a labor party, than simple majoritarian systems. Another element in the structure of political competition that can facilitate the entry of new actors is electoral opportunities at the subnational level. Small and new parties have been more successful in local elections where their support base is more concentrated than in national or presidential elections that require greater resources in ideational, organizational, and financial terms (Van Cott 2005; Keck 1992). Therefore, the early introduction of local elections is not only more hospitable to new labor parties but also helps these parties to build electoral and administrative experiences for their later success on a national scale. In comparing the electoral institutional opportunities in Korea and Taiwan, Taiwan’s unions were in a more advantageous position than in Korea, which had a highly majoritarian electoral system until the 2002 reform. In Korea, the majority of the legislative seats (80 percent of 299 seats) were elected in single-member districts under simple majority rule, making the election of new entrants extremely difficult, as evidenced in the failed experience of early labor parties. Moreover, the “proportional seats” were allocated based on each party’s number of seats acquired in the district election and created greater disproportionality between votes and seats (Park 2002).19 This electoral system advantaged large, established parties, while posing a high entry barrier to new candidates and parties. Additionally, local elections were introduced later than national elections

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in democratizing Korea—1994—so local autonomy and local administrations began to develop later. Consequently, new parties such as the DLP did not have much experience in local arenas through which to build electoral and administrative clout. The labor party had to challenge established parties from the outset. Taiwan’s electoral institutions provided greater possibilities to labor and other new electoral aspirants than in Korea. Subnational-level electoral space has existed since 1950, despite the fact that Taiwan had been under martial law and tight authoritarian rule. The KMT regime, being an émigré and minority government, had to take cautious measures toward local Taiwanese who comprised about 90 percent of the population at the time (Chu 1989). The KMT therefore permitted local elections as a way to appease Taiwanese while halting electoral competition at the national level. In addition to these local electoral opportunities, the electoral system in Taiwan incorporated a greater proportional element than the majoritarian system used in Korea. Under the single non-transferable voting (SNTV) system that was used in Taiwan until 2007, voters cast one vote for their preferred candidate in a multimember district. Because this system allows candidates who earn more votes than others to get elected, even a minority candidate has a fair chance of getting elected if the district is relatively large. However, candidates who ran under the Labor Party or the Workers’ Party failed to gain an elected seat despite the favorable institutional conditions in which they competed. As discussed above, Labor Party candidate Luo’s unsuccessful electoral bid in the district of his own union base illustrates the failed project of independent labor parties in Taiwanese politics. The preceding discussion suggests that the prevailing political cleavages in democratizing Korea and Taiwan equally stifled labor’s distributional agenda whereas electoral institutions offered more openness to new parties in Taiwan than in Korea. Labor unions were also in command of a similar level of organizational strength, sharing a similar structural basis as described in table 2.1. Given this, why and how were labor unions in Korea able to form a viable labor party while their counterparts in Taiwan were not? To explain this puzzling reality, we need to investigate the legacies of the authoritarian period when the interactions among labor unions, political parties, and the state were initially formulated. Authoritarian legacies are understood as formal or informal institutions and practices that originate under authoritarianism and that continue to shape politics in the democratic era (Collier and Collier 1991; Caraway, Cook, and Crowley in this volume). The specific relationship between labor unions and political parties (or the state) formed during authoritarian decades is an important legacy of authoritarianism. This study highlights how variations in labor’s relationship with ruling parties shaped labor’s later path for political

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organizing. In Korea, unions were independent from the ruling party—that is, they were organizationally separate, relied on their own financial resources, and made decisions autonomously. In Taiwan, unions were incorporated into party structures, that is, they were closely tied to political parties along these three dimensions. From the legacy perspective, the relationship formed between unions and parties during the authoritarian period in Korea and Taiwan differed and it is this difference that shaped labor’s distinctive choices in these two countries. Another analytical query that needs to be addressed with authoritarian legacies is to identify the specific mechanisms through which legacies are sustained to the extent that they exert a critical causal influence on the behavior of collective actors in the contemporary politics of the democratic era. The legacies of the authoritarian past linger over the years of democratic transition because the conditions formed in the preceding period narrow the possible choices of action in subsequent periods. One mechanism that keeps legacies in place is the inertial behavior of collective actors who find it relatively costless to stay on their familiar path instead of exploring new ones. Once one path is chosen, actors invest organizational resources and develop expertise. In economic language, there are sunk costs that make it costly to divert to the untraveled path. Another mechanism that sustains legacies is ideational norms. When a relationship among actors is built, they develop reputations and mutual expectations, which are hard for the actors to change. Unless there is an external shock or near-crisis circumstance that requires a complete reexamination of existing relations, the old and familiar path is more likely to be followed. Labor unions that organize independently from state intervention or party incorporation develop their own organizational and financial structure and practice distinctive collective action repertoires. They also embody ideational norms of autonomous unionism that eventually become a part of the union’s reputation in interacting with its own members or external actors. Conversely, labor unions that are incorporated by the state structure or political parties are organizationally and financially interlinked and take advantage of these “channels” in addressing their grievances. Such practices evolve into the unions’ modus operandi and reputation that become hard to alter. The KCTU unions in Korea inherited a legacy of independence that eventually led to the organization of their own political party. The unions in Taiwan, in contrast, inherited a legacy of partisan dependence that undermined the possibilities for a viable labor party. Based on the theoretical discussion presented in this section, table 2.3 summarizes the divergent paths for union-parties in Korea and Taiwan.

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TABLE 2.3  Labor parties in Korea and Taiwan

Korea

POLITICAL CLEAVAGE: EQUALLY NEGATIVE

INSTITUTIONAL OPENNESS: MORE INDUCING IN TAIWAN

AUTHORITARIAN LEGACY: MOST DEFINING

OUTCOME

Nonlabor cleavage:

Plurality (SMD) Mixed

Separation of unions

Emergence

Regionalism Taiwan

Nonlabor cleavage: Ethnic identity

system from 2002 SNTV Mixed system from 2007

and political parties Incorporation of unions into

of the DLP No viable labor party

political parties Note: SMD for single-member district; SNTV for single non-transferable voting.

Authoritarian Legacies and Diverging Paths of Labor Representation Union-Party Relations under Authoritarianism The extent of labor incorporation by the state or political parties during South Korea’s authoritarian decades was largely incomplete. Authoritarian regimes in Korea used labor laws to institute single unionism and to forbid unions from forming links to the political opposition. With the single unionism clause, authoritarian regimes recognized and sponsored one national center, the FKTU. Such strict control over unions’ legal status was designed to co-opt labor leaders and preempt the independent organizing of industrial workers. Yet the extent of incorporation was partial in the sense that it included only a narrow stratum of FKTU leadership that often lacked grassroots penetration to the rank-and-file workers. The perks, privileges, and welfare benefits were limited to a handful of union leaders and left the majority of workers with low wages, few benefits, and despotic work experiences (O. Lee 1990). For these reasons, industrial relations under authoritarian regimes remained highly contentious. The despotic and repressive work experience on the shop floor enraged ordinary workers and drove them to demand “humane treatment” in the 1980s and 1990s (Koo 2001). Worker protests occurred in workplaces with and without official affiliation to the FKTU before political democratization (Kim 1994). Although the legal principle of single unionism buttressed the FKTU, the scope of its organizational coverage was narrow and tenuous, leaving many workplaces in the industrial sectors as a fertile ground for future union organizing. The authoritarian state also imposed a labor union isolation policy by banning unions’ political activities and a possible alliance with political opposition. The Trade Union Act included a stipulation that prohibited unions from collecting political funds or using union dues for political purposes (Kim 1994). In

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addition, the Act banned anyone who was not a union member, such as laid-off unionists, lawyers, politicians, or labor activists, from assisting unions (a prohibition of third-party intervention). These legal restrictions were designed to keep labor unions depoliticized and delinked from other political forces. Under these circumstances, linkages did not form between labor unions and political parties. Even though some individual politicians from opposition parties were sympathetic to labor causes, they never developed an institutionalized partisan relationship. More fundamentally, political parties played a minimal role in authoritarian Korea compared to parties in Taiwan. It was the autocratic president and his bureaucracy, not political parties—be it the ruling party or the opposition party—that reigned in Korean politics. The central political organization labor unions interacted with or confronted during the authoritarian decades was the state. This political condition for labor unions was drastically different from Taiwan where the ruling KMT party was the authoritarian state. New labor activism emerged in authoritarian Korea against various legal barriers and the FKTU’s political subjugation to the state. An alternative labor movement formed outside of the official FKTU, which viewed the FKTU as completely co-opted and controlled either by management or the state. Instead of opposition parties, it was college students, dissident intellectuals, and religious groups that aided the formation of an autonomous labor movement (Koo 2001). Democracy activists in authoritarian Korea identified industrial workers as a central force to be organized and included in a prodemocracy alliance. The newly organizing labor activists positioned themselves as the antithesis to the FKTU, which meant that they had to be “democratic” in representing workers’ interests, “independent” from political subordination, and “militant” in confronting management and government authorities.20 Their vision was radical, without much room for compromise, as they regarded authoritarian regimes, despotic management, and co-opted union leaders as part of the same repressive labor system (Y. Lee 2011). Therefore, the labor control strategy used under Korea’s authoritarian regimes created a partially incorporated labor federation, on the one hand, and a new labor movement that prioritized political independence and rank-and-file organizing, on the other hand. A path of separate organizing was already in formation. In Taiwan, the political incorporation of labor unions into the ruling KMT regime was more complete than in Korea. The alternative union activism emerging out of this tight state grip sought a partisan unionism with the newly fortifying opposition party, the DPP. It was this legacy of labor’s reliance on existing parties that was sustained in democratizing Taiwan and that eventually forestalled the potential for a separate labor party.

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The KMT had organized and sponsored the CFL from its inception and granted it a monopoly status. Although the CFL may look like a twin of Korea’s FKTU, the extent of its incorporation into the authoritarian regime was more thorough, systematic, and consistent. As Tun-Jen Cheng’s description of “quasi-Leninist state” implies (1989), state-union relations in Taiwan resembled former socialist states. The state was the KMT and unions were regarded a part of the party-state structure. The extent of the CFL incorporation included both the leadership level and the workplace level (Ho 2007).21 Through the Labor Union Law, the KMT mandated that all unions in Taiwan to be affiliated with the CFL. At the upper level, the KMT controlled union affairs by appointing the union leadership, pouring party funds into the union to finance its operations, and offering union leaders positions in government or party committees. It was a long-held practice for the KMT to reserve a seat for the CFL leaders in the Legislative Yuan and the party’s Central Standing Committee, the highest decision-making body of the party (Ho 2007).22 Also, party membership in the KMT was regarded as a prerequisite for upward mobility for union cadres in the CFL and its affiliated unions (Kleingartner and Peng 1991, 433). At the lower level, union cadres were mobilized into KMT’s local networks and election machines to mobilize votes for the KMT candidates. In exchange for their participation in campaigns, union cadres were rewarded with opportunities for promotion, assignment to easy positions, or other perks and privileges in their workplaces (Ho 2007). The testimony below by a union leader who served as the general secretary of the CFL reveals the extent of the CFL’s integration into the KMT’s election activities:23 The KMT regarded the CFL not as a trade union but as a vote-mobilizing machine for KMT candidates. Unionists were election campaigners in charge of their own districts. During election time, union cadres were busy persuading their coworkers to vote for a certain candidate. The KMT also introduced labor protection laws such as the Employee Welfare Fund Act and the Labor Insurance Act in the 1950s. The former provided support for employee housing, children’s schooling, sports, and cultural events while the latter funded medical and disability benefits, unemployment insurance, and pension plans (Frenkel, Hong, and Lee 1993). The benefits of these programs were largely applicable to workers in the large state-owned enterprises that formed the backbone of the CFL. Workers who were recruited for party members and union officers were primarily mainlanders or pro-KMT Taiwanese and they enjoyed higher positions and better wages in their workplaces (Ho 2007). For many local Taiwanese workers, the persistent gap in status and income between “them” and mainlanders

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(and pro-KMT Taiwanese) was the most intolerable aspect of their everyday work experience. Because of these experiences, many workers along with other local Taiwanese saw ethnicity as the dominant form of inequality in Taiwanese society and the CFL as part of this unjust domination apparatus (Yang 2007). However, due to the CFL-KMT penetration of the shop floor, Taiwanese workers who sought alternative paths had to find other venues of organizing and empowerment. One venue they found was outside of the shop floor, seeking an alliance with the political opposition to stand against the KMT monopoly on power. Local elections under martial law in Taiwan served as an institutionalized channel through which social conflicts were addressed and political power was challenged (Yu 2005). Political candidates who were critical of KMT domination first labeled themselves as the nonpartisan, nonfaction group and later the dangwai (literally, outside of the party, that is, the KMT). From the beginning, the dangwai, which later developed into the DPP (the first opposition party in Taiwan), worked in conjunction with labor activists. Starting in the 1970s, it was the dangwai that organized and built linkages with other movement actors, such as workers, students, women, and environmentalists, around the nativist Taiwanese identity and emerged as the central force in the prodemocracy movement (Chen and Wong 2002; Yang 2007).24 The dangwai activists took the leading role in organizing the Taiwan Labor Front in 1984, the oldest and the most well-known labor movement group outside of official unions in Taiwan. This alternative union activism outside of KMT control served later as the organizational basis of the second national center, the TCTU. The specific labor control strategies practiced in autocratic Taiwan created distinctive legacies. Due to the well-established incorporation of the CFL into the ruling KMT, labor unions were widely perceived as an arm of a political party. Therefore, even the new labor movement that rose against the CFL-KMT dominance pursued a strategy of forming close linkages with an oppositional political force that was gaining greater influence from local elections.

Unions and Parties during Democratic Transition In Korea’s democratizing political context in the late 1980s, union activists outside of the FKTU concentrated their efforts on organizing independent unions, resulting in a rapid increase in the formation of new unions after the democratic transition in 1987. Within a few months in 1987, more than thirteen hundred new unions were newly organized, a 50 percent increase. The number of unions soared from 2,658 in 1986 to 4,086 (with 1.3 million union members) in 1987 and to 7,861 (with 1.9 million union members) in 1989, the year with the highest union density over the last twenty-five years.25 These newly organized labor

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unions and some defectors from the FKTU formed the organizational basis of the KCTU. The KCTU’s organizational power came from these newly organized union affiliates that engaged in militant actions to achieve their goals (Y. Lee 2011). The prevailing sentiment among union activists around the time of democratic transition is aptly described by a KCTU official: Korean unionists, in a way, made a critical decision about their political strategy during the transition politics. Witnessing the strength of spontaneous mobilization of workers during the Workers’ Great Struggle in 1987, movement leaders decided that it was the union organization, not existing parties, which was going to be the major vehicle for labor movements in Korea.26 The new unions that formed the backbone of the KCTU put direct democracy into practice, especially in choosing their delegates and leaders and in making decisions on collective bargaining. In most of the new unions, delegates and chairpersons were selected by direct voting of union members (Choi, Jeon, and Lee 2000). Union delegates negotiated over collective agreements with management but the draft of bargained collective agreements had to be approved by direct votes of union members. These democratic decision-making procedures empowered rank-and-file workers, who were often willing to use strikes to place pressure on employers. For these independent unionists, developing linkages with existing political parties was not considered to be a viable labor movement strategy. First, labor laws continued to ban the interaction between labor unions and political parties until their repeal in the labor reform of 1997. Moreover, regionalism (appealing to voters in the region where the party leaders come from), not policy programs, differentiated political parties competing in post-1987 elections (K. Lee 1998). Even the opposition parties were guided by regionalist competition and failed to present policy alternatives in the area of labor or social protection. Seeking an alliance with such political forces was considered to be following in the footsteps of the FKTU and hence a betrayal of their ideals.27 From the perspective of existing political parties, too, the prevailing anticommunist hysteria and labor’s reputation for militant mobilization prevented them from seeking a close relationship with union organizations. Therefore, the KCTU developed autonomously, focusing on organizing workers on the shop floor, instituting bottom-up democratic decision-making procedures, and resorting to confrontational mobilization to achieve their collective goals. Seeking partisan alliances with established parties and devoting union resources to such partisan efforts was largely outside of their consideration and practice. The legacy of incomplete labor incorporation and the distance between

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democratic unions and opposition parties created a space and norm for “organizing one’s own” as the only authentic form of labor activism (Roth 2004, 6). Consequently, labor unions in Korea have invested organizational resources, developed expertise, and nurtured ideational norms to support independent organizing and militant mobilization (Y. Lee 2011). The lack of a preexisting relationship between labor unions and opposition parties was reinforced during the transition period where even the opposition parties failed to represent distributional issues in electoral politics. The practice of “independent” unionism became solidified in Korea’s democratizing context. Political liberalization in Taiwan also began in the late 1980s and it was then when the difference between Korea and Taiwan became more apparent. By the time martial law was lifted in 1987, it was still unclear whether the formally launched DPP would monopolize opposition politics in democratizing Taiwan. The party’s successful electoral performance in the 1989 legislative election reaffirmed its status as the most viable vehicle to challenge the KMT’s dominance (Copper 1993). Taiwanese workers who opposed the KMT-CFL nexus began to organize under the auspices of the DPP and supported the DPP in the elections. The partisan competition between the KMT-CFL and the DPP-TCTU therefore limited the possibility of forming a viable labor party during the early years of democratization. The upsurge of new organizing that took place in Korea’s transition was absent in Taiwan. The number of unions in the industrial sector did not dramatically increase between 1986 (1,160 unions) and 1989 (1,345 unions).28 The rise of new unions and union membership occurred most visibly in the occupational unions, which people joined to gain access to the national health insurance program (Huang 2002).29 The unions that formed the backbone of the TCTU were largely the unions in the industrial sector that switched their organizational affiliation from the CFL to a new alternative federation that would better represent the interests of industrial workers. These figures reflect the priorities set by the TCTU unions. Organizing new unions or mobilizing the shop floor to directly challenge the government or management was not a priority for the TCTU. The birth of the TCTU in democratizing Taiwan cannot be understood without considering the union’s close relationship with the DPP, whose political influence grew during the transition. The TCTU began to be organized and legally recognized at the local level, especially in administrative units where the DPP won office (Huang 2002). Because the TCTU was based on existing unions in the industrial sector, its internal decision-making rules remained largely intact. In Taiwanese unions, rank-and-file workers elect standing directors and these standing directors take turns in presiding over union affairs.30 This practice

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originates from the period of KMT rule when the party imposed the indirect election of union presidents to guarantee the election of pro-KMT unionists as well as to minimize the possibility of the rank-and-file revolts (Y. Lee 2011). The TCTU introduced the direct election of its president only in 2004. The limited influence of rank-and-file workers in union decision making meant that dissatisfaction with existing union-party relations could not easily materialize in the union’s collective decisions. Moreover, the central political cleavage in posttransition Taiwan rested in the division over ethnic identity between mainlanders and Taiwanese. The discrimination and injustices experienced by workers with Taiwanese identity further reinforced workers’ alliance with the DPP. Mainlander workers, in turn, stuck with the CFL and the KMT. The CFL unionists mobilized for KMT candidates, whereas the TCTU unionists campaigned for the election of DPP candidates, especially when Chen Shui-bian ran for mayor of Taipei in 1994 and for president in 2000. Unions’ partisan linkages with the existing major parties therefore persisted in the early elections of Taiwan’s democratic transition. It was not only the CFL that remained under the tutelage of the KMT, but also the newly formed TCTU with the DPP. The partisan strategy became the norm and formed the reputation of Taiwanese unions. As such, the TCTU did not devote its organizational resources to organizing the shop floor, mobilizing its rank-and-file members in strikes, and forming its own political party. The organizational and mobilizational resources for organizing a separate labor party had already been absorbed into the nexus between the CFL and the KMT or the TCTU and the DPP.

Electoral Reform and Labor Parties For Korean unions, especially the KCTU, building a labor party continued to be their primary project. From their failed attempts in earlier elections, labor party activists increasingly saw electoral rules as the fundamental hurdle that blocked their electoral success. They considered electoral reform to be an essential step for a successful labor party, especially in the national legislature. From the late 1990s, labor activists and other progressive actors campaigned for the reform of the electoral system. They first placed pressure on the legislators of the established parties to amend the electoral law. However, when these politicians refused, labor and civic groups submitted an appeal to the Constitutional Court, requesting an examination of the unconstitutionality of the existing election laws (Lee and Lim 2006). In 2001, the Court ruled that the electoral rules were unconstitutional because they violated the equal weight of all votes and therefore had to be amended.31

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The new electoral law was a mixed-member majoritarian system under which voters cast one vote for a candidate in the given district (for the National Assembly, 242 out of 299 seats) and a second vote for a party (for the remaining fifty-seven seats). The new rule went into effect first in the 2002 local elections and later in the 2004 national legislative election. The DLP’s electoral record improved after this change in the rules, which introduced a proportional representation element into Korea’s electoral system (see table 2.2). Yet the causal sequence that led to the emergence of an independent labor party was not initiated by the reformed electoral system. It was KCTU activists that first set the goal of organizing a labor party and then pushed for such electoral reform to enable the party’s entrance into the National Assembly. Now the DLP has stabilized its position in Korean legislative politics as a third, alternative political force that represents labor and social protection policies. This electoral success and the DLP’s viable presence as a third force would not have taken place without the decision by KCTU unionists to avoid alliances with established parties and instead to engage in sustained efforts to organize an independent labor-based political party. The reasons for making this decision, in turn, have their roots in the authoritarian legacy that separated labor from the political opposition. This legacy was reproduced under democratic politics when the new labor movement pursued the formation of a labor party despite the high barrier posed by the existing electoral system. Taiwan also introduced an electoral reform in 2005 that went into effect starting in the 2008 election. The SNTV system was criticized for being the cause of rampant factional mobilization in Taiwanese politics, so the members of the Legislative Yuan introduced a new system similar to the one in Korea. The number of seats to be filled by a mixed-member majoritarian system in the national legislature was reduced from 225 to 113. Of these seats, seventy-three are chosen by single-member district pluralities, thirty-four seats by proportional representation, and six seats were reserved for aboriginal representatives (Fell 2012). Whereas the electoral reform in Korea was a small step forward in increasing the proportionality in the electoral system, the reform in Taiwan was a small step backward. Many small parties (such as the New Party and the People First Party), though not labor parties, had done quite well under the previous SNTV system (Fell 2012). Under the changed rules, however, both of these small parties and the DPP suffered. After the new electoral rule went into effect, the DPP gained only 24 percent of the seats with 37 percent of the vote (Fell 2012). By increasing the gap between the share of votes and the share of seats allocated to competing parties, the new system was obviously less proportional than the SNTV system. This electoral reform placed greater barriers to labor party aspirants who were unable to produce an elected seat even under the electoral system that was more

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open to minority parties. Although some scholars ascribe the failure of labor parties in Taiwan to their strategic errors in filing an appropriate number of candidates under the SNTV system (Schafferer 2005), I argue that it is the absence of an organized basis in labor unions that foiled their electoral aspirations. Labor’s visions and organizational support were already absorbed into the CFL-KMT nexus or the TCTU-DPP linkage. When these two parties dominated the electoral competition with their linkages with sectoral and social organizations, few resources were left for activists aspiring for a separate labor party in Taiwan. For better or worse, labor issues (such as workweek reduction, protection of workers in the state-owned enterprises, and other labor law reforms) were debated and written into bills by these two parties, although under the banner of the ethnic identity cleavage (Y. Lee 2011). Therefore, the specific relationship formed between labor unions and political parties during the authoritarian period precluded the possibility of a separate labor party in Taiwan. Partisan unionism was reinforced in the democratizing political context, further reducing the likelihood that labor would form an independent labor-based party. Once collective actors have chosen a specific path for their political representation, electoral rules can serve as a facilitating or reinforcing institutional condition. However, the specific path chosen originated in the practices and norms of the authoritarian past, not from the institutional rules for political representation.

Conclusion This chapter traced the divergent paths through which organized labor in Korea and Taiwan gained political representation within their democratizing political contexts. A labor party has emerged as a significant political force in Korea, while the two dominant parties in Taiwan have channeled labor’s political voice. This variation in organized labor’s political representation derives from the legacies of party-union relations from the authoritarian period. The arm’s-length distance that existed between organized labor and established parties in Korea was sustained after democratization, and alternative unions pursued and practiced a separate path of “organizing one’s own.” This was the path that led to the rise of the Democratic Labor Party and its electoral success in contemporary Korea. Similar authoritarian legacies shaped the path followed by the conservative FKTU. Due to its past as a national federation with partial incorporation into the authoritarian regime, the FKTU continuously sought an alliance with existing political forces. The federation declared a policy alliance with President Kim

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Dae Jung (from the liberal camp) in 1997, with President Lee Myung Bak in 2007 (from the conservative party), and with the United Democratic Party in 2011. All these alliances have proven to be partial and provisional. Although the trajectory of the FKTU is obviously different from the one of the KCTU, both cases demonstrate the longevity of specific patterns of labor movements that had been formed during the authoritarian era. In Taiwan, new unions replicated the CFL’s close relationship with the KMT by establishing close links with the DPP. The linkage between the conservative CFL and the KMT, on the one hand, and the nexus between the new TCTU and the DPP, on the other, continued to be the dominant form of labor activism. Such partisan representation of organized labor undermined the prospect of forming an electorally significant labor party in democratized Taiwan. Labor issues in contemporary Taiwan are therefore largely represented by channeling demands through the existing political parties, not by a separate labor party. The divergent paths that developed in these two Asian democracies demonstrate that the authoritarian legacies of labor control outlive the authoritarian regimes that institute the specific system. The legacies are replicated and sustained because they shape opportunities and constraints for labor in choosing their strategies for greater political influence later in democratic politics. The old unions and their relationship with the state and political parties bequeathed varying capabilities and constraints to unions in their organizational and political resources. The new unions had to respond to these existing conditions and choose organizing strategies that most effectively challenged the old guard. The KCTU chose shop floor organizing and forming its own political party instead of staying close to elected executives or existing political parties. For the TCTU, allying with an opposition party and gaining influence in political bargaining was the best method of compensating for its weakness in shop floor organizing against the KMT-CFL nexus. Once unions made these strategic choices, invested their organizational resources, and developed norms and reputations for one path over the other, it was hard to turn back to the untraveled path. However, identifying the critical influence that authoritarian legacies leave on current labor politics does not mean the legacies are set in stone or preclude changes in the way labor pursues its interests. Structural and economic conditions change, as do electoral and party politics. With increasing economic woes and insecurities and the growth of contingent work in both Korea and Taiwan, labor unions and political parties are equally under pressure to reconfigure their strategies and platforms. The question of whether the legacies from the authoritarian era will survive these structural and political reconfigurations, or whether new legacies of democratic politics will emerge, awaits further empirical and theoretical examination.

3 AUTHORITARIAN LEGACIES AND LABOR WEAKNESS IN THE PHILIPPINES Jane Hutchison

Labor mobilizations helped to end authoritarian rule in the Philippines in 1986. At the outset of the democratic transition, labor issues were prominent and the new Corazon Aquino administration moved to accommodate organized labor. But political openings for reform quickly narrowed and the subsequent mode of state incorporation both reflected and reinforced the labor movement’s essential weaknesses. Almost three decades later, labor is in no stronger position under democracy than it was under authoritarianism and, with respect to workplace unionism, it is considerably feebler. Like in Indonesia, organizational weakness is a feature of labor in the postauthoritarian era in the Philippines, but workplace unionization rates are even lower in the Philippines and there are not the same promising mass mobilizations over wages and working conditions. At federation and confederation levels, labor is deeply split as a result of organizational rivalries and ideological divisions. Conservatives1 depend on state patronage for continued relevance, whereas leftists2—who eschew dependence on the state—are the main target of political violence that extends to extrajudicial murder (United States Department of State 2012; Rufo 2009; Human Rights Watch 2007). This violence happens in the wider context of worker harassment and intimidation by employers and state authorities (ITUC 2011, 3; also International Labour Office 2011b, 143–44). Authoritarian legacies are in part to blame for Philippine labor’s current weakness. Retained provisions of the Marcos Labor Code that formally restrict workers’ collective rights, tripartism as a means of co-opting union leaders, and 64

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the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) as the “most representative” national labor center and “legacy union” (Caraway 2008) are important legacies from the Marcos era. In addition, under Marcos the Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement, KMU), the leftist labor center, emerged out of the opposition to dictatorship and is an integral part of the inheritance from authoritarianism. Marcos’s incorporation of conservative labor leaders via the TUCP and tripartism, combined with the prominent role of leftist forces in his overthrow, resulted in more polarized and entrenched divisions among labor organizations, which both further weakened unions and in the transition context of a resurgent oligarchy, produced a radical flank effect by which the government co-opted conservative unions and tolerated massive labor rights abuses as a means to isolate and weaken the Left. This political legacy of weak and divided unions contributed to the survival of the other authoritarian legacies, most notably the retention of many restrictive provisions of the Marcos Labor Code. Importantly, labor’s conservative leaders are not entirely an authoritarian legacy. Marcos might have instigated their current dependence on the state, but these conservative leaders and their federations rose in prominence prior to Marcos’s reign during the postwar democratic era, along with enterprise-based unionism, both of which laid the groundwork for a weak and divided union movement with weak ties to members and little workplace power. Because authoritarian rule in the Philippines did not produce the same radical break with the past as it did, for example, in Indonesia, certain contemporary carryovers from the Marcos labor regime are in fact preauthoritarian legacies that he did not abolish but instead integrated into his regime. Marcos retained both enterprise-based unionism and an extant labor leadership because neither threatened his political ambitions. By bringing the federation leaders who were most open to political co-option together under the TUCP umbrella, the dictator transformed them into organizations more dependent on the state. After the fall of Marcos and the return to democratic rule, the Aquino administration made use of this dependence in order to contain and marginalize the leftist opposition as a political force. This chapter explains the nature of authoritarian labor legacies in the Philippines and why they survived the restoration of democracy. It begins with an elaboration of labor’s current circumstances. It then turns to Marcos’s authoritarian labor controls, including those that were a preauthoritarian heritage. Finally, it covers the reactions and counterreactions to the overthrow of Marcos as they shaped the reproduction of his legacies, in part as a democratic mode of state incorporation of a labor leadership with considerable autonomy from rank-and-file workers. Throughout the chapter, it is important to stress that Philippine labor be understood to function “as organizations” with their distinctive corporate interests and not as the collective embodiment of workers’ material

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interests (see Levitsky and Mainwaring 2006, 21–22). This is because the chapter dwells on labor leaders’ “strategic interests” in their own organizational, career, and political goals as the key political driver within the sector of the reproduction of authoritarian labor legacies in the Philippines (see M. Cook 2007).

Labor in the Present Workers in the Philippines have the right to form or join a union, but in practice very few are able to. Officially, 4.4 percent of the labor force—or 8.7 percent of all wage and salary earners—belong to a union that is registered (Bureau of Labor Relations 2012). But these figures are known to overstate the situation: the better indicator of effective union coverage is the proportion of workers who have completed a collective bargaining agreement with their employer (Bacungan and Ofreneo 2002, 97). In this respect, less than 1 percent of the labor force—and only one in eight union members—are in a position to collectively bargain over wages and conditions at the enterprise level (ITUC 2012, 3). But even then, most registered agreements grant workers little to nothing more than what is already their legal due. For all their efforts at bargaining, workers “may as well just sign the Labor Code”—specifically the sections on conditions of employment, health and safety, and social welfare benefits.3 Despite perilously low workplace union densities, there are some 135 federations and ten confederations or labor centers still in existence. The TUCP is the largest labor center, claiming 1.2 million members, but with the hollowing out of workplace affiliates and members, it is probably also the “biggest shell.”4 The labor center allows members to join who do not belong to a union: “groups from the OFWs [Overseas Filipino Workers], informal sector, drivers, urban poor, youth groups, cooperatives, alliances, coalitions and other civil society groups.”5 Other labor centers do the same, revealing their departure from conventional unionism. Progressives and leftists have proclaimed “social movement unionism” as a revitalization strategy (Aganon et al. 2008). Notwithstanding, the peak labor bodies in the Philippines clearly lack a strong union and enterprise base, and extending their remit beyond the workplace to organizing in communities through social movement unionism is in some ways a compensatory measure for their weakness in the workplace. The most prominent national union, the TUCP, retains its premier national position through state support, not through effective mobilization of its members, as evidenced by the central role of tripartism in governing labor affairs. The TUCP’s grip on tripartite appointments is determined by the “most representative” criterion of the International Labour Organization, but its dominance on

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tripartite bodies also reflects the TUCP leaders’ perpetual openness to co-option to government positions and “the play of politics” involved (Institute for Labor Studies 2004, 21–22). Tripartism’s enduring status as the principal vehicle of labor’s engagement with national executive government is itself an effect of labor’s organizational weakness and the accompanying modus operandi of its leaders. The peak Tripartite Industrial Peace Council (TIPC) is “the main game in town” with respect to policy engagement with the executive levels of the state, principally as a consultation vehicle with some additional compliance monitoring of tripartite instruments, including international conventions and social accords. Since with appointments to the TIPC there are no accountability mechanisms in place whereby the “representative” labor organizations in fact represent workers and their interests, tripartite institutions serve to distance union leaders further from their members and tie them ever more closely to the state. It is therefore unsurprising that when pressure has been applied to challenge serious labor rights abuses, it has come as a result of appeals to the ILO over violations of its conventions and the extrajudicial killings of unionists in particular. In the electoral arena, the labor movement has no established party connections. Instead, the main labor centers nowadays compete head-to-head via small and micro party-list parties for the 20 percent of seats in the House of Representatives that are reserved for the marginalized social sectors.6 The party-list system has both reinforced organizational fragmentation and opened a legal space for political participation for progressives and leftists. Whereas the TUCP party-list party has won only one seat (on appeal in the 2013 election), the social democratic Akbayan party has averaged two seats over five elections and the various leftist parties within the communist-aligned Bagong Alysansang Makabayan (Bayan), or New Patriotic Alliance, have averaged two to three times that number.7 These electoral outcomes show where organizational capacity resides, but in relation to a mass base rather than a labor one. Although there are more than one hundred federations and confederations remaining, Philippine labor is organizationally very weak. Labor laws allow workers to form or join a union, but this is occurring in exceptionally small numbers nowadays. Lacking a proper membership base, the surviving peak bodies rely on external means of legitimacy and support. Conservatives especially depend on state recognition and associated incorporation of their leaders via tripartite appointments for their continued relevance rather than on effective representation and mobilization of their members. Leftists have stronger mobilization capacities, but the prevailing legal arrangements for union formation and collective bargaining weaken their position in the workplace and over time have undercut their membership base. The next section explains in more detail the nature of the Marcos labor regime, including its significant carryovers from

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an earlier, democratic era, all in relation to the president’s broader intention of imposing authoritarian rule.

Labor under Marcos Marcos introduced martial law in September 1972, principally to continue to hold presidential office beyond the looming constitutional limit on his term. His declared reason for doing so—to stave off threats to the state from a communist insurgency—was largely a ruse. A recently reformed communist party—the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)—was behind various recent political mobilizations, but it was also far away from possessing the revolutionary capacity to seize state power. When Marcos transitioned to dictatorship, he had neither an incumbent to dispose of nor any serious challengers to defeat and, as such, was focused on designing and achieving constitutional and institutional changes rather than on liquidating his enemies and opponents (Boudreau 2004, 134). With regard to labor, Marcos was concerned primarily with achieving “industrial peace.” Despite a recent upsurge in strikes, labor was fundamentally weak—its leaders had greater strategic interests in political co-option than in opposition and resistance. While acting decisively against strikes as a “vehicle of political agitation” (Ople 1976, 7–8),8 Marcos did not proscribe existing labor federations or decimate their leadership. He also increased state intervention in labor relations by subordinating collective bargaining to state arbitration, imposing strict legal limits on strikes, giving the police and military a direct role in industrial relations, creating peak employer and labor bodies for incorporation within tripartite arrangements, and relying on more frequent upward adjustments of the minimum wage. Although Marcos arrested and detained thousands and resorted to torture and killings, his rise to power was less bloody than Suharto’s in Indonesia, and Marcos never entirely eliminated the legal and organizational spaces for moderate and radical oppositions to operate and grow (Boudreau 2004, 135). Consequently, the leftist opposition strengthened under his rule, resulting in the formation of the KMU, which rejected collaboration with the state and instead focused on the mobilization of its members. The strengthening of the Left and the division between co-opted conservative unions and a dynamic and radical social movement were important legacies of authoritarianism.

Preauthoritarian Legacies Marcos inherited a weak labor movement that posed little threat to him. In the early 1960s, it was said to have had “a long way to go before it can be characterized

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as a strong labor movement” (Carroll 1961, 246)—and little had changed in the intervening decade. The critical historical juncture (Collier and Collier 1991) took place after the postwar repression of organized labor with the subsequent introduction of a system of enterprise-based unionism and collective bargaining in 1953. On top of the loss of a militant national leadership, the requirement to organize at the enterprise level caused collective activism to dissipate across myriad small and micro establishments. But, in addition, workers’ rights were persistently undermined by weak state enforcement of the law in the face of employers’ antiunion practices (Woodiwiss 1998, 103). In the dozen years or so before martial law, industrial disputes were frequently over employers’ antiunion practices—including intimidation, contracting out, and creation of a company union to impede workers’ right to self-organization—not collective bargaining proper. As a result, only one in three local unions was able to successfully conclude a collective bargaining agreement—the raison d’être for a union to seek registration (Snyder and Nowak 1982, 48–52). In the late 1960s, deteriorating economic conditions and declining real wages produced a spike in strikes, but this was not due to an upturn in labor organizations’ mobilizing efforts, as radical student groups were more influential (Snyder and Nowak 1982, 59). Communist forces did not yet have a strong presence in the labor sector. The preauthoritarian crop of labor leaders was “nonpolitical” in orientation. They functioned less as union leaders advocating for members’ interests than as the heads of their own labor-related professional and business concerns. The predominant pattern was one of labor leaders being labor lawyers who ran their organizations as legal firms. This situation had developed under earlier compulsory arbitration, but it persisted with the introduction of collective bargaining as disputes in relation to unfair labor practices continued to be handled through the industrial court (Ramos 1990, 118–19). Accordingly, the labor leaders viewed workers more as clients than as members, and the pattern of workplace organizing reflected this, with local union formation processes more directed at the goal of signing up a larger clientele than of collective organizing per se (Snyder and Nowak 1982, 52). Alternatively, existing federations tended to function as little more than labor hiring firms, especially on the waterfront (Ramos 1990, 98). In the preauthoritarian era, labor controls centered on “counterorganization” by employers rather than repression by the government (Snyder and Nowak 1982, 56). That is, the formation of management-aligned or controlled local unions to block the presence of rivals was common, in the context of the legal requirement that there be one union per enterprise. It was a de facto system that clearly encouraged labor leaders to collude with employers. Under the preauthoritarian mode of labor incorporation, this practice was considered “legitimate” unionism by the state—precisely because it was nonpolitical. However, whereas the unions

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were nonpolitical, labor leaders were not without private ambitions in relation to appointed or elected public office (Snyder and Nowak 1982, 47). Wurfel (1965, 17) observes that labor leaders frequently maintained a personal “network of ties between them and leading politicians” to foster their chances of securing government appointments rather than to encourage or reward a particular politician’s policy stance. On the occasions when labor leaders stood as candidates themselves, electoral success was rare due to the absence of a “labor vote” (Snyder and Nowak 1982, 47; Kimura 1990). In short, organized labor was no threat to Marcos’s dictatorial ambitions. The worker base was not well mobilized within union structures, federation leaders had strategic interests in preserving their “legitimate” status, while many were personally known to Marcos and Blas Ople, his labor minister, through successive government appointments (Thiruchelvam 1972). Upon the declaration of martial law, the leaders were generally rattled, but proceeded to adjust: in the words of one, they became “more disciplined in obeying the law” yet were “not particularly cowed.”9 Even if they did not particularly support the authoritarian clampdown, the extant labor leadership put up no political resistance. Marcos therefore retained this system of enterprise-based unions and put in place additional structures designed to increase labor’s dependence on the state, to expand the legal prerogatives of the state to intervene in labor relations, and to constrain the space for labor organizing.

Authoritarian Measures Although Marcos did not abolish the system of enterprise-based unionism he inherited, he introduced several reforms that narrowed the scope of labor organizing. The new Labor Code enacted in 1974 excluded workers in various employment classes—government, supervisory, non-for-profit organization employees, and security guards—from forming unions for the purposes of collective bargaining. For the workers not so disqualified, Article 234 required that the names of participating workers and the addresses of local union officeholders be submitted to the labor ministry, which left workers highly vulnerable to employer and military harassment and dismissal. Workers were “very afraid to organize” as “less than twenty-four hours after filing, management knows about it and tapos [terminated]! you lose your job—and if you are a small tenant farmer, you lost your house too.”10 Marcos also increased state intervention in labor relations. Collective bargaining was largely subsumed under compulsory arbitration, and after the total strike ban was lifted in 1975, the right to pursue protected strike action was limited to nonvital industries, as defined and approved by the labor minister. With the lifting of martial law later in 1981, strike numbers increased, so new laws were introduced “that made it almost impossible for unions to strike” on a legal basis (Dejillas

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1994, 30–31). For example, there were bans on strikes over interunion disputes and those threatening “the national interest.” Also, under Article 264 (g), the labor minister could issue return-to-work orders and direct the police and military to intervene in an industrial dispute. Finally, Article 264 (e) guaranteed the free entry and exit of goods, services, and personnel from any establishment that was hit by a stoppage. If workers impeded this free passage, their strike became illegal and the workers involved could be legitimately dismissed. A subsequent Letter of Instruction strengthened the consequences of workers’ defying return-to-work orders, directed police and military to automatically assist in the implementation of such orders—frequently through the use of violence—and increased government powers with respect to compulsory arbitration (Dejillas 1994, 31). In addition to increasing state intervention in labor relations and narrowing the scope of labor organizing, Marcos also erected new structures designed to co-opt labor leaders and to increase their dependence on the state. For example, Marcos enshrined tripartism as a key arm of state-labor relations, raising its profile beyond the various government agencies where it had already operated to the national level, in particular through regular tripartite conferences on labor and employment issues (Institute for Labor Studies 2004, 12). To help institute tripartism, Marcos established the TUCP as the representative of labor and counterpart of the newly formed Employers Confederation of the Philippines. According to Ernesto Herrera—the TUCP’s future secretary general—the majority of the “legitimate” labor leaders brought their organizations under the TUCP umbrella because they were keen to secure official recognition.11 Significantly, Marcos thereby achieved what these labor leaders had previously failed to do themselves—that is, jointly form a national confederation. Since Marcos did not compel unions to join the TUCP, a number of existing federations did not join or disaffiliated soon afterward. Among those staying outside the TUCP was the Federation of Free Workers (FFW). Originally, it was “a part of the process that led to the formation of the TUCP, but . . . did not [actually] join in the end” as its leaders preferred to remain independent, in line with their adherence to Catholic social teaching.12 As a result, according to the same FFW official, “we increased our membership because workers saw that we did not belong to the TUCP.” Because all labor leaders resisted the dissolution of their organizations, when Marcos sought to restructure the labor movement along one union–one industry lines, he was also unsuccessful, especially since the policy was not enforced (West 1997, 98). The reason is not that the leaders were a force to be reckoned with; rather, Marcos was more concerned with his efforts at state-building and, in view of this, ensuring the labor sector’s peak representation in tripartite forums

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as “a partner in national economic development”—and a source of domestic and international regime legitimacy (Bacungan and Ofreneo 2002, 102; Institute for Labor Studies 2004, 11–12). To strengthen labor leaders’ support for “industrial peace”—a regime priority—the national tripartite conferences served as a platform for the regular announcement of increases in the minimum wage, over a time period in which real wages in fact fell (Sicat 2004, 11–12). TUCP officials were also incorporated into the regime through their willing selection for nominated positions in the legislature and as candidates in the president’s party in controlled elections (Institute for Labor Studies 1989, 11; Dejillas 1994, 62). The conservative labor leadership was “highly visible” in the executive and, later, the legislative branches of the authoritarian regime (Dejillas 1994, 62).

Political Resistance In addition to his state incorporation of an extant, conservative labor leadership, Marcos’s style of authoritarian rule enabled the development of a broad and mass-based resistance movement, among which leftists aligned with the CPP were “the biggest, best organized, and most militant” (Quimpo 2008, 58). “By underestimating his opponents when they were small and scattered, Marcos allowed them to survive, and his pattern of repressive policies assured that they would grow” (Boudreau 2004, 64). In 1980, after several failed attempts to do so previously, the CPP-aligned National Democratic forces established the KMU as a new labor center. In marked contrast to other existing labor organizations, the KMU avowed militant action and, for example, sought to circumvent the strictures of enterprise unionism and collective bargaining by organizing extralegal labor alyansas (alliances) at regional, industry, or conglomerate levels. These alyansas encompassed KMU and non-KMU local unions as well as unorganized workers and their church and community supporters (West 1997, 46). The KMU presence was also a factor in the rise in the number of strikes during the 1980s. In the face of mounting economic crises, workers’ grievances were primarily local and economic, but in a repressive climate the strikes were politicized and attracted broader support. The KMU thus “radicalized strikes and pickets by broadening their scope, staging them outside factory grounds, and ventilating non-factory and non-trade union issues” (Dejillas 1994, 63). It expanded labor mobilizations under Marcos, but its significance as an authoritarian legacy lies in its continued adherence to the CPP’s radical agenda for labor and certainly not in any longer term improvements in workers’ organizing capacities at the enterprise level. The rising resistance to Marcos’s rule gained deeper traction following the 1983 assassination of exiled opposition figure Benigno Aquino—the husband

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of the next president, Corazon Aquino. The breadth of the societal opposition to Marcos was such that even the bulk of TUCP affiliates eventually joined in. The tipping point came when TUCP Secretary General Ernesto Herrera, as a member of the commission of inquiry into the assassination, supported that commission’s findings against those of the administration.13 From then on, the TUCP participated in the mass rallies against Marcos but, unlike the KMU, it did not organize political strikes that challenged the regime.14 Although some TUCP federation leaders remained loyal to Marcos, backing him in the snap election he called for in early 1986, the Herrera group joined the moderate National Movement for Free Elections in support of a clean electoral process (Dejillas 1994, 62). In February 1986, in the wake of accusations that the outcome was rigged, and after more than three years of heightened political protest, the “people power revolution” finally ousted Marcos from office. The overthrow of the dictator was one thing; dismantling his regime was another. In the aftermath of Marcos’s departure, legacies from his authoritarian rule coalesced with the configuration of social forces behind his downfall to generate specific political dynamics that played out in the labor sector, as well as more broadly at a national level. Marcos consigned to political successors authoritarian labor laws and practices that curtailed workers’ rights to form a union and undertake protected industrial action. He also bequeathed a labor movement that was deeply polarized ideologically: on the one hand, conservatives accustomed to official recognition through authoritarian state incorporation and, on the other, leftists who had helped to drive the militant opposition to Marcos and continued to seek to play a political role. As will be argued in the following section, legal and institutional reforms in the authoritarian aftermath were less than might have been expected from the combination of labor’s part in the overthrow of Marcos and the Aquino administration’s consequent initial accommodations. What ensued was the political legacy of a divided labor movement leading to the consolidation of conservative interests behind limited labor law reform and, thereafter, the institutionalization of these interests’ within tripartite representative structures.

Authoritarian Legacies and Labor after Democratization The societal overthrow of Marcos meant that the incoming administration needed to seek ways to accommodate the socioeconomic reform demands of legal mass organizations, without simultaneously destroying the conservative project of restoring preauthoritarian political institutions and “elite democracy”

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(Boudreau 2009, 235). The Aquino administration’s response was to create new modes of incorporation for the marginalized social sectors that corresponded directly with their actual organizations and demands (Magadia 2003, 5). Significantly, this form of incorporation institutionalized the disaggregation of reformist social forces along sectoral and organizational lines (Boudreau 2009, 249). Although this avenue of political participation redirected many sectoral representatives into programmatic demand-making, it also divided “civil society” reformers from leftists over political strategy, and eventually leftists from leftists, with the CPP loyalists becoming more marginalized. Consequently, reformist social forces never unified behind a mass political party. With respect to labor, as Valenzuela (1989, 455–56) observes, during democratic transitions extant labor divisions often “generate a scramble by the various groups to ensure control over their usual turf and to expand beyond it.” In the aftermath of authoritarianism in the Philippines, this organizational rivalry occurred in association with ideological splits over the course of the democratic transition and manifested itself as one between the pragmatic leadership of the conservative unions that cooperated with Marcos, and a radical bloc that resisted co-optation and that retained significant mass-organizing capacity, at least in the early years of the transition. One consequence of the continued salience of the Left was the reinvigoration of the military’s anti-insurgency campaign, resulting also in a dramatic upsurge in vigilante-style political violence directed at leftists operating legally and their activist allies (Hedman and Sidel 2000, 51–56). While the state moved to contain and disrupt the Left, the Aquino administration simultaneously adapted Marcos era tripartite institutions so as to perpetuate the dependence of conservative unions on the state. The marginalization of the Left and the incorporation of compliant union leaders into tripartite institutions in turn deepened the divisions and further weakened labor, leaving it in a poor position to undo some of the worst legacies from the Marcos era, most notably the numerous restrictive provisions in the Labor Code that survived the transition to democracy.

Democratic Transition and the Legacy of Polarization Worker mobilizations had been a part of the societal overthrow of Marcos, so labor was one of the social sectors that the Aquino government initially moved to appease (Magadia 2003, 67). Because of its opposition to dictatorship, the KMU had appreciable initial access to the new administration, especially through Aquino’s first labor minister—a former human rights lawyer and leftist sympathizer. Nevertheless, when the minister soon established the Labor Advisory and Coordinating Council (LACC) as a national consultative forum, all the major

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labor blocs were invited to participate. The LACC did not succeed in producing a cohesive labor voice as its participants each pursued their own organizational agendas and identified with LACC only in a “secondary and passing” manner (Magadia 2003, 87). Within weeks of the LACC’s establishment, the TUCP withdrew to maintain its separate corporate status. Subsequently, the TUCP did join with LACC members on specific campaigns to pressure the government to raise the minimum wage, but these alliances were tactical and short lived. Concomitantly, KMU leaders were a target of the mounting political violence against leftist and reformist forces more broadly. After twelve months, during which the CPP and its allied forces had pursued a relatively open stance toward the new Aquino administration, leftists groups commenced to take a much more oppositional stance (Weekley 2001, 149–78). A further trigger was the first election for the restored national Congress. Held in May 1987, the KMU ran a candidate but they “lost resoundingly,” whereas the TUCP’s secretary general, Ernesto Herrera, was elected to the Senate as a member of Aquino’s political party (West 1997, 113). His candidacy was assisted by funding support from the Asian-American Free Labor Institute, which was sponsored by the AFL-CIO (Scipes 2010, 52). The elections were an important step in the consolidation of “elite democracy” as the majority of successful candidates had direct personal or family connections to the preauthoritarian era Congress and, consequently, political intentions to block progressive socioeconomic reforms (Bello and Gershman 1990). Three months later, the KMU resumed its tactics of political destabilization by launching a fresh round of nationwide welga ng bayan (people’s strikes) over oil price rises and demands to increase the minimum wage. During the second event, “strikes, combined with pickets, rallies or parades, occurred in most parts of the Philippines; there was no major provincial city where a protest action did not take place” (Lane 1990, 73). From the leftists’ perspective, it was “an enormous success . . . a major shock to the government” (Lane 1990, 74). When rogue elements of the military then launched a failed coup attempt, the Aquino administration appeared to be gravely threatened by the Left and the Right. Another welga in October 1987 pressured the administration to grant a substantial raise in the minimum wage, but the reaction was also to clamp down on labor militancy. Subsequent welgas involved property damage and received much less media and public backing. The tide had gone out on popular support for disruptive tactics: workers risked losing their jobs, the economy was in desperate need of recovery, and the Aquino administration itself remained popular (West 1997, 122). The aftermath of authoritarianism had reinforced labor’s political polarization. An important factor in the TUCP’s survival as a “legacy union” was therefore

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the “radical flank effect” of the presence of a leftist labor center, the KMU. With respect to workplace coverage, the radical flank effect happens through employers preferring more conservative and compliant unions in situations of exclusive coverage of a single enterprise, when there is weak enforcement of workers’ rights to unionize and the union formation process lacks transparency (Anner 2009, 552). This substitution effect helped to bolster the TUCP’s affiliate membership in the aftermath of authoritarianism. Yet, in relative terms, it mattered also that the enterprise-level organizing capacities of the TUCP’s rivals did not significantly improve with redemocratization: militant tactics only went so far in the face of the historical and constant causes of weak enterprise-level unionism. In other words, in the absence of an effective organizing alternative, supported by the state’s enforcement of workers’ collective rights, the radical flank effect served to reinforce the TUCP’s premier national status without much real prospect of being matched by counterorganizing at the enterprise level. More significant for the course of law reform, the radical flank effect also functioned politically to bolster the TUCP as the acceptable representative of labor’s sectoral interests. In this regard it helped that the TUCP could also draw on a relatively large federation base; a strong corporate identity and associated organizational capacities; and close relationships with government officials. Despite its association with the Marcos regime, another key to the TUCP’s survival was the leadership’s unrelenting openness to (and, indeed, dependence on) cooperating with the government, both personally and via the TUCP as a whole. As “contingent democrats” (Bellin 2000), TUCP leaders were adept in their adjustments to new political circumstances—under Marcos and then again under Aquino. For these reasons, Herrera maintains that the transition to democracy “was easy” for the TUCP and its officials.15

Incorporation through Tripartism Upon entering office, President Aquino retained the authoritarian legacy of national tripartite consultative conferences, but transformed it into a mode of democratic accommodation of employer and labor interests. In 1990, Aquino issued Executive Order No. 403 to establish the Tripartite Industrial Peace Council as the main consultative vehicle for labor-sector policy. Although tripartism was an authoritarian inheritance, it bore the imprimatur of the ILO and, in relation to redemocratization, was carried forward as a vehicle of participation and representation in policymaking. Hence, in the post-Marcos period, tripartism was expanded and reconfigured as a democratic institution. It has spread to more than fifty government agencies and various consultative forums on social and economic development issues as well as labor relations as such.

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The legacy of tripartism in the Philippines is both a cause and a symptom of labor’s organizational weakness. As a cause of weakness, tripartism casts capital and labor as social equivalents and “partners” in national development (Trebilock 1994). This can be interpreted to raise the status of workers beyond that of the “mere objects” of national development (see, for example, Estacio 1997, 13). However, in the face of nowhere near substantive equivalence, tripartism is a necessary obstacle to any reforms that might advantage workers’ interests over those of employers. Today “no [government-initiated] labor-related legislation, executive order or departmental order will be prepared unless it goes through the [Tripartite Industrial Peace] Council and is approved.”16 Under these circumstances, any influence labor representatives may exert over executive decisions also has to entail employer support as a condition of reaching consensus. But, in the words of one labor representative, “we agree with employers on minor things, not major ones,” hence “it is only when there is already tripartite agreement that labor has any influence.”17 In instances where labor and employers continue to disagree, the final decision rests with the government. Only through external representations to the ILO have labor participants made some small progress in relation to labor rights violations, in particular on the issue of the persistent extrajudicial killing of unionists. Since the fall of Marcos, successive administrations have disavowed vigilantism and human rights abuses by the military, but at the same time they have allowed these to proceed with effective impunity due to the lack of prosecutions (Human Rights Watch 2007). It is a pattern of political violence that serves ‘the political and undemocratic ends of established political forces” while creating the impression that the state itself in not culpable and remains formally democratic (Boudreau 2009, 249). Following a high-level investigative mission from the ILO in late 2009 (Rufo 2009; International Labour Office 2011b), the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo government established the National Tripartite Industrial Peace Council, specifically to monitor violations of ILO Convention No. 87 in regard to extrajudicial killings (International Labour Office 2011b, 141). The major point here is that, without the further element of international scrutiny, tripartism in the Philippines in fact institutionalizes a mode of political demobilization and enfeeblement. But tripartism is not only a cause of labor’s organizational weakness; it is equally a reflection of it, given that it depends on labor’s continued participation to function. We have seen the preauthoritarian legacy of a willing conservative leadership that, through ensuing affiliation with the Marcos-created TUCP, has been able to claim “most representative” status in the postauthoritarian era. Critically, the willingness of labor leaders to participate on tripartite bodies that domesticate them reflects their modus operandi as leaders with considerable autonomy from rank-and-file members and consequent strategic interests in

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receiving state support. In embodying sectoral representation of this kind, tripartism has helped to reproduce the labor movement’s general organizational weakness by entrenching such leadership and, in the context of the hollowing out of affiliate membership, attracting additional participants from a wider group of labor blocs. Because the TIPC has developed into “the main game in town” in relation to executive-level state-labor relations, labor’s sectoral representation within it has extended beyond the TUCP to include even progressives—but not leftists. The smaller, progressive bloc admits to utilizing their participation strategically as “an opening for engagement,” while being “under no illusions” about the outcomes.18 In other respects, tripartism simply provides “very lucrative positions for the individuals involved.”19 Tripartism as both a cause and a symptom of labor weakness is evident in the minimal changes made to labor law since the fall of Marcos. The deepest changes to the Labor Code were initially implemented through executive order by President Aquino in 1986. This executive order ameliorated a number of the Marcos era Labor Code’s harsher provisions. It legalized the unionization of employees of government-owned corporations, curtailed police and military intervention powers with respect to pickets and strikes, reduced the procedural obstacles concerning the right to strike, and abandoned the one union–one industry policy. These measures taken by Aquino were largely ad hoc and a response to the prevailing balance of political forces (Bacungan and Ofreneo 2002, 103). The reforms were minimal and left in place many restrictive elements from the Marcos era such as the requirement that the names and addresses of local officials be held by the Department of Labor and the bar on striking workers preventing the movement of goods, services, and personnel in and out of the effected premises. With the restoration of Congress in 1987, the setting for labor law reform shifted from the executive to the legislature. Magadia (2003, 68–69) argues that the tripartite conferences in 1986 and 1987 were important in shaping the labor law reform agenda. Thereafter, a draft bill overseen by the TUCP head and now Senator Herrera moved through various House and Senate committees before eventually being passed by Congress in March 1989, as Republic Act (RA) 6715, or the “Herrera Bill.” Despite labor’s participation in the tripartite national conference and the congressional committee hearings, RA 6715 embodied the consolidation of conservative interests behind law reform. Even though the changes to the Labor Code that RA 6715 made were mostly beneficial to workers, they delivered no substantial improvement in their overall circumstances, either by not being sufficiently comprehensive or because they included countervailing controls (Woodiwiss 1998, 136–37). Organizing rights were extended to supervisory employees and private security guards, there was a reduction in the number of signatures needed to hold a certification election, and the recently formed

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National Labor Relations Commission (which replaced the industrial court) was given greater autonomy from the executive branch of government. However, the labor secretary can still assume jurisdiction over a labor dispute that threatens the national interest, and “seek the assistance of law enforcement agencies to ensure compliance” (Article 263 (g)). Overall, it remained as difficult for workers to undertake protected strike action as it was under Marcos; the process remained drawn out because the Department of Labor had new powers to intervene and recommend voluntary arbitration. The major thrust of the legislation was to strengthen collective bargaining and voluntary grievance mechanisms. The evolution of minimum wage negotiations also demonstrates the means through which tripartism has deepened labor weakness. In the months prior to the passage of RA 6715, LACC members prioritized demands to raise minimum wages, and this strategy paid off with another successful campaign (Magadia 2003, 91). The Aquino administration reacted to this success by decentralizing wage setting to regional tripartite wage and productivity boards. In the process, labor leaders lost a major target of their mobilizations, around which there had been some periodic coordination, if only temporarily. Since 1998 the party-list system has offered an alternative mode of political participation to tripartism, through elections and the legislature. However, it took until 2007 before this became an avenue to further amend the Marcos Labor Code. Before then, and nearly two decades after RA 6715 (“the Herrera Bill”) was passed by Congress, Article 234 of the Labor Code—which required that the names and addresses of all local officials be submitted to the Department of Labor when unions register with the government—still remained on the books. In that year it was amended by RA 9481, the Strengthening Workers’ Constitutional Right to Self-Organization Act.20 The bill to amend the provision was “the result of a nine-year struggle” by a number of small progressive and leftist parties elected to the congressional seats reserved for the “marginalized social sectors”.21 Yet, even then, the changes were limited as the RA 9481 only removed the requirement to submit names and addresses in the case of local unions that are affiliated with a federation or national center when filing a petition for certification as a bargaining unit. In regard to the processes to acquire “all other rights and privileges of a legitimate labor organization,” the requirement to submit names and addresses still stands and is an annual requirement (ITUC 2011). Moreover, much of the value of even these limited changes were undone by a follow-up departmental implementing order (40/03) stipulating that the names of local union leaders still be provided, five days before the certification election—during which time “a lot can happen.”22 In general, the problem with the party-list system reflects the sectoral pattern of incorporation of reformist forces that has been a feature of democratic

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consolidation post-Marcos. The party-list system further dissipates the organizing efforts of extraparliamentary oppositions in general, encouraging intra- and intersector rivalry while preventing the formation of mass parties. On the labor front, the party-list system has not specifically built a labor vote as the leftist and progressive parties typically remain more broadly based within other constituencies. Accordingly, labor continues to be outside the electoral mainstream, only entering temporarily to offer tactical support to traditional parties and politicians. Even in the case of leftists, there have been some unlikely ideological alliances, having little to no grounds for coalition building of any duration.23 Despite some initial liberalization of the Marcos Labor Code, then, workplace unionism has declined, not recovered, with the consolidation of democracy. Although current labor laws often have a direct, detrimental effect on workers’ abilities to organize, it is also the case that the collapse in workplace unionism is a result of economic restructuring through globalization that has seen, for example, the severe contraction of the export clothing industry, where unions had a significant foothold, and, conversely, rapid employment growth in call and related business centers, where unions have yet to penetrate (Ofreneo 2009). The divisions among unions and the co-optation of a significant portion of unions by the state means in turn that unions have failed to compel a series of governments to enforce labor laws and punish those who use violence and other coercive practices to undercut organizing efforts (Sidel 1998; Kelly 2001; McKay 2006b). The result is a vicious downward spiral through which formal institutions, informal practices, and a political economy dominated by oligarchic power and decentralized violence combine to perpetuate and deepen labor’s marginalization.

Conclusion Authoritarian legacies matter because of their enduring effects on workers’ capacities to defend their interests. Workers were significant actors in the societal mobilizations that ended the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. In the democratic transition, this created some early openings for possible reforms, but unions failed to seize this opportunity. To understand why, we must examine the characteristics of the labor movement that Marcos bequeathed to the Philippines’ new democracy. Two features of the labor movement are particularly salient here: the survival of a viable radical element in the labor movement, on the one hand, and a pragmatic group of unions dependent on state support, on the other. The antiregime KMU was a legacy of the opposition to Marcos. Its presence as a radical labor bloc generated initial reformist pressures, but in the context of the return of oligarchic power, produced a radical flank effect by which the state contained

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the Left through embracing conservative unions and permitting extralegal forms of labor control and intimidation against labor activists and other leftists. This strategy was made possible by the existence of conservative leaders whom Marcos had raised to preeminent status as the sectoral representatives of labor through the twin authoritarian legacies of the TUCP and tripartism. They were amenable to political co-option because they had considerable autonomy from the rank and file and were dependent on the state for their organizational survival. These continued divisions among unions and the channeling of conflict into tripartite institutions that domesticated labor have contributed to the reproduction of labor weakness in the Philippines. Consequently, labor failed to seize the political opportunities that opened after democratization, as most evidenced by the minimal legal reforms, the persistence of severe labor rights abuses, and the continued and ever more profound organizational weakness of unions.

4 THE PECULIARITIES OF COMMUNISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF WEAK UNIONS IN POLAND David Ost

It is difficult to recall how strong the Polish workers’ movement appeared to be in the 1980s. The Solidarity trade union arose in 1980 as a result of strikes against a putative workers’ state, and although it was outlawed in late 1981, martial law imposed, and its leaders arrested, it persevered underground, finally pushing the government to the Round Table negotiations in 1989 that ended the communist system. A union movement had toppled the old regime, its leaders elected to state power. Such a scenario would seem to imply that workers would have a powerful say in what happened afterward, but that was not to be. Solidarity leaders, now heading the government, as well as those still heading the union, pressed workers to accept radical neoliberal reforms and give up rights in the workplace. This ideological promarket behavior was a legacy of the fight against communism: the enemy’s enemy became a friend. Just as in the 1980s, unions remained a force afterward. Because of how the old regime ended, unions have had enormous symbolic clout in Poland, and continue to command the attention of the media. In the late 1990s, Solidarity was the leading force behind the creation of an explicitly right-wing political coalition, while in the early 2010s it mobilized support against an increase in the retirement age. In the immediate postcommunist period, however, Solidarity put its resources into strengthening the market, in line with the emerging neoliberal narrative that this, rather than a strong civil society, was the basis for democracy. Meanwhile, the former official union federation, the National Association of Trade Unions (OPZZ), found itself divided between demonstrating its prodemocratic credentials by 82

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going along with promarket policies and modestly resisting in order to gain support among workers dissatisfied by the economic results. The irony, then, is that even though Solidarity was an independent labor movement fighting an authoritarian state, it entered the democratic period burdened with legacies from the authoritarian period that made it unable to forcefully defend workers’ interests—not because it lacked the material resources or the militant spirit necessary for successful labor struggles, but because it lacked the ideational resources, or a critical ideology toward market reform. The National Association of Trade Unions, meanwhile, precisely because it was a federation linked to the old regime, did lack the spirit of confrontation, and in order to demonstrate its democratic bona fides, also supported market reform. We see here, then, the diverse ways in which the “rupturing” of the classic transmission-belt model of union organization (Caraway 2012)—the state socialist arrangement where unions served as vehicles to mobilize workers on behalf of the system—had such unanticipated consequences for the future of Polish labor. Enjoying support because of its heroic past, the new, prodemocratic union became an instrument for disciplining labor. The ostensibly “procommunist legacy union,” meanwhile, only weakly and sporadically protested. Although the situation would change somewhat in the 2000s, as a new generation emerged and “really existing” capitalism became familiar, the pattern molded at the outset became the norm: a powerful workers’ movement had crystallized into an institutional arrangement of weak unions and neoliberal dominance. To be sure, legacies were not the only factor leading to such an outcome. Imminent incorporation into a capitalist world economy and international factors made it obvious already in 1989 that times were going to be tough for any labor movement in postcommunist eastern Europe. Domestically, factories were going to close, the informal sector would boom, state budgets would be tight, new investors and employers would seek to undo the employment and labor rights of the past. The overall political focus would be on democratization and liberalization rather than industrial relations. On the international level, regional and global associations sought to lock in long-term eastern European dependency. The International Monetary Fund imposed its customary tough conditionality, and even the European Union, seen as a source of largesse, initially insisted on unequal trading arrangements (eastern European markets needed to open up to western European imports, while western European markets remained closed to eastern European exports), which weakened labor’s bargaining position (Ost 2008; Gowan 1995; Bohle 2005). Legacies of union experience were not the determining factor here. What they did was allow labor weakness to be institutionalized easily, while maintaining unions’ symbolic clout that has kept them at the center of political interest. Much of this chapter concerns cultural legacies, understood here as effects of past structures and institutions that shape present ways of thinking and

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understanding. Jan Kubik attributes the staying power of cultural legacies to the energy of those who mobilize on behalf of them. “Past cultural scenarios,” he writes, “if they are to become legacies, must be transmitted from the past by cultural entrepreneurs,” who promulgate the myths they find most attractive and consider most likely to succeed (Kubik 2003, 343). This, however, seems to overstate the centrality of agency for turning the past into usable legacies. Labor emerged the way it did in postcommunist Poland—with union activists uncommitted to asserting labor power or to building strong unions, which resulted in weak and fragmented unions—not because cultural entrepreneurs argued that that’s how things should be (although some did argue just that). Rather, a diverse set of patterns, rules, structures, and institutions from the state-socialist past1 brought this result about, apart from the wishes of individual actors. Legacies are institutional or structural relics that go on to shape a later period even though the original causal conditions are no longer operative. But institutions and structures themselves affect culture and ideas. Unions emerged weak in postcommunist Poland, and most other postcommunist countries, not just because influential actors propagated such an outcome, but because communist political logic coaxed opposition to be expressed as prolabor, and because communist structural and organizational logic turned opposition trade unions, and specifically Solidarity, into being something much larger than the representatives of workers. Cultural legacies are not simply ideas from the past that are given new life by the efforts of cultural entrepreneurs. They result also from the institutional arrangements of the past, which make certain ideas and patterns of behavior seem “natural,” shaping behavior in the present that make only certain outcomes possible. Since a central theme of this chapter is its insistence that postcommunist labor movements are affected by legacies specific to communist societies, not legacies specific to authoritarianism in general, the chapter begins with a discussion of some differences between the labor legacies of communist and right-wing authoritarian regimes. It then outlines four types of legacies that shaped the postcommunist future, explores the paradoxical similarity of “democratic” and “legacy unions” in Poland, and concludes with a discussion of the impact not of communist but of postcommunist legacies on labor developments today.

From Heroic Communist Labor to Disoriented Postcommunist Unions Unique among authoritarian regimes, only the communist system of the former Soviet bloc proclaimed that labor was its leading force, and that the aim of the

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system was to build up the working class and enable that class to rule. Only the communist system claimed that labor did in fact rule, through the governing party. Only the communist system promoted virtually universal union membership, and endowed the unions with such extensive resources both material (funds, buildings, paid leaders, factory newsletters) and symbolic (opposition during the communist period had to pose as being in the interests of workers). This large array of assets, however, left a complex legacy for unions in the postcommunist system, as it simultaneously weakened unions as institutions fighting specifically for workers’ interests while maintaining unions’ symbolic power that could be deployed when necessary. This can be called the paradox of the weakness of past strength. On the one hand, communism saddled labor with burdensome legacies once democracy was attained. By inscribing labor supremacy into its program, pushing most citizens into trade union membership, and running a system that proved extremely unpopular and eventually had a clear majority of the population seeking an alternative, it made programs based on class and labor ideas unattractive in the new era, and turned even unionists away from the idea of trade unions. On the other hand, that same past kept unions at the center of attention. This was particularly true for Poland, where a trade union led the fight against the old regime. With labor officially championed in the old system, as well as the force that led the fight against that system, it had a powerful claim on the public imagination. Worker discontent was news, strikes and protests garnered attention, and once unions began to reassert themselves, around the beginning of the new century, this could sometimes be translated into small victories. Not always; everyone likes to see the mighty taken down, and after 1989 many in the new professions and the burgeoning middle class seemed to enjoy watching the previously lofty working class plummeting to earth. With unions so prominent a part of the last decade of state socialism, many associated unions with that system, and wished the new one to be free of them. Nevertheless, to this day labor actions are considered newsworthy, and political parties have frequently sought the support of unions. The communist tradition of lionizing labor thus blunted one of the few empowering legacies for labor that authoritarianism often provided elsewhere: the belief that now that democracy was established, labor might finally flex its muscles. The reason hinged on the nature of the economic system. Right-wing authoritarianism was certainly quite diverse. It ran the gamut from bloody military dictatorships where unions were suppressed, leaving militant underground union organizations fighting for democracy in which they hoped to play a prominent part, to a milder authoritarianism where an official union was incorporated into the system, and opposition unions were weaker. In terms of policy, some of these countries were stridently liberal, such as Chile, while others, such as in East Asia,

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embraced state-led developmentalism. But because all of them were based on capitalist private property and explicitly limited labor rights, opposition unions and workers tended to see the onset of democracy as a long-awaited opportunity to advance their interests. The previous official unions were of course more wary of democratic transition. As Caraway shows for Indonesia, and Bensusán and Cook for Mexico, in their chapters in this volume, the co-opted corporatist unions from the old regime feared the onset of democracy, because it meant a reduction of their privileges and monopoly, as alternative unions now emerged. Labor activists opposed to the old regime, however, greeted the end of capitalist authoritarianism with an organizing fervor and passion that had been bottled up for years. Things were quite different in the state socialist countries. There, the end of authoritarianism meant the end of the political system that had officially celebrated labor. When that system collapsed, and a democratic regime was ushered in, opposition labor activists suffered a severe crisis of agency, quite different from the mood that prevailed in other postauthoritarian countries. If unions coming from capitalist authoritarian systems embraced democracy as a time to finally advance labor rights, unionists from communist systems saw democracy as—well, they didn’t know exactly what, but they did know it would, and should, no longer have the same prolabor profile it had in the old regime. Thus, the end of authoritarianism there did not usher in a period of labor militance. Whereas labor could welcome democracy with a new fighting spirit in formerly authoritarian capitalist countries—and particularly in the “inclusionary corporatist” systems of Latin America (see the introduction to this volume)—in former communist countries labor greeted democracy as a system that brought a capitalism that needed to be given a chance. In both cases a great political battle had been won, but only following the collapse of capitalist authoritarianisms could labor opponents hit the ground running and promote the interests of workers.

Communism’s Debilitating Legacies There were four kinds of debilitating legacies that communist authoritarianism left labor. These can be identified as strategic, organizational, ideological, and structural or class-based. Strategic legacies refer to the dissonance between the kinds of actions unionists in the past could deploy on behalf of their organizations and members, and those that could prove useful in the new era. Unions in communist societies were never supposed to be adversarial organizations. Nor was this lack of adversarialism simply a sham: unions had no necessary clash of interest with

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management in socialist firms, since the goal of the firm was not to make profit but to provide jobs and stability, and to coordinate state-socialist welfare goals. Unions were the subordinate partner in what was intended to be a harmonious community of management, trade union, and local party leadership. The union’s responsibility was to bring workers into that community, to represent their interests sufficiently enough so that they accepted the overall arrangement. When workers had grievances, unions usually defended them, in order to protect the community. Unions were charged with maintaining good labor discipline, a productive labor force, and general social stability, and it was the latter that gave them responsibility not only for enforcing orders from above but for representing workers from below. Unions were, to use Stark and Bruszt’s felicitous term, “responsive responsibles” (Stark and Bruszt 1998, 113). Enterprise union leaders conveyed their assessment of the needs of employees to higher decision makers, who had an interest in following what union leaders advised because they too had an interest in social stability. Unions usually defended workers involved in individual conflicts with management by making personal or moral appeals on the individual’s behalf, stressing that siding with the worker would be good for the firm. But while the legacy of moral, cooperative appeals to management helped members in the past, it proved quite inappropriate in the new capitalist environment. New managers responded to such entreaties with belittlement or condescension, treating them as a sign of immaturity and irrationality. Resistance to the pervasiveness of market logic was dismissed with the pert response that this is how things now had to be, this is how “normal societies” functioned. Uncertain how to defend themselves in the face of this new hegemonic discourse, widely accepted because of its image as the purported opposite of communism, unions usually had to capitulate.2 Moral appeals against market logic were doomed to failure. What had worked in the past would not work in the future. The legacy of directing grievances to the state constituted a partial exception to this rule. Solidarity, for example, had always seen the state, and not the enterprise, as its interlocutor and opponent; enterprise managers, after all, had little autonomy. And as it turned out, targeting the state rather than the firm made sense in the early postcommunist years too, since the aim of generating strong enterprise management based on private property was still mostly an aim, and the state still retained much direct control over the economy. This practice, however, only served to solidify a longer-term strategic weakness, as the continued focus on the state left labor unprepared for the emerging system of private control of the economy. It established the pattern, still visible today, of unions being more active, organized, and mobilized in protests against the state, and much less bold, confident, or militant in challenging capital.

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Organizationally, communist-era trade unions were huge—too huge to sustain themselves. Everyone belonged to them, from janitor to manager. Unions would inevitably shed members in the democratic, capitalist era, and be drastically transformed as well. New types of economic units would emerge that would demand that new unions be formed, or not. New private enterprises, privatized enterprises, semipublic units spun off from large state firms: all called for new types of organizations for which unions familiar with giant state-owned firms found themselves ill prepared. How to get new members? Years of compulsory membership left unions with little experience recruiting members, and much reluctance to do so, as urging workers to join seemed too much like the pressure of the past. Only later did they see that they had to do so, but at that point it was difficult. Legally, as in the past, all workers are covered by any contract the union might negotiate. Unions needed to offer selective incentives to get people to join. But with the privatization of some of the services unions could offer in the past, such as health spas and summer cottages, they didn’t have much to offer. Then there was the challenge of the new practice of “self-employment”—often one-person firms in which the person does the same work in the same place as before, but now as an independent contractor rather than an employee, thus allowing the employer to skimp on taxes and benefits contributions. With all these factors putting pressure on membership, and with managers and owners now fighting unions in the private sector, the inexperience and aversion to recruitment became a severe liability. It also contributed to the tendency for unions to be concentrated in the public sector, where unions gained from the principle of continuity (they did not have to be re-created, as in the new private sector) and from the absence of employer antiunionism. By 2002, over three-quarters of Polish unionists worked in the public sector. As for numbers, trade union membership peaked in Poland at 12.3 million in 1975, for a density rate of about 90 percent. In 1981, most of those members switched to Solidarity, with total membership staying about the same. All unions were suspended when martial law was introduced in December 1981, and revived only with the legal formation of OPZZ in 1983. At its peak in 1987, OPZZ counted some 5.84 million members. It lost about 3 million in the 1990s, originally in outflows to Solidarity. Losses have continued ever since, to a level of 792,000 members in 2011. Solidarity’s postcommunist peak came in 1991, just after the transformation, when it counted 2.25 million members. Six years later, membership had dropped 50 percent, to 1.1 million. In fact, membership dropped every single year from 1991 to 2010, at which point membership stood at 649,000. The year 2011 saw Solidarity’s first increase in membership since the end of the old regime, with gains made mostly in services, leaving Solidarity with

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a total of 667,000 members. Even though it is significantly smaller than OPZZ, it dominates in industry and manufacturing; a full one-third of OPZZ’s membership consists of public-sector teachers. In 2002 several OPZZ locals joined with a few small militant Solidarity offshoots to form a third union federation, the Trade Union Forum, chiefly in order to obtain their own independent representation on the tripartite commission. Adding its membership of 408,000, plus about 500,000 members of nonaffiliated unions, to that of Solidarity and OPZZ gives a total figure of about 2.7 million union members in 2011, making for a density rate of about 17 percent (figures from Gardawski, Mrozowicki, and Czarzasty 2011). Clearly, the organizational legacy of the past, with membership accruing without active recruiting, has not been one that unions have yet been able to overcome. The ideological legacy of the communist system was perhaps the most debilitating of all, as it drained unions of the intellectual excitement and ferment that they desperately needed if they were to be able to take on their formidable challenges. Simply stated, the ideological legacy consisted in the collapse of support for the very idea of organized labor or trade unions. The fact that communist authoritarianism was associated with a prolabor regime meant that the system following it should follow opposite principles. The rejection of communism came with new promises of freedom and prosperity, said to be attainable only with the express abandonment of classic Left ideas of labor power. “Labor” and “unions” were quickly relegated by the new culture to the status of bygone categories, with attempts to resurrect them treated as anachronistic and even dangerous. Businessmen were presented as the new model group, and even many union activists agreed. “We naturally support the new bourgeoisie,” said Aleksandr Sergeev, leader of the Russian Independent Miners Union, in 1991 (quoted in Mandel 1994, 184)—just before he got his wish and the new regime, dominated by emerging capitalist oligarchs, ushered in a cataclysmic depression, perhaps the worst in peacetime history. In the end, then, unions were unable to take on the challenges of the new era in large part because they were unwilling to do so, due to the ideological hangover of the past. Unions found themselves trapped by old Cold War dualisms. Having rejected one system, they put their hopes in another, whose success, they erroneously believed (and as both sides in the Cold War agreed), did not require strong unions.3 By the late 1990s, workers gradually became disabused of this notion, as they came to experience really existing capitalism, and as western European trade unions came to realize that it was in their interest to help their counterparts in eastern Europe. But this initial reticence constituted a powerful legacy that negatively affected how unions became incorporated into the new system. In this

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sense, then, it is not just the legacy of communism that weakened labor, but the legacy of anticommunism. The embrace of the ideas of the enemy’s enemy had even workers in eastern Europe doubting the importance or necessity of unions. Structural legacies, finally, led to the undercutting of class ideas in general—both the “small” class bonds that link workers of a single enterprise to each other and the “large” ones that get employees in one plant or industry to conceive of those working in distant plants and different industries as members of a common class with similar interests. The problematic structuring factors here were state ownership and universal employment. These factors were responsible for the incredible popular unity so notable during communist times at moments of popular unrest, since they gave people a common enemy and an assurance that they would not end up jobless. But the unity these structural factors thereby promoted was not a class unity but a national, civic, or moral one. When the system collapsed, and unity disintegrated in the face of the need of firms to become profitable and of the polity to generate partisan differences, any specifically working-class sensibility was lacking. All of these factors have played a role in all postcommunist countries. Unions structured around interacting with the state, and shaped as nonadversarial institutions, had a hard time adjusting to a new situation where they would have to answer objections based on market logic and adopt a more forceful posture. Unions that formerly enjoyed virtually universal membership found they did not know how to win members, with many activists feeling it untoward even to try. Although levels of ideological opposition to communism differed in the various Soviet bloc countries, once the systems collapsed, market logic was embraced everywhere in the region, and had to be embraced due to these countries’ new location in a global capitalist economy, and because of the need for investments. Cultural frames shifted throughout the region in favor of marketization, the quicker the better, as this was now the only hope plausibly, if improbably, available for a better life. Objections were denigrated as desires to return to an authoritarian past, and thus politically neutralized. Even those unionists who were not believers in the new ideology felt compelled to go along. Structural legacies, meanwhile, left workers everywhere in the Soviet bloc unable to recognize themselves as members of a discrete class (Crowley, in this volume, shows how Russian unions still believe that their interests and those of management are similar), since the concept of the working class had included even those specialists who were now able to utilize the transformative conjuncture to advance their separate class interests. But while present to some degree in all postcommunist countries, these factors were surely most prominent in Poland. There it was an ostensible trade

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union, Solidarity—which first arose in 1980, was suppressed by martial law in late 1981, and then lasted as a powerful underground movement until the final denouement in 1989—that emerged as the national opposition movement. By regularly subordinating class demands to civic ones, Solidarity confirmed, and institutionalized, a pattern whereby labor did not engage in public political action over labor concerns. By articulating the democratic demands of all, it largely ignored the specific demands of labor. This was not such a problem in the communist era, when workers had privileged systemic claims on the national income, and possessed nonpolitical, “hidden” ways of advancing their interests (Sabel and Stark 1982). But it became a major problem in the postcommunist era, when the new capitalism legitimated vast inequalities and workers were left with poor interest representation for themselves. Poland ended up with unions supporting market solutions, reluctant to recruit members, and embracing strong anti-Left sentiments (enhanced by historic Polish anti-Russian sentiments) that left many union leaders ambivalent about the very institutions they were leading. It was thus no surprise that workers and unionists alike continued at first to look for leadership to their erstwhile intellectual allies from Solidarity, despite the fact that the latter were now mostly pursuing their own budding class interests and had adopted a strong antilabor position. Nowhere else in eastern Europe was labor so explicitly linked with the capitalist creation project, so nowhere else did unions become the foremost proponent of the sanctity of that project. In the former Czechoslovakia, labor had little to do with 1989, and so even though its new leaders asserted their support for the democratic transformation, they posed some conditions that the new government, in the interests of stability, felt compelled to support. The first few years even saw a thriving tripartism there, whereas Poland was one of the last countries to establish formal tripartism (Ost 1997, 2000). In Slovenia, it was nationalism more than anticommunism that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the emergence of an independent country. The labor self-management legacy thus retained its popularity (as Grdešic´ confirms in his chapter in this volume), and this, plus the country’s small size, insignificant rural sector, and high level of integration into Austrian and northern Italian high-tech production chains, allowed unions to emerge as a strong social actor (Avdagic 2010; Crowley and Stanojevic´ 2011). In the Baltic republics, meanwhile, labor ended up weakest of all, though there it was due to legacies linking unions, heavy industry, and the labor movement as a whole with immigrant Russian-speakers, which led the region’s new nationalist leaders to deemphasize industry and marginalize trade unions, and made it particularly difficult for unions to fight back.4

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Conflictual Legacies in the Workplace Besides the general weakness of class identity in postcommunist society, the old system also gave rise to a peculiar kind of clash between skilled and unskilled workers—yet another type of structural legacy that proved quite devastating for labor once that system had collapsed. Labor historians have long noted a difference in interests between the skilled and unskilled. Skilled workers are usually the ones to form trade unions in the first place, as they have the resources and the workplace bargaining power to do so. (Erik Wright [2000, 962] defines the latter as the power that results “from the strategic location of a particular group of workers within a key industrial sector,” referring chiefly to their ability to cripple production by declining consent.) And while they seek to protect their clout and autonomy vis-à-vis employers, they also seek to ward off downward pressures coming from unskilled workers. The power skilled workers have is precisely their skill, and to the extent those are devalued, they lose their main weapon of defense. Not surprisingly, it was skilled workers and technicians who took the leading role in Solidarity (Kurczewski 1993; Kennedy 1992). The firms they worked in, however, had far more unskilled workers than skilled ones. This was itself a communist legacy: the aim of firms, again, was not to earn profit but to provide jobs, distribute social services, keep people under control, and secure popularity. Skilled workers thus came to head unions in which they were largely outnumbered by the unskilled. This disparity, not a problem during the communist era, became a key source of tension in the postcommunist period. Skilled workers who wanted their firms to become competitive, and wanted their own labor highly valued, came to have different interests from those unskilled workers who wanted security and protection, and who knew their labor power itself would never be highly valued. Although the skilled workers wanted to have strong unions for themselves, they did not want to use unions to protect the unskilled. This is the reason so many of them were so promarket in the first postcommunist years: they wanted firms to be competitive ones in which their labor would be valued, and they understood that only marketizing logic could get rid of the unskilled. As late as 1994, over two-thirds of local union officials, in a national sample, said not only that they themselves supported market reform but that explaining it to a skeptical workforce was one of their chief role as unionists. About half said they got involved in unionism in order to speed up privatization (Ost and Weinstein 1999). The skilled workers in Solidarity wanted strong owners to come and create some order in their firms, because they believed they would be the beneficiaries. This is what made them skeptical of trade unions in general. This attitude is one of the key factors explaining the durability of weak unions in Poland after regime transformation. It is an unintended and largely unconscious

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legacy of the old regime, a cultural legacy derived from the economic arrangement of the old system, and more specifically from skilled workers’ desire to overcome that arrangement. Skilled workers thus saw the communist system as one that held them back and privileged the unskilled instead. By guaranteeing full employment and running enterprises as institutions for social control (and social improvement) rather than as profit-making ones, the old system made it impossible for skilled workers to reach their potential, whether as craftsmen, team leaders, or as consumers. Whereas the famous old communist-era adage, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” has usually been interpreted as a boast of proletarian cunning, it represented in fact the lament of the skilled, complaining about a labor process that squandered their talents and energy. These workers had gotten involved in Solidarity in order to change this state of affairs and have their work valued again. In order to bring this about, however, they had to take responsibility for the transformation of communist enterprises into profit-making ones, and that meant working against the interests of the unskilled workers, including most of the women who worked at these enterprises, often the majority of the workforce. Over time, skilled workers got what they wished for. Privatization, market reform, attrition, and unemployment all worked in tandem to strip firms of their large numbers of unskilled. At that point, by around the early 2000s, unions that survived, particularly in the private sector, could indeed be unions of skilled workers. The initial antiunion attitudes of leading trade unionists, however, had worked to make all unions weak. Though they wanted to weaken only unions with large numbers of unskilled workers, the result was a weakening of unions in general. A new pattern was established in these first postcommunist years in which unions were treated with disregard, and management and owners became the dominant players. Unionists’ desire to jettison the communist legacy of mass employment led them to comply with policies weakening unions in general. Their focus on the past blinded them to the needs of the new. Unionists themselves helped construct a system in which unions were weak. That legacy of the postcommunist period has endured to this day (Ost 2009).

Communist Labor Incorporation and Its Legacies Labor incorporation refers to the way in which a labor movement becomes accepted and institutionalized by and within the political system, shaping its patterns of action and its dominant psychological frames. How did the mode of incorporation affect postcommunist labor? This is one of the most difficult questions to disentangle, since for some countries, such as Poland, we can distinguish

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three different periods of incorporation: during the time of modern statehood after World War I, at the introduction of communist rule after World War II, and with the systemic change after 1989. About this first period we can be brief: the labor movement was very small at this time, concentrated in Łódz. and Silesia, divided along ethnic and religious lines, consisting originally of German or Jewish workers rather than Polish, and shaped by diverse experiences from the different preindependence partitioning states. The new state set about building up ethnic Polish power, including a Polish working class. Labor incorporation was thus largely a state project focusing on Polish nation-building. That project was far from complete when the state collapsed following the German and Soviet invasions of 1939. The communist authorities who took control of the country in 1944–45 undertook a dramatic reconfiguration of the labor movement as one of their top priorities. In their classic discussion of the matter, Collier and Collier (1991, 161) define initial incorporation of the labor movement as “the first sustained and at least partially successful attempt by the state to legitimate and shape an institutionalized labor movement.” Although it is possible to see the interwar period as one such attempt, clearly it is the communist incorporation of labor that is central. For that is when the labor movement became sizeable and powerful, carefully integrated into the political system, and no longer divided by ethnic cleavages. What kind of incorporation did the communists carry out? Collier and Collier (1991, 8) distinguish two broad types, which they call “state incorporation” and “party incorporation.” In the former, the state reaches out to recognize the labor movement in order to control, depoliticize, and impose discipline on it. In the latter, a political party initiates the process, galvanizing the labor movement in order to secure its support for the party. In a sense, the communist incorporation of labor was neither one nor the other but a peculiar combination of both due to the nature of the mobilizing authorities as simultaneously party and state. It resembled state incorporation in that the new authorities sought to control the labor movement—so much so that the eventual emergence of an independent trade union, Solidarity, set in motion a life-and-death battle that the regime ultimately lost. It resembled party incorporation in that the state was in the hands of a party, which sought to ground its power precisely by mobilizing working-class support on its behalf. Yet what made the communist incorporation of labor a category all its own is that when the communist party first came to hold state power, it did not yet have any social group constituting a base of support. When the Colliers speak of state incorporation seeking to control and depoliticize the working class, they have in mind a state controlled by an oligarchic landowning or capitalist class, which seeks to integrate a workers’ movement, which they would rather have avoided,

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in a way that poses minimum obstacles to the continued pursuit and satisfaction of their own interests. Communist power came to eastern Europe, however, on the backs of the Red Army, without yet a domestic class underpinning it. The new authorities sought to mobilize labor in order to create that base of support. Mobilizing labor, however, above all meant creating laborers, because the previous regime had done so little of that, and because much of the prewar working class had been either killed or deported. The strategy, similar to that adopted in the Soviet Union, was to turn peasants into workers. The new authorities built industries and drafted peasants from the countryside to staff them, a process wonderfully portrayed in Andrzej Wajda’s 1977 film, Man of Marble. Mobilizing labor was the only way to generate a viable social base of power, while controlling it was the only way to maintain power. This difficult and delicate balance consumed the regime throughout the communist period. Once it had power, control of the labor movement was of paramount importance. But any parallel with Latin American authoritarianism is inappropriate. In Poland, the aim was not to control labor in order to placate a propertied class. The aim was to mobilize and control labor at the same time, in order to build a new kind of society. At the time of initial incorporation the party-state authorities believed they were building a society in the name of those it was trying to mobilize. Ideology was thus central to the incorporating process. The communist incorporation of labor was intended not just to control labor but to emancipate it. Their concern was not with existing trade unions, but with bringing new laborers into the labor force, creating a new labor movement that would be thankful for its social advance and would work in cooperation with the party to build this new world. It was this utopian vision that gave labor its particular sense of power and entitlement, and made all groups aware that any fight for political change had to be presented as in the interests of labor. The reasons the communist incorporation empowered labor are the same reasons why it so weakened labor in the ensuing democratic period. For when the system was rejected, the concepts of labor and working-class power were rejected with it. The new elites after 1989 were particularly adamant about expunging labor as an honorific category. The desire to transform the system meant also the desire to change its guiding iconography. This was true throughout Eastern Europe, but particularly so in Poland, where the new leaders had come to power thanks to a putative labor movement. The third incorporation of labor, undertaken once the communist regime was toppled, was thus very much a project of subordination. The aim was to create a labor movement without a sense of power and entitlement, one that understood itself to be not the representative of the nation, as it was seen and saw itself during the communist period, but rather simply as a particular interest group without any special claim on the social surplus.

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This effort was successful, aided by the skilled workers who headed the trade unions themselves. Upon democratization, the labor movement was no longer seen as the central player in society, much less, in the light of privatization and capitalist formation, as the social base of state power. The key point about the postcommunist world is thus not that it was not communist, but that it was “not-communist.” It was what it was not. Labor was still important, but now as a negative rather than a positive. The new aim was to oversee its marginalization.

The Impact on Politics and Law As noted, Poland’s postcommunist union leaders initially worked against the building of strong unions, since their desire to streamline firms in order to make them more market-ready put them at odds with the interests of most union members, the unskilled who wanted to hold on to their jobs. By the turn of the new century, however, after most of the unskilled had been let go from unionized firms, unions acted more like unions: organizations to defend the interests of their members. At this point, the enduring symbolic importance of labor had contradictory consequences. Since they got easy publicity, unions could convey the reasons for strikes and protests relatively easily, which often helped their cause. On the other hand, the prominence of labor issues also left an impression that unions protested more than they actually did, which contributed to the attacks on unions as special interests that have accelerated over the years. Labor prominence has also led to an overpoliticization of trade unions. In the early postcommunist years in Poland, unions were a central constituency for budding political parties. Since the Solidarity leadership supported rapid neoliberal reform, this did not lead to competition over who could best satisfy workers’ needs. Instead, it allowed union leaders to enter the political realm directly. In 1996, Solidarity devoted its resources to spearheading a new right-wing political coalition, which a year later came to power. Instead of helping unions, however, it was able to take unions for granted; the political careers of a few former unionists surged while labor decline proceeded apace. OPZZ, meanwhile, maintained close connections with the Democratic Left Alliance, also without being able to win much for its members. As for the effects of legacies on law, Poland is still affected by the old regime’s desire to weaken Solidarity after the introduction of martial law in 1981. For when the authorities permitted union revival in 1983, they insisted on decentralization. Unions were allowed to form only at the firm level, with the possibility of only a loose federation representing joint interests. The Trade Union Act of 1991 maintained this decentralization, as well as a very low threshold

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for union formation: only ten workers are necessary for a union to be registered, with the head of the union protected from dismissal. All this has led to the plethora of small unions—sometimes dozens in a single manufacturing firm, often formed chiefly to protect their “leaders” who become legally barred from dismissal—which makes unified activity and collective bargaining extremely difficult and often impossible. Some relics of the old regime, on the other hand, have been beneficial to unions. Although most gave up their role in running vacation homes and summer camps, or providing housing—these services were privatized and commodified, made available through the market—unions in large workplaces did maintain their factory newsletters and other resources with which to communicate with the workforce. They also maintained, by law, the right to have enterprise-paid delegates when union membership passes a certain threshold. (This is actually a double-edged benefit. Although it frees an official to do full-time union work, unions whose activists are paid by the enterprise are not as intrinsically connected to the workforce as those paid by dues alone.) We might also say that legacies played a role in the way firms shed workers, less by dismissal than by attrition, early retirement, and exaggerated disability releases. Norms guaranteeing full employment disappeared in the postcommunist era, but unions are still required to be consulted over layoffs, which tends to limit outright dismissals. There is a danger, however, of labeling all such holdovers as “legacies.” Even though guaranteed consultation over layoffs was surely related to the perceived need to avoid gratuitous mistreatment of workers so soon after replacing an ostensible “workers’ state,” minimizing internal dissatisfaction by at least symbolic involvement is a human resource management policy recommended in plenty of capitalist firms, and required by European Union norms. Whereas many of the new labor policies introduced right after 1989 were tied to managerial practices and expectations dating from the past, in the last decade, particularly since entry into the European Union in 2004, entirely new laws have been introduced to facilitate the diffusion of EU rules, with the role of legacies receding.

The Paradox of “Legacy Unions” in Poland The introduction to this volume argues that legacy unions, or the official state-backed unions of the authoritarian past, entered the new era with a particular set of deficiencies: “dependent on employers, [with] little experience mobilizing their members or engaging in collective bargaining, and . . . no history of independence from the ruling party.” Because of their dependence on the state, their weak links to members, and their near monopoly on union representation,

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they are said to be laden with liabilities that make them unlikely to advocate for their members. In some ways the situation of postcommunist unions would seem to be better than that of their counterparts in many postauthoritarian capitalist settings, because, unlike the latter, the former had no choice but to change, since they now faced a new economic system and, with privatization, new employers as well. Although unions in both settings had a tradition of working closely with management and the state, legacy unions in capitalist countries continued to face the same employers as before. When authoritarianism fell, the same unions dealt with the same employers, with a pattern of cooperation and mutual aid, often corruption, long established between them. These unions were likely to be staffed by functionaries wary of strong labor movements, charged with maintaining good relations with business, unaccustomed to making demands. They were likely to have a history of fawning contract negotiations with business, subservience to the state, and hostility to independent unions. Dependent on business revenues and official recognition for their survival, they would not seem to be good vehicles for the defense of labor interests. Here, the burden of legacy unions could indeed be heavy. Former communist legacy unions in eastern Europe faced a quite different situation, and dealt with a different set of incentives. First of all, these unions lost their historical partners in the postcommunist period, in the national and industrial bureaucracies as well as in the enterprise. They could not continue their old patterns because the system that structured those patterns no longer existed. No longer guaranteed members, they had to learn to appeal to workers if they were going to survive. Their legacy as putatively communist unions, meanwhile, turned some of them into militant actors, sometimes more militant than those in the independent unions that had emerged with the aim of supplanting them. Thus they were not the burden that legacy unions elsewhere might be. Of course, there were variations in how this played out in the region. Procommunist legacy unions remained a heavy burden in Russia, where the old regime remained largely intact, and where traditions of cooperation with the state ran deep. They remained least of a burden in Poland, where, as a result of Solidarity, classic communist-style “official” unions had already disappeared. That had happened already in 1980. The sudden emergence and then recognition of Solidarity was such a challenge to the existing official trade unions—hundreds of thousands of people abandoned them within days—that the government simply disbanded the official federation and allowed union pluralism. From that time until the collapse of the system in 1989, unions never returned to their former, “transmission-belt” status. From August 1980 until the declaration of martial law in December 1981, Solidarity became

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the dominant union. All union activity was then outlawed by martial law. In 1983, the government decided to revive unionism, but in order to maintain the official narrative that martial law did not constitute a return to the pre-Solidarity period, but was rather a transition period in order to stop state collapse and ensure a “proper” reform consistent with true socialism, it called into being an entirely new union body, the OPZZ, and made clear that union membership was no longer obligatory. OPZZ used the same words to characterize itself that Solidarity had used—“independent, self-governing trade unions”—in order to stress that they would not take orders from the ruling party. They even had the official right to strike, albeit on the basis of a complicated procedure. On the one hand, the independence was a sham: these unions were proposed at a plenum of the ruling party, its leaders were party members (though many had earlier also been members of Solidarity), and the express purpose of the unions was to keep Solidarity from being relegalized. The communist political system could not function without any trade unions at all, and the authorities sought to dissipate support for the return of Solidarity by offering a supposedly “new” union in its place, which would continue to administer benefits (and run the vacation homes and spas) while recognizing the legitimacy of party rule. In their effort to legitimize themselves and demonstrate that they really were “independent,” however, OPZZ did speak some tough words, did talk openly about wage and working conditions issues. They even ratcheted up the rhetoric when Solidarity returned. By 1988, the government started negotiating with Solidarity, preparing for the onset of Round Table negotiations to end the long crisis (and, in quick order, end communist party rule). OPZZ used the moment to present itself as the main force fighting against potentially painful market reform. This was not so strange a stance, given that Solidarity and even most of the communist party leadership had come out in strong support of market reform, and given their own organizational need to establish a rationale for survival once Solidarity was formally relegalized. It was not the putative legacy union, OPZZ, that dragged labor down in the postcommunist period. Paradoxically, it was Solidarity that did. This was the region’s greatest independent trade union, with a history of militantly defending union rights against encroachment from the state. Why should it stop playing that role after the collapse of the system, or just at the moment when it had won? The answer, of course, is that Solidarity’s main aim was to topple the old regime. Once it had, it was the union’s own leaders who came to head the new government, and so Solidarity set about to support that government. This meant working to prevent strikes, minimize labor activism, and otherwise provide succor for the new political leaders.

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In Poland it was thus Solidarity that acted like a legacy union laden with liabilities, making them poor advocates for their members. Solidarity as a legacy union? This makes sense if we understand how the Polish transformation unfolded in ways quite distinct from other communist countries. Only in Poland did new unions emerge before the collapse of the old regime. They emerged as a response to that regime, and were organizationally structured so as to deal with it. Solidarity was thus to a large extent part of the old regime. Its mission after 1989 was a continuation of its earlier one: to root out the old system. And so in the early postcommunist period Solidarity was naturally extraordinarily close to the government, committed to creating a new political and economic system. It had close relations to employers, too. Managers of state-owned firms understood that Solidarity was the new dominant force, and quickly established a good relationship with the union. Where elections were held for new managers, these almost invariably produced a new Solidarity-supported management team. Many new private firms that emerged were founded by Solidarity members, usually technicians and professionals. So committed was Solidarity to the creation of a market economy that even when these new private firms opposed the formation of unions, Solidarity still refrained from criticizing them. All in all, the marketization project enjoyed strong Solidarity support. Unions were indeed weak in the postauthoritarian era, and many unionists promoted that weakness. Lech Wałe˛sa himself proclaimed, just before the first noncommunist government was installed in 1989, that “we will not catch up to Europe if we build a strong trade union.” Whereas OPZZ had organizational reasons to be critical of the new government, Solidarity had ideological reasons to be loyal. Solidarity remained just as focused on the state after the democratic transition as before, with the difference that beforehand it extended absolute opposition, whereas now it offered absolute loyalty. In the Round Table negotiations of 1989, Solidarity took a promarket position (still seen as an oppositional stance) while OPZZ styled itself as the principled defender of working people. In discussions about the future of mining, for example, Solidarity proposed “marketization”—other than that, “we didn’t have anything to propose,” said Solidarity’s chief negotiator, Jan Lityn´ski, some years later5—while OPZZ called for guarantees for miners. OPZZ demanded full wage indexation to protect employees from the ravages of inflation, while Solidarity, believing that this would only contribute to inflation, took a conciliatory stand. Afterward, when a Solidarity-supported government came to power, the discrepancy grew even larger. Solidarity vouched for the policies proposed by the new government, and worked to quash labor protests against them. OPZZ, meanwhile, opposed these policies, and even once, in 1990, less than a year after the

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collapse of the system, supported a high-profile railway strike conducted by several rail unions, including Solidarity locals, which national Solidarity vigorously opposed. In the face of a historic economic crisis led by a Solidarity government, militance was exactly what OPZZ needed if it was to have a chance of surviving the relegalization of Solidarity. As it happened, OPZZ proved to be too saddled to its own past to play the role of militant union. Even though some officials at the national level did try to present themselves as the new tough unionists against a Solidarity tied too closely to the new state and economic elite, most local officials were unable to do so. Shaped by a legacy of following the lead of the party and valuing cooperation over adversarialism, they were unable suddenly to transform themselves into militants. Although to some extent they had to speak up for their members’ immediate interests, in order to prevent a wholesale exodus of members to Solidarity, they also needed to demonstrate that OPZZ was not an old-regime holdover, which mitigated antimarket rhetoric. Legacies of the past affected both unions here, ushering in a pattern of weak representation for members.

From Communism to Postcommunism As noted at the beginning of this chapter, and as stressed in the volume’s introductory chapter, legacies were surely not the only factor shaping labor outcomes, in eastern Europe or anywhere else. Global market logic and pressures bring about many of the outcomes on their own. What legacies do is affect how actors are able and willing to respond to the new challenges. This chapter has argued that labor in postcommunist society had a particularly hard time adapting. This was not because communism left unions weak. Union density in the region was actually higher than anywhere in the world. Unionists had not experienced the kind of severe repression that capitalist authoritarianisms inflicted on their workers, rendering them passive, mute, and frightened. Martial law in Poland was no reign of terror. The problematic legacy for the postcommunist period was not the authoritarianism of the past but its state socialist nature. The lack of a market economy left unions without the experience to deal with the new situation, while the enthusiasm connected with the transition to democracy translated seamlessly into an enthusiasm for a market economy that left unions unprepared and uneager for the challenge. Over time, the impact of these legacies seems to have worn thin. Experience with capitalism, the rise of a new generation, and incorporation into the European Union have made eastern European unionists increasingly similar to their counterparts in the west. In recent years, Polish unionists have stood with

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western European unions against the Bolkestein Directive on the liberalization of the service sector, even though the Directive would disproportionately benefit Polish workers. In a startling and significant change, Solidarity and OPZZ have shed most of their ideological divisions and now frequently engage in protests together, in order to preserve what is left of a fraying welfare state and to fight against an ever increasing “flexibility” of labor that has made Poland the EU leader in short-term, benefit-free, so-called junk contracts (Watson 2012, Pan´ków 2011). On a visit to Solidarity’s national headquarters in June 2013, I encountered the unprecedented sight of a portrait not of the pope but of Karl Marx, in the office of Solidarity’s secretary for international affairs. It was meant only slightly tongue in cheek, the secretary explained to me, but since 1989 his views on capitalism had changed quite radically. And yet the need to fight such rearguard action is itself partly a consequence of old legacies. For it is because of these legacies that, despite the power of Solidarity in the 1980s, unions emerged in postcommunist Poland as particularly weak actors, as measured by tottering density levels and a striking inability to influence policy. Even with the ebbing of the legacies and the appearance of committed union activists, unions are still bearing the impact of that past. In that sense, today it is the legacy not of communism but of postcommunism that is labor’s great challenge today.

5 EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS The Legacy of Self-Management in the Former Yugoslavia Marko Grdešic´

A sizable literature has investigated the impact of Communist legacies in Eastern Europe, whether in general (Jowitt 1992; Millar and Wolchik 1994; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Pop-Eleches 2007) or in the context of labor politics (Crowley and Ost 2001; Crowley 2004; Kubicek 2004; Chen and Sil 2006). Crowley and Ost have put forward the thesis that labor has emerged as a weak political and socioeconomic actor in much of the region and have adopted the legacy of the Communist regime as their central explanation. In reaction to this, a body of work emerged that has asked whether the Yugoslav system of socialist self-management, as distinct from Soviet state socialism, presents an exception (Stanojevic´ 2003; Grdešic´ 2008; Meszmann 2008). A small controversy has developed in which the impact of the Yugoslav legacy is seen either as negative (Arandarenko 2001) or positive for labor (Stanojevic´ 2003). This chapter will offer a reassessment of the Yugoslav legacy and trace its workings throughout the postcommunist period in three successor countries, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. The chapter makes two main points. First, the legacy of self-management was important in shaping the fate of labor, but it did so in interaction with certain political and economic factors. The legacy of self-management combined with the character of the political regime and the relative economic strength and international competitiveness of each country to produce three distinct transitional stories. Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia share the same legacy but their fates diverged because of the ways that the legacy combined with different economic and political factors. Therefore, the same legacy can be either a plus or a minus: it can 103

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operate differently depending on its context. The comparison is especially stark for Slovenia and Serbia. Whereas Slovenia is a transitional success story and the only East European corporatist or “coordinated” economy (Bohle and Greskovits 2007; Crowley and Stanojevic´ 2011), Serbia presents a case of an “aborted” transition (Arandarenko 2001) in which labor has become quite weak. Croatia presents an in-between case. The legacy was not the sole culprit for these outcomes, but it is part of the explanation: the workings of legacies are best seen in an interactive manner. In other words, the legacy of self-management separates former Yugoslavia from countries such as Russia and Poland, but the legacy itself works differently depending on its context. And second, issues of timing matter. The early transitional period can be seen as a critical juncture (Collier and Berins Collier 1991), an unsettled period that increased the relevance of elite agency. The choices made by political elites in the late 1980s and early 1990s have sent the three countries on three distinct paths when it comes to patterns of labor politics. It was during this period that a decision had to be made regarding the institutional framework of the old regime and elites in each country chose differently. The legacy mattered more directly in this period too. Yugoslav workers’ councils, the key institutional innovation of the regime, were still around. So was “social ownership” of the economy, the Yugoslav alternative to Soviet-style state ownership. Furthermore, workers who were socialized within the old institutional context had clear expectations regarding the direction of the transition. In other words, both formal institutions and ideological orientations, each connected to the legacy of the old regime, were still firmly in place. As the transitional period progressed, early transitional choices constrained future possibilities for both elites and labor. Following this volume’s common points of emphasis, this chapter looks at the following dimensions that matter for historical legacies: labor incorporation, legacy unions, ideology, and labor law. Both the Yugoslav practice and the subsequent trajectories of Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia are discussed. Finally, I discuss the two main points outlined above: first, the interactions of the legacy with other factors, notably economic constraints and political choices and, second, the relevance of timing and the critical juncture of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Labor Incorporation How was labor incorporated in the political regime of Yugoslavia, and how has this changed since the transition to liberal democracy? Most of the contours of the Yugoslav system would be familiar to any student of communism. In the area of labor politics, this included universal membership in unions subservient to the party. The unions thus differed little from unions elsewhere in the region,

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     105

including countries such as Poland and Russia. On the other hand, workers’ councils were the main innovation of the Yugoslav system. They were introduced after Yugoslavia’s leader and dictator Josip Broz Tito decided to oppose Stalin and the Soviet Union in 1948. Prior to Tito’s conflict with Stalin, economic policy had been run in accordance with Stalinist principles of central planning. After the break with the Soviet Union, reforms of some sort, preferably reforms with Marxist motivations, had to be introduced. Workers’ councils, the key component of a broader ideology of worker self-management, were seen as an ideologically acceptable way to differentiate the country from the Soviet Union. This innovation made it possible for the regime’s chief ideologues to claim that it was actually the USSR, not Yugoslavia that had betrayed the cause of communism. From the beginning, the self-management project was torn between the partially contradictory goals of giving workers voice and influence, ensuring labor discipline and increasing productivity, and promoting economic development while opening up to the world market (Woodward 1995; Upchurch and Marinkovic´ 2013; Unkovski-Korica 2014).Whereas trade unions were more easily controlled as a centralized bureaucracy, workers’ councils were not. What workers would demand in factory meetings was never fully predictable. On the one hand, the regime forbade independent forms of worker organization, just as in other Communist countries such as Poland and the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the existence of workers’ councils meant that workers always had an institutionally available platform they could use to voice their discontent. The increased autonomy of workers’ councils was ideologically compatible with efforts to decentralize the economy and allow for market stimuli. As it developed, the Yugoslav model of “market socialism” developed certain traits that are basic to Western capitalism but which did not exist in the Eastern bloc: firms were free to set prices and sell their products to whomever they wished. Furthermore, they operated in an environment of open inflation and unemployment. This separates the Yugoslav experience from other Communist countries. Additionally, where economic conditions were favorable, labor incorporation occurred through company-level “micro-corporatism.” Those companies that were smaller in size, more capital intensive, and export oriented were often characterized by an alliance of workers and management. This alliance could provide a basis for insider privatization once the transition began. Yet the size of this sector varied: it was strongest in Slovenia and grew progressively weaker as one moved toward the southeast (Woodward 1995). The goal of the insider coalition was to prevent politicians from “meddling” in their internal affairs, that is, to prevent redistributive flows to other, less successful companies (Comisso 1979). Where the insider coalition was weaker, in domestically oriented labor-intensive companies with many employees, workers were more prone to strike.

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TABLE 5.1  Strikes in Yugoslavia 1980

Number of strikes Number of

253

1981

216

1982

174

1983

336

1984

393

1985

696

1986

851

1987

1,685

1988

1,851

13,504 13,507 10,997 21,776 29,031 60,062 88,860 288,686 386,123

participants Source: Foˇco 1989, 62.

Industrial conflict slowly became a regular feature of the Yugoslav economy. Strikes were relatively rare in the 1960s and 1970s, but increased in number in the 1980s (see table 5.1; Lowinger 2009; Music´ 2013). Faced with an economic crisis, rising inflation, and stagnating incomes, workers engaged in a series of strikes, triggering a large protest wave. This wave of mobilization was occurring in the context of the country’s breakup. Very soon, the relevant political contours were those of independent Slovenia, Croatia, and a rump Yugoslavia headed by Serbia. Each new state approached the problem of labor incorporation differently. It is during this brief time window that labor stood to gain the most as the key decisions on privatization and on industrial relations had not yet been made. Elite decisions stood to make the most impact too, but how elites handled this increased influence varied from country to country. In Slovenia and Croatia the first multiparty elections were won by right-wing nationalist elites. In Slovenia, it was a loose right-wing coalition called “Demos” led by the Slovenian Christian Democrats. This new elite attacked the union movement, and especially the old, but now reformed, trade union confederation, the Association of Free Trade Unions of Slovenia. A similar trajectory occurred in Croatia with Franjo Tud-man’s nationalist and conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). Although elected in democratic elections, new right-wing elites had clear authoritarian tendencies that manifested themselves most clearly when they had to interact with actors from society, such as unions. As in Slovenia, the Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia (SSSH), the Croatian trade union confederation, reformed and struck out on an independent course. For a time, the new course of the central union confederations placed them under considerable political pressure, as politicians attacked them for their supposed “union unitarism” or condemned them as “Bolshevik residues” (Stanojevic´ and Krašovec 2005, 7; Zakošek 1996, 215). The difference between the two countries was that in Slovenia the nationalist episode was much shorter. Whereas the nationalist and conservative HDZ went on to rule for a full decade in Croatia, in Slovenia power was seized in 1992 by Liberal Democracy of Slovenia (LDS),

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     107

a centrist and pragmatic party. It ruled for roughly the next decade. As LDS had very little ideology of its own and did not rely on nationalism to legitimate itself, it welcomed the cooperation of actors such as unions. A practice of social pacts developed, with the first such agreement being signed in 1994, followed again by pacts in 1995 and 1996. Initially, the agreements regulated only pay policy but the scope of the documents has grown over time. No such practice of social pacts took hold in Croatia and Serbia. In Serbia, the first elections brought to power the former Communist Party of Slobodan Miloševic´, now renamed the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). It blended a nationalist agenda with a socialist one, claiming to be both the political force that would defend Serbs outside of Serbia and maintain a high degree of social security. Its authoritarianism was visible in the way it frowned on social and political pluralism, and quickly accused autonomous actors, such as the new unions, of treachery and national betrayal. Economically, Miloševic´’s rule proved disastrous, leading to hyperinflation and a steep decrease in real wages. The party had warm relations with the old trade union confederation, the Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia (SSS), mostly because the union did not reform and never tried to challenge the government in any major way (Arandarenko 1997, 134–41; 2001, 171–73). Yet throughout the 1990s both Miloševic´’s SPS and Tud-man’s HDZ enjoyed strong support from voters, including working-class voters. Interactions between the government and the unions were different in each case. Although the Croatian government backed down from its authoritarian approach when faced with large union protests, it never warmed to the idea of bringing the unions on board the reform process, as occurred in Slovenia. In Serbia, the picture was more similar to Russian labor relations under Putin. The official union, SSS, was included in tripartite bargaining, but independent unions were not, leading to a kind of authoritarian corporatism. Therefore, both Slovenia and Serbia achieved a form of corporatist incorporation: in the former, this occurred in the context of stable liberal democracy and a union movement that had an independent source of social legitimacy, while in the latter it occurred in the context of authoritarianism, international isolation following war, and a trade union that never divorced itself from the party. In Croatia, a third scenario took hold: an independent union movement frequently battled an obstinate nationalist government, resulting finally in fragmentation and internecine conflicts between labor leaders. Therefore, the same legacy combined with different structural conditions and different political choices to produce three different outcomes. In Slovenia, workers’ councils were being replaced with German-style works councils and a developed system of collective bargaining. A relatively favorable economic situation

108     MARKO GRDEŠIC´

made it possible to extend cooperation to unions, and a stable democratic setting facilitated the new coordinated system of industrial relations. In Serbia, workers’ councils were kept in place, but meant little for the daily lives of workers. A dramatic deterioration of the economy, international isolation, and politically authoritarian and economically inept elites all combined to produce truly disastrous consequences. Croatia was an in-between case, both in terms of the deterioration of the economy and the damaging impact of the elite. The new regime did away with workers’ councils and was reluctant to offer cooperation—whether it be real, as in Slovenia, or fictitious, as in Serbia—to the unions. Although data on the survival of the “micro-corporatist” alliance of workers and managers in successful export-oriented companies is scarce, it is relatively safe to say that the alliance survived in Slovenia but not in Croatia or Serbia. In Croatia, HDZ sacked those managers it saw as too “red.” In Serbia, Miloševic´ managed to place his cronies in management positions already in the late 1980s (for some evidence on Croatia, see Pusic´ 1992). In Slovenia, the coalition of workers and managers survived and was the basis of insider privatization, which transformed social ownership into private property. In Croatia, the coalition was destroyed and social ownership proclaimed legally void with a strike of the pen. In Serbia, the micro-corporatist coalition was not as common as in Slovenia and the economically successful parts of Croatia, yet there is good reason to think it was largely destroyed there too. Social ownership was allowed to live on, but it ultimately suffered the same fate as in Croatia: it de facto became state ownership that needed to be sold to the highest, or at least best-connected, bidder. After 2000, the stark differences between Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia narrowed significantly. This is mostly due to the democratization that occurred in Croatia in early 2000, and more dramatically in Serbia later that same year. Yet, out of the three countries, it is only Slovenia that had put in place a system of industrial relations that replaced Yugoslav workers’ councils with institutions that resemble German co-determination councils. Further, it was only Slovenia that managed to transform social ownership into private ownership of workers and managers. Croatia and Serbia were still reeling from the choices they made in the early 1990s. Their nationalist detours had cost the working class dearly.

Legacy Unions As mentioned before, the central union confederation under communism did not attempt to become an autonomous actor. The one exception was the early 1960s when Svetozar Vukmanovic´-Tempo was the union president. In 1958 the first large strike occurred in Yugoslavia, in the mine of Trbovlje, Slovenia. In

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     109

its aftermath, Tito decided to make Tempo, a close wartime colleague, the new union president. His war reputation and legendary energy turned the union into an autonomous social force, independent of the party. Many in the party elite disliked the new autonomous and critical orientation of the union (Zukin 1981, 296). He frequently criticized political and economic elites of the time and was even willing to support spontaneous strikes. Despite being in frequent conflict with the federal government he enjoyed the support of the rank and file.1 Additionally, Tempo put pressure on the federal government and the chamber of commerce to sign tripartite agreements to regulate wages and investment. This form of top-level bargaining did not take hold following his departure from the union in 1967. Subsequent reforms moved away from a centralized system of tripartism and industrial policy to a system of decentralized bottom-up bargaining. Anything too centralized reminded politicians of the Stalinist period and was thus ideologically unpalatable. Additionally, regional elites were never able to agree on what the economic priorities should be. It was easier not to bring the issue up at all and depoliticize investment decisions by leaving them up to supposedly neutral and objective market forces. Reforms during the 1970s moved the system in the direction of more decentralization. This was agreeable to the union as it meant it did not have to take potentially controversial public stances. The top levels of the union hierarchy satisfied themselves with dull conferences while company-level unions devoted themselves to service provision. The union’s slumber was broken in the late 1980s. As the various republics became independent states, the possibility of autonomous action presented itself. The practically confederal character of the Yugoslav state and all Yugoslav institutions also had repercussions for the trade unions. Slovenia’s or Croatia’s trade union confederation could cut their ties with the umbrella Yugoslav organization rather easily. All of the property, manpower, and membership that was located on the territory of each successor state simply became a resource of that particular confederation. In rump Yugoslavia, the Serbian and Yugoslav trade union confederation continued to coexist, though the latter grew increasingly irrelevant with time. To what extent can the trade union confederations in Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia be compared to the legacy unions one sees in some postcommunist countries such as Russia? Are unions holdovers from the old regime that have not reformed and are holding a large membership captive? This was true only in Serbia during the 1990s. In Slovenia and Croatia, reforms of the old trade union confederation were successfully carried out. Reform-minded factions managed to gain a sufficiently strong base within both organizations and amass enough votes in the first union congresses held after state breakdown. These groups of enthusiastic unionists were crucial for the revitalization of unions in Slovenia and Croatia in the early 1990s.

110     MARKO GRDEŠIC´

In Slovenia, reforms began in the late 1980s. In Croatia, they took place in 1990. When the strike wave began to occur in the late 1980s, the Slovenian trade union confederation was the first to recognize the need to support the strikes (Meszmann 2008, 12). Thus, when the first multiparty elections were held in 1990, the union already had a short period of autonomous activity. Even so, challenges were made by new unions, usually formed by breaking off from the old one. The largest of these was Independence KNSS (Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Slovenia). This confederation was allied temporarily with the new right-wing parties. Several smaller confederations were also established. Faced with a need for internal reform, the Association of Free Trade Unions of Slovenia allowed its members to choose whether they wanted to remain members or not. Most decided to stay (Stanojevic´ and Krašovec 2005, 7). After the initial years of turbulence and interunion conflict, the confederations detached themselves from political parties and, most of the time, acted jointly toward the government and employers. A similar trajectory occurred in Croatia. In 1990, a reformist faction managed to take control of the old trade union, leading to the formal establishment of SSSH. Groups close to the right-wing government manufactured a split and formed an alternative union federation, the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Croatia. Not only the pattern but also the name was the same as in Slovenia. When this confederation detached itself from the government, the ruling HDZ tried to manufacture another split and create yet another confederation (Kokanovic´ 2001, 145). Ultimately, these attempts came to nothing and the union movement managed to maintain its autonomy from political parties. SSSH also allowed its members a choice to leave, but most decided to stay (Zakošek 1996, 215). Very soon, by 1992 or 1993, all confederations cooperated in their protests against the government. The unions supported the war effort, since the war for Croatian independence was generally seen as a defensive one. This issue in itself did not lead to union divisions as it did in Serbia. However, the government used the war cleverly and cynically to demobilize and defuse discontent: any opposition during wartime could be labeled as unpatriotic and disloyal. This government strategy was also used in Serbia (Gagnon 2004). Since Slovenia was isolated from the war, this was not an option for Slovenia’s elites. A reform faction tried but failed to take over the Serbian union confederation SSS. The crucial congress of the union, which was held at about the same time as in Croatia, ended in a victory for the conservative faction. Worse even than the union’s passivity in the face of a steep decline in living standards was the fact that they denounced multipartyism and supported Serbia’s military adventures (Arandarenko 1997, 137). Disappointed by this outcome, most of the reformists left the official union and began organizing new and independent unions. The

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     111

most important of these was UGS Nezavisnost (Independence), which had an unequivocal antiwar attitude. However, SSS retained most of its members and property. This meant that, unlike in Slovenia and Croatia, the union with the most members and resources would keep itself out of political battles. Therefore, referring to SSS in the 1990s as a legacy union is indeed appropriate. After 2000, they initiated an internal reform and can no longer be called a legacy union. It should be mentioned that in all three countries trade union membership is declining. This holds even in Slovenia. Currently, about a third of the employed are union members in all three countries. Membership clusters in the public sector, state-owned companies, and large companies in the private sector. Although inheriting a very large membership base from Communist times was no doubt an advantage, this also meant that unions never tried to organize membership drives. In all three countries, most new unions have formed as break-away factions. Attempts to reach out to previously un-unionized workers have not been very successful. A partial exception is UGS Nezavisnost in Serbia, but even this union is rather small.2 The new private sector of small and medium enterprises remains practically union-free. Furthermore, union confederations do not exercise much control over local-level unions, nor local unions over members. In Croatia, but even more in Serbia, the early 2000s witnessed a spike in unauthorized protest. Workers engaged in a series of strikes, occupations, demonstrations, and marches. Most often, the problems had to do either with nonpayment of wages or with corrupt privatization.3 The strikes and protests continued in Serbia in the mid- to late 2000s. In these instances, the local union was often part of the problem, entangled in corrupt ties with company management. Whether the wave of mobilization was strong enough to reform the corrupt segments of the union movement is as of yet unclear.

Ideology Yugoslav self-management was the official ideology of a regime that tried to differentiate itself from both Western capitalism and Soviet etatism. The goal of the Yugoslav Communists was to navigate between “the Scylla of bureaucratization and the Charybdis of capital” (Kardelj 1983, 92). Even some renowned Western scholars had their curiosity piqued by the Yugoslav “third way.” For example, Robert Dahl (1970, 130) called Yugoslavia “probably the most radical alternative to the American and Soviet status quo.” In similar fashion, Carole Pateman assessed to what extent Yugoslavia approximated a “blueprint for a participatory society” (Pateman 1970, 88). Of course, we should not believe that the regime

112     MARKO GRDEŠIC´

implemented all of its proclaimed goals or that it completely abandoned its authoritarian foundations. As an essentially authoritarian regime with liberalizing and democratizing ambitions it was prone to periodic crackdowns and reversals of previous breakthroughs. Self-management should above all be understood as an ideological and political promise. On the way toward this end goal certain achievements were made that need to be pointed out. These achievements were often overlooked by domestic observers as well, as they frequently fell short of official ideology. This constant inability of reality to measure up to the ideals set by the regime was a frequent source of criticism from domestic analysts. The fact that such criticism was possible speaks of the freedoms that existed in Yugoslavia. It is also a telling sign that many intellectuals were sympathetic to the goals of the regime. The grudge they had was that it failed to meet the standards that it set for itself. The story of Yugoslavia is thus a story of a regime continuously failing to meet criteria that it set for itself. Furthermore, unlike Poland, Czechoslovakia, and most of Eastern Europe, socialism in Yugoslavia had strong domestic roots. The Communist-led resistance during World War II gave the Yugoslav Communists a much stronger legitimacy and made socialism much more popular with ordinary citizens and workers. Workers’ ideologies could most clearly be observed when it came to the operation of workers’ councils. Luckily, there is a large body of empirical research, both domestic and international, that explored what went on in Yugoslav companies. The stated ideological goal of workers’ councils was to give workers full control over the companies in which they worked. Measured by such a yardstick, the councils did not fulfill their role. More than twenty years of domestic research showed that workers’ councils did not have the role that official ideology expected. Instead, the distribution of power was skewed in the direction of management in general and the general director in particular (Rus and Adam 1989; Županov 1983; Obradovic´ 1972; Obradovic´ 1974; Arzenšek 1984). Some observers despaired that workers’ councils were only a “self-management ritual,” a mere “voting mechanism” (Rus and Adam 1989, 124). But workers’ councils did provide workers the opportunity for their opinion to consulted and to be heard.4 They created a sphere of public discussion inside companies that guaranteed that all key decisions regarding the company’s future would be discussed and that problems would become public knowledge within the company (Comisso 1979, 116; Pusic´ 1992, 136). Researchers described workers’ councils as “some sort of parliament of informal groups in which interests are confronted more or less openly” (Rus and Adam 1989, 100–101), or as a “forum in which events and decisions important to the life of the company are assessed publicly” (Goldstein 1985, 80). The most systematic comparative research was

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     113

conducted by the Industrial Democracy in Europe research group (see IDE 1993). As figure 5.1 suggests, Yugoslav companies did present something of a cross-national exception. Another three-country comparison of worker participation, also based on employee surveys, again showed high scores for Yugoslavia (see DIO 1979). The institution of “social ownership” was the flip side of workers’ councils. Legally, social ownership of the economy was impossible to define: factories belonged to “society,” simultaneously to everybody and nobody. Yet, for workers, this simply meant that they owned the factories they worked in. A strong emotional connection to workplaces was created (Goldstein 1985, 131–33). To the workers, the company was the center of their identities (Comisso 1979, 62). Identification with their companies was jumbled up with a sense of frustration about how the companies functioned. It was precisely the workers who were more actively involved who were also more frustrated (Comisso 1979, 175; Rus and Arzenšek 1984, 411). Two comments by workers can help to illustrate this: “When you get into self-management you can’t stop. Many nights I couldn’t sleep. I used to come home, toss and turn and worry how are we going to solve this, how are we going to solve that” (Drezga 1982, 47). “I spend most of my free time on these meetings. I have already had problems with my wife. All you do is worry about these meetings [she says], these preparations, you lock yourself in

FIGURE 5.1  Power of company-level representative bodies. De jure participation refers to formalized rules that regulate employee involvement. De facto participation is derived from respondents’ ratings of how much actual influence exists. Data collected in 1987.

Source: Adapted from IDE 1993, 94.

114     MARKO GRDEŠIC´

the room. I read newspapers, various materials …” (Drezga 1982, 122). When these high hopes were not fulfilled a paradoxical blend of identification with the company and frustration with it emerged (Goldstein 1985, 73). After the transition to liberal democracy began, social ownership had to be transformed into some form of private ownership. Since I discuss this policy area in the next section, I will make only brief comments here. Most workers had formed expectations that the privatization process should simply formalize that “their” companies belonged to them. A model of insider privatization was envisioned in the last federal reforms from 1989. After a lot of turmoil, a similar mixed model that privileged insiders (workers and managers) was adopted in Slovenia. In Croatia, all “socially owned” property was first turned into state property (that is, etatized or nationalized) and then sold off to individual buyers. In Serbia, the pace of privatization was slowest, accelerating only after 2000. In both Croatia and Serbia, privatization violated the expectations of workers of what would have constituted a fair transformation process. Unhappiness with the way privatization was handled led to a spike in labor protest in Croatia in the late 1990s and early 2000s and even more visibly in Serbia in the early and mid- 2000s (Bahtijari 2001; Grdešic´ 2007). In these mobilizations the legacy of self-management is relevant as social ownership created the strong emotional attachments of workers to their firms. At the same time, it is impossible to say exactly how much of this activism is due to the legacy and how much to the new economic and political context, that is, the double trend of corrupt privatization and democratization that characterized the 2000s, most notably in Serbia. Protests took the form of factory occupations and wildcat strikes and share some similarities with the protests that took place in Russian company towns in the 2000s (Crowley, this volume). As in Russia, many wildcat protests took place in smaller towns in Croatia and Serbia, where significant proportions of the local population depend on one large local firm. The company-level protests that have proliferated in Serbia do not seem to have had much of an impact. They were mistimed: the moment to influence the key decisions had already passed. This contrasts starkly to Slovenia where labor protests happened at a more opportune moment, peaking in the early 1990s. The more recent protests have largely been ignored by the media and the government, especially in Serbia. For most of the 2000s, politics in Serbia has been dominated by the Democratic Party. Though nominally a Center-Left party, it has proven to be rather disinterested in responding to labor’s demands. The central union confederation has also not offered much leadership to the wave of wildcat strikes and factory occupations. In Croatia, the immediate result of the protests and occupations was the creation of the Office for Social Partnership, a new institution that resolves industrial disputes and acts as a labor secretariat for the government. It was created by the reformed Communists, the Social Democratic

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     115

Party of Croatia, which won power in 2000. In Serbia, where protests were more numerous, there seems to be no result whatsoever. The comparison between Slovenia and Serbia is still the starkest. An illustrative example can be used to showcase the differences in the settings that characterize these countries at the end of the second decade of transition. Following the global economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, reverberations were felt in all three countries. In Slovenia, there were two highly visible strikes. One was held at Mura, a bankrupt textile company in an economically depressed region of the country. The other took place at Gorenje, a high-end exporter of kitchen appliances. Elites quickly responded to the strikes. In Gorenje, a wage agreement was reached that raised the salaries of workers in the lowest pay grade. In the case of Mura, legislation was passed to provide economic assistance to the region and a new government official was appointed to oversee the process. In Serbia, the summer of 2009 was especially turbulent. The OECD reported that at the end of July forty-five companies with about thirty thousand workers were on strike.5 Similarly to other postcommunist countries such as Russia, the main reason for the strikes was nonpayment or late payment of wages. In the most extreme cases wages were not paid for several years. Yet the government did not offer much in terms of a policy response. Looking at volume alone, Serbian labor has produced more activism. However, the bar for successful mobilization seems to be much higher in Serbia than in Slovenia. Compared to Serbia, Slovenian labor can win more by mobilizing less, given that it operates in a more favorable economic context combined with a more responsive public sphere. This would suggest that there is much more room for radical neoliberalism in Serbia than in Slovenia. Yet, on the whole, the rush toward neoliberalism was never as pronounced in the former Yugoslavia as it was, for example, in the Baltic countries. In the early 2000s, international financial institutions exerted pressures on governments to reform labor markets, which is a topic I will discuss in the next section. But even here the changes were not radical. This may speak to the variation in ideological climate that, though subtle, still exists in Eastern Europe. Neoliberalism is present in the entire region, yet its severity varies across countries. One likely explanation is that observed differences in the severity of neoliberalism are connected to the countries’ different legacies (see also Bohle and Greskovits 2007).

Labor Law Yugoslav labor law was centered around the Law on Associated Labor. This “little constitution” was the cornerstone of the decentralizing reforms of the mid-1970s. All companies were to be broken into smaller units or BOALs (basic organizations

116     MARKO GRDEŠIC´

of associated labor), which correspond roughly to divisions. BOALs were then joined into larger units, that is, companies. The system was very cumbersome and convoluted, and most of its provisions were honored in the breach. This refers especially to the complicated system of bottom-up bargaining according to which BOALs were expected to sign social compacts and self-management agreements with each other and other actors in society (see the blueprint in Kardelj 1983). As a relatively original idea on how to manage an economy from below, the concept of “associated labor” is not without theoretical appeal. But it proved impossible to implement in the Yugoslav context, and by the late 1980s many were calling for the law to be revoked in favor of more conventional market relationships. Changes to the basic legal framework began under the leadership of Ante Markovic´, the last federal prime minister of Yugoslavia (on the reforms, see Woodward 1995). Previously, workers did not sign employment contracts but “associated” their labor. The Law on Enterprises, passed in 1988, reintroduced the basic employment relationship. New labor codes adopted by states after independence went further still. Yet all the labor codes tried to preserve a fair deal of employment protection. Table 5.2 gives the data for OECD’s employment protection index, a measure (from 0 to 6) that takes into account regulation of dismissals, notice periods, and severance pay. Along with Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, a few other East European countries are included for comparison. There is relatively more employment protection in the countries of the former Yugoslavia than in Central Eastern Europe. However, there is also a trend toward deregulation in all countries, Slovenia included.6 Pressures to liberalize labor relations were strongest in the early 2000s. The kinds of neoliberal pressures that were immediately present in East European countries such as Poland (Ost, this volume) now became important factors in the former Yugoslavia as well. Because of Croatia’s and Serbia’s nationalist detours, international organizations saw both countries as laggards in reform (Upchurch and Weltman 2008). Even Slovenia was caught up in neoliberal trends, despite TABLE 5.2  OECD Employment Protection Legislation index EPL INDEX (0–6)

Slovenia Croatia Serbia Hungary Poland Slovakia

1990S

2000S

3.3 3.6 2.9 1.8 2.0 2.3

2.7 2.7 2.9 1.6 2.2 1.7

Sources: Micevska 2004; Romih and Festic´ 2008; DGEFA and WIIW 2008.

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     117

the fact that its macroeconomic performance was much better. Pressures to abandon the country’s gradualist and labor-friendly path came from both foreign and domestic economists (Rojec et al. 2004). After a long period of rule by Center-Left parties, a right-wing party, the Slovenian Democratic Party, took control in 2004 and pushed for a series of reforms. The crown jewel of these reforms was supposed to be the flat-rate tax. Ultimately, labor protest and widespread social resistance diluted the reforms considerably. A large street protest was organized in the center of Ljubljana by the unions in order to attack the flat-rate tax. Similar large demonstrations took place over the course of the next few years to oppose various government policies. Indeed, the viability of the Slovenian “corporatist” or “coordinated” economy seems to depend on the unions’ ability to organize street protests and mobilize enough public support to stop neoliberal reforms (see also Crowley and Stanojevic´ 2011, 284). The dropping membership rates of (even) Slovenian unions puts into question the future ability of unions to oppose the policy drift toward neoliberalism. In Croatia and Serbia, the context was quite different. Loans from international financial organizations were made conditional on labor market reform. Severance pay was lowered and notice periods shortened, making it easier for employers to dismiss employees. Yet, as table 5.2 shows, even such liberalized labor relations still compare well with other countries in the region. Unions in both cases reacted with protests and managed to influence the final result to some degree. In Croatia, the conflict over labor market liberalization resulted in the cancellation of an already signed social pact, the first and thus far only such agreement signed in the country. Since the early 2000s the pace of labor market reform has slowed. Yet the persistence of double digit unemployment rates in Croatia and Serbia makes employers’ cries for the removal of labor market “rigidities” a constant factor. In the summer of 2010, Croatian unions scored a victory when they collected enough signatures for a referendum on the government’s proposed changes to the collective bargaining system, forcing the government to drop the proposal. The central transition issue was, as already mentioned, privatization. Legally and politically, it was the most complex issue that former socialist countries faced. Given the attachment of workers to their companies, it was also a very personal issue to all workers. In Slovenia, a mixed privatization system gave some shares to insiders and some to the wider population (see Crowley and Stanojevic´ 2011, 280; Mencinger 2004). Privatization turned striking workers into owners and thus had a clear antistrike effect (Stanojevic´ 2002, 9). Therefore, the large strike wave that began in the 1980s had its resolution in the privatization bill. The strike wave was interrupted in Croatia and Serbia by the outbreak of war, which made it possible for the governments of both countries to ask for social peace

118     MARKO GRDEŠIC´

while military operations lasted. As already mentioned, war had an unexpected positive side effect for the elites: they could use it to demobilize labor protest. The privatization policy favored in Croatia was one of first nationalizing all previously socially owned property and then selling it off to the highest bidder through tenders. It was a highly nontransparent process that excluded workers and eventually led to their disillusionment with the ruling HDZ and long-term frustrations with the transition process (Bicˇanic´ 1993; Franicˇevic´ 1999). In Serbia, some insider buyouts occurred during the 1990s and were popular among workers. Yet, on the whole, privatization was slow as the Miloševic´ regime attempted to promote a variety of ownership forms, from private to social ownership (Arandarenko 1997, 98–99). Even so, control of companies was frequently transferred to cronies of the regime, just as it was in Croatia. In the 2000s, privatization followed a course similar to the Croatian one: direct deals with individual buyers, often in a nontransparent way. With labor code reforms on the one hand and privatization on the other, any overt institutional connection to self-management has been severed.

The Relevance of Interaction and Timing This chapter has emphasized two main points: first, the legacy is important but it interacted with other forces, most notably political and economic factors and, second, critical junctures are important for subsequent transitional opportunities and constraints. The comparison between the three cases is summarized in table 5.3. Legacies are important, but they never operate in isolation. The same historical legacy, evidenced in the same formal institutions and workers with very similar expectations, was present in all three cases. Yet only Slovenia built what can be described as a “corporatist” economy. There, the legacy operated in the context of an internationally competitive economy, stable liberal democratic institutions, and isolation from war. This meant that unions could become partners of an elite that did not rely on nationalism to legitimate itself. Furthermore, because Slovenia was relatively well-off, the country could afford to extend cooperation to unions. The institution of workers’ councils was transformed following a German-style co-determination template. The institution of social ownership was transformed in a way that respected the expectations that workers had developed under the old regime, namely that social ownership actually means that they own the factories they work in. The union movement reformed quickly and has since enjoyed strong public support.

Yes

Yes

Yes

Slovenia

Croatia

Serbia

WORKERS' COUNCILS

Yes

Yes

Yes

SOCIAL OWNERSHIP

and sectors)

Yes (in richer regions

and sectors)

Yes (in richer regions

Yes

MICRO-CORPORATISM

LEGACY OF SELF-MANAGEMENT

Yes

territory)

Yes (on its

No

WAR

2000s)

crisis

mid and late

transformational

Yes (more in

very deep

Yes (until 2000)

early 2000s)

Very unfavorable,

late 1990s,

Yes (more in

1992)

peaks in

Yes (strike wave

LABOR PROTESTS

crisis

Yes (until 2000)

1992)

No (only until

NATIONALIST ELITES

transformational

Unfavorable, deep

crisis

transformational

after initial

Favorable,

ECONOMIC CRISIS

CRITICAL JUNCTURE OF EARLY 1990S

TABLE 5.3  Similarities and differences between Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia

2000s)

early

Yes (until

early)

No (reformed

early)

No (reformed

LEGACY UNIONS

protest

successful labor

threshold for

Miloševic´, high

labor tainted by

nationalist detour,

Crony privatization,

weakened.

progressively

relationship, labor

union-government

detour, conflictual

nationalist

social pacts. Crony privatization,

co-determination,

by German

relations inspired

industrial

Insider privatization,

OUTCOMES (LATE 2000S AND EARLY 2010S)

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Serbia is the polar opposite case. Here, the same formal legacy exists, with the same institutions of workers’ councils and social ownership. Yet the country’s initial transition to liberal democracy was a failure and the economic situation—following hyperinflation, war, and international isolation—truly disastrous. The institutions of the old regime were kept in place: both workers’ councils and social ownership continued to formally exist even as they slowly decayed. As this occurred, self-management institutions became tainted by their connection to Miloševic´. The working class in particular has been tainted due to the electoral support it gave to Miloševic´ (although other groups supported him just as much). Therefore, self-management has gone from asset to liability: anything that has to do with workers’ struggle is shunned by the public. From a setting that should be receptive to worker demands and initiatives, Serbia has become precisely the opposite. Croatia presents an in-between case, but with some original twists. The economic situation was not as bleak as it was in Serbia, though the transformational depression was deep. Politically, liberal democracy advanced further than in Serbia, but the atmosphere of war and the nationalist ideology of the ruling party constantly led to various authoritarian lapses. All institutions of the old regime, such as social ownership and workers’ councils, were seen as economically inefficient, legally nebulous, and possibly anti-Croatian. When the expectations of workers regarding involvement in company life and company ownership were not respected, long-term frustrations on the part of ordinary workers were created. Politicians assumed that the legacy would disappear if all traces of it were struck from the relevant legislation. Yet the legacy continued to exert its effects, most notably in worker protest driven by strong company-level attachments. Unlike in Slovenia, where the legacy manifested itself through new co-determination bodies, in Croatia and Serbia the legacy became visible through factory occupations and street protests. Both cooperation in Slovenia and confrontation in Croatia and Serbia are driven in part by the same ideological orientations and company attachments that are consequences of the old regime’s legacy. In the last decade or so of the transition, actors have tried to undo some of the choices of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet these choices have proven difficult to reverse: the key decisions have been made and have kept the three countries on distinct trajectories. It is important to emphasize that these were indeed choices. Miloševic´ and his party could have chosen not to pursue military adventures in other Yugoslav republics and could have avoided hyperinflation with sound monetary policy. Similarly, Tud-man and his party in Croatia could have chosen not to attack unions as national traitors and could have chosen not to erase all legal traces of self-management. In Slovenia, the centrist LDS did not have to take the unions on board the reform process and did not have to pursue the privatization policy they chose.

5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS     121

Paradoxically, the beneficial aspects of self-management could have been salvaged only if elites had acknowledged the need to leave socialism behind. At the same time, this process was a highly contentious and volatile one. In the countries of the former Yugoslavia it was occurring during the critical juncture of the early 1990s, the period when the country was breaking apart and war was beginning. During such moments labor’s agenda may not be the only agenda to mobilize. In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the alternative agenda was nationalism. Pursuing nationalist paths has sent Croatia, and especially Serbia, on long detours. All of these early choices constrain what is possible for future actors. With the economic pie now divided, there is little elites can do to address the perceived injustices of the privatization process. As the 1990s in Serbia and Croatia witnessed deep recessions, the space for politicians to extend cooperation to unions has proven limited: they could not afford to do so. For labor activists in Serbia and Croatia, any gains they could have won in the 2000s pale in comparison to what was at stake in the early 1990s, when privatization was only beginning. Slovenian labor had, in this respect, timed its wave of mobilization much better: strikes peaked just as the decision on privatization was being made. Although the gains of Slovenian labor were substantial, it is not safe to assume that they are self-perpetuating. The coordinated system of labor relations in Slovenia depends on the ability of unions to oppose the drift toward neoliberal solutions. There is no equilibrium that would perpetuate the system—it needs to be fought for politically. Therefore, while crucial watersheds such as the early 1990s are vital, their passing does not signal a self-sustaining equilibrium. This chapter has dealt with the Yugoslav legacy of socialist self-management, which presents something of an exception in the region of Eastern Europe. It has also aimed to show what the limits of this exceptionalism are. The initial starting point for the Yugoslav divergence from the Soviet Union, Tito’s conflict with Stalin, was a highly contingent outcome of international rivalry and may have been possible only in the Cold War era, when defecting regimes could play one superpower off against the other. The self-management legacy offered certain advantages compared to other Communist countries in the region, but for labor to truly profit from the transition to liberal democracy, the legacy needed to combine with other factors, both political and economic. Furthermore, these factors needed to come together during a very particular, and rather short, time window, that is, the early transitional years. In this respect, outcomes that are more favorable to labor, as exemplified by the Slovenian trajectory, appear to be highly contingent and difficult to imitate.

6 RUSSIA’S LABOR LEGACY Making Use of the Past Stephen Crowley

In May and June of 2009 in Pikalyovo, a factory town of twenty-two thousand in Leningrad Oblast, residents stormed the mayor’s office, and then blockaded a major highway, creating a four-hundred-kilometer traffic jam.1 One-third of the town’s residents had been out of work since the previous December, when the town’s three factories (formerly united in one enterprise, and all interrelated) had shut down. Many workers were owed back wages, and in a final insult the local utility shut off the town’s water supply over nonpayment. In all the resulting press coverage, the factories’ labor unions received little to no mention. Instead, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin personally intervened, arriving in the town and appearing on national television to dress down factory owner (and “oligarch” billionaire) Oleg Deripaska. The incident illustrates several challenges facing Russia’s workers: the tenuous fate of Russia’s many one-industry towns or monogorods built in the Soviet era; the dependence of workers on such enterprises not only for work but for their very survival; the near absence of institutional channels through which workers might express their grievances, which instead occasionally erupt in the form of “extreme measures”; the concern of the Russian government to maintain social stability above all. Twenty years after the Soviet collapse, these challenges all reflect the impact of the Soviet past. Even though it is hard to imagine a society that has undergone a more dramatic transformation over the last two decades, it is also hard

122

6. RUSSIA’S LABOR LEGACY    123

to imagine a society where the legacy of the past regime’s emphasis on labor could be more explicit; it is as evident as a faded but still visible mural to the glory of Soviet labor found in many a Russian factory today. The challenge of this chapter is to assess how much and in what ways that legacy continues to shape events in the face of this transformation, and whether current trends suggest this legacy is gradually fading away or will likely remain visible into the future. The argument here, in short, will be that the Soviet legacy is clearly visible in a number of areas, such as the dominant trade union federation, labor relations in the workplace, forms of labor protest, and the precarious existence of many Russian workplaces and their communities. In other areas, most notably labor law, significant changes have taken place. Yet in Russia even those changes were refracted through past legacies, which in combination severely limit the ability of workers to resolve their grievances. Although there are some limited signs of convergence toward practice elsewhere in the world, in many areas Soviet legacies have shown little sign of fading away; indeed, in recent years certain legacies have become even more pronounced. Significant departure from this pattern would almost certainly require some dramatic event such as widespread labor unrest. Even though the latter is unlikely, given the problematic nature of Russia’s labor relations, such an event cannot be ruled out. Legacies matter to labor to the extent they help or hinder workers’ ability to express and defend their interests. With this in mind I will make use of Erik Olin Wright’s (2000) three sources of workers’ bargaining power (see also the discussion in Silver 2003 and Grdešic´ 2008). The first is “associational power,” from collective workers’ organizations such as unions and political parties. There are also two types of “structural power,” stemming from workers’ place in the economic system: “marketplace bargaining power,” such as from tight labor markets, and “workplace bargaining power,” from the strategic location of certain groups of workers. Contrary to hopes when Russia embarked on the path from communism to capitalism and democracy, workers have not been able to compensate for their loss in structural power with an increase in associational power. In what follows I will first examine how the Soviet Union attempted initially to incorporate labor, before turning to Russia’s current trade unions, with emphasis on the dominant “legacy union,” the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR). I will then turn to labor in the Russian workplace, before examining labor protest and strike activity, since such conflicts can help reveal the cracks in Russia’s system of labor relations. I will conclude by examining the extent to which past legacies still explain the relations of Russia’s workers to the workplace and the state.

124    STEPHEN CROWLEY

Soviet Labor What exactly was the consequence of the Soviet system for labor? Here I will focus on Soviet industrialization, Soviet trade unions, the impact of ideology and labor law, and the sources of worker power. Although there was a growing industrial sector at the time of the Russian Revolution, the most dramatic change was the formation of a huge working class under Stalinist industrialization. This “revolution from above” (Fitzpatrick 2008) entailed, among other transformations, turning peasants (still about 80 percent of the population) into workers, and creating, in little more than a decade, industrial cities where none had been before. More than one thousand new cities were built in the Soviet Union, most in the 1930s, most of which were “born and raised as Soviet-style company towns, in the shadow of one industrial establishment or with several establishments dividing responsibility or competing for control.” These enterprises provided “housing and whatever meager services” there were (Taubman 1973, 54). These cities—built around industrial enterprises (sometimes called “city-forming enterprises”) and created to meet the needs of a planned economic system that no longer exists—remain in themselves a sizeable legacy from the Soviet past (S. Collier 2011). How was this new working class initially incorporated into the Soviet system? A major role was of course played by labor unions. Soviet trade unions were organized as industrial unions in the various branches of the economy. All workers in a given branch belonged to the same union, regardless of their occupation. Given the notion of nonantagonistic interests in a society supposedly free of class conflict, workers as well as top managers, and even ministry officials, belonged to the same union. Membership was nearly universal, making union density rates almost 100 percent, and also making unions the largest organizations in Communist societies, even larger than the Communist Party (Kubicek 2004). Soon after the Revolution unions were given “dual functions”: to encourage labor productivity and protect workers from managers. However, especially in the post-Stalin era, Soviet trade unions were concerned primarily not with production or the protection of workers, but with the distribution of social benefits within the enterprise (Crowley 1997; Ashwin 1999; Kubicek 2004). Beginning with Stalinist industrialization, a “shortage economy” developed whereby virtually all commodities, including labor, were in short supply (Kornai 1980). Given the labor shortage and workers’ ability to leave one job for another, trade unions, at the behest of management, distributed scarce goods in an effort to retain skilled workers (Crowley 1997). The enterprise became the central social unit of Soviet society, and the unions functioned essentially as social welfare agencies, distributing items such as housing, trips to the enterprise resort centers and children’s camps, and consumer

6. RUSSIA’S LABOR LEGACY    125

goods, as well as maintaining the enterprises’ day care centers, “houses of culture,” sports teams, musical groups, and the like. Unions also distributed the state social insurance fund (Ashwin and Clarke 2003, 30). This distribution increased workers’ dependence on the workplace, as well as the dependency of unions on both management and the state, which ultimately controlled the enterprise social fund and social insurance. In contrast to unions in advanced capitalist societies, workers, managers, and union officials alike viewed Soviet enterprise-level unions as arms of management, and unions and managers often provided a common front in bargaining with central planners. Unions rarely saw themselves as independent advocates of workers in adversarial bargaining with managers. Unions had very little say over such central issues as wages, which were centrally determined, and collective agreements contained little mention of the terms and conditions of employment beyond what was stated in Soviet labor law. Such bargaining that did take place occurred informally, on the shop floor between workers and line managers, and was based not on the unions’ collective voice but on workers’ individual power of exit in a labor-short economy. As a result, workers were more likely to approach their supervisor than their union representative with a workplace grievance. The grievances that workers addressed to unions typically concerned the goods and services that the unions distributed.2 The Soviet Union was the first state in history where the working class was placed in the primary ideological position. Although workers likely viewed their status as the leading class in society as an ideological fiction, they did appear to embrace such notions as the “labor collective,” whereby all units of the enterprise—workers, union leaders, and managers—worked toward a common goal (Ashwin 1999). Even Soviet coal miners, who practically alone among workers rose up and helped bring about an end to the Soviet system while demanding “markets,” embraced many of the ideals if not the reality of the Soviet system (Crowley 1997). The Soviet Union could claim with justification that under its labor laws “the legal rights and protection accorded to labor were the most advanced in the world” (Ashwin and Clarke 2003, 101). There were detailed provisions protecting workers from arbitrary dismissals, most notably without trade union approval, and conditions of work and pay were laid out in minute detail, yet these centrally set provisions took the place of anything like mutually negotiated collective agreements governing wages and work conditions (Ashwin and Clarke 2003, 101–2; Hendley 1996). There was no law governing collective labor disputes, let alone strikes, until 1991, since strikes were essentially forbidden, and few if any were reported from the late 1920s to 1989. One notable exception was Novocherkassk, a small town in southern Russia where in 1962 workers

126    STEPHEN CROWLEY

protested a price increase allegedly by storming the local party headquarters, and were put down with bloodshed. The incident became well known, and the name Novocherkassk remains synonymous with spontaneous labor uprising and state repression. Wright’s (2000) framework can help assess the power of workers within the Soviet political economy. Despite all the rhetoric, workers clearly lacked associational power in the Soviet system, but given the labor shortage, they did have marketplace power. Even with the de facto prohibition on strikes, they also had workplace power, since the shortage of labor and other necessary materials meant that labor’s cooperation was often necessary in key areas of production (Burawoy and Krotov 1992). Much of this changed dramatically with the end of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s “Postcommunist” Unions With the end of communism, Russia’s workers might have expected to increase their associational power. Yet the Soviet past weighs heavily on Russia’s trade unions. Russia’s trade unions are dominated by the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, the successor to the Communist-led union federation of the Soviet period. Alternative unions do exist—the two largest such unions, the All-Russian Confederation of Labor and the Confederation of Labor of Russia, have recently made efforts to merge, and there are others, such as Sotsprof—but they play a very limited role on the national level, though alternative unions are occasionally quite influential at the level of the enterprise, often leading strikes or aiding striking workers. One apparent strength of Russia’s unions is the relative size of their membership, which, despite a dramatic decline from the Soviet days of compulsory trade union membership, is still quite large. Those numbers have declined dramatically: the current membership the FNPR is estimated at twenty-four million, less than half of the 55−60 million members it had in the early 1990s, and it has dropped by an additional 3.5 million in the last four years. Yet Russia’s overall union density is estimated at 54 percent, quite high by international standards (Olimpieva 2011, 2). Indeed, Mikhail Shmakov (the union’s president since 1993) could justifiably claim that the FNPR remains “the biggest non-governmental association in the Russian Federation” (Shmakov 2001; Gordon and Klopov 2000, 218). Though the statistics on memberships in alternative unions are unreliable and likely inflated, alternative unions claim a combined membership of close to five million, an estimate unchanged since 2000 (Olimpieva 2011, 2; Ashwin and Clarke 2003).

6. RUSSIA’S LABOR LEGACY    127

Yet despite its sizeable membership, large structure, and a near monopoly on worker representation in Russia, the FNPR is a clear example of a “legacy union,” a union whose resources are the result of its privileged yet subordinate position in the previous (in this case Communist) regime (Caraway 2008). As the business newspaper Vedomosti put it, “Luckily for many businessmen, workers’ associations in Russia are relics of the Soviet era and are not unions in the European sense of the word” (Vedomosti 2010). Or as close observers of Russia’s unions recently stated, “FNPR unions are para-statal organizations intended to manage workers rather than represent them” (Greene and Robertson 2010, 75–76). How exactly has the FNPR been able to retain its privileged position despite the enormous changes that Russia has experienced in the last two decades? For one, while membership figures are large the membership ties are often weak. Much of the FNPR membership remains a rather passive holdover from the Soviet era of compulsory membership, rather than reflecting any active commitment on the part of members. For example, one small-scale survey of Russian enterprises found a number of respondents not knowing whether they were union members or not (Karelina 2000, 48). Other survey data back up the passive nature of FNPR membership and the low level of popular support for Russia’s unions generally. As Zaslavsky (2001, 215) summed up the evidence, “In polls ranking public organizations by the level of popular mistrust they generate, Russian trade unions have come to occupy the highest position.” Although surveys pointed to some increasing levels of trust through the 1990s (Gordon and Klopov 2000, 218), a VTsIOM survey from 2008 found that of those respondents with a trade union at the workplace, 64 percent “do not believe it helps the living standards of their staff,” and only 11 percent hold the opposite view, a figure relatively unchanged from three years earlier (Moscow News 2008). Besides its massive structure, with union entities at the national, regional, and branch levels as well as in most workplaces, the FNPR also inherited an enormous amount of trade union property from the Communist period, including revenue-generating concerns like vacation resorts and other real estate. Yet, as one observer put it, “being one of the greatest landlords in Russia, the FNPR is not interested in confrontation with the state. The government may decide to privatize its property at any moment” (Markov 1998). Although it not longer solely controls social insurance funds as it once did, it sits on state bodies managing health, social insurance, and pension funds, giving it some power but increasing its dependence on the state (Ashwin and Clarke 2003, 131). The Russian government has used this dependence successfully in the past to keep the FNPR in line: the Boris Yeltsin administration explicitly threatened to remove such resources from union control after the union sided with Yeltsin’s opponents who

128    STEPHEN CROWLEY

were defending the Russian “White House” during the dramatic confrontation of October 1993. Yet the dénouement of the “October events” (which included the shelling of Russia’s parliament) was a pivotal turning point for the FNPR. In the aftermath, when Shmakov was appointed union head, the FNPR began its shift toward an accommodationist policy toward the Yeltsin government, a policy that has increased significantly under Putin’s leadership.

Transformation in Labor Law That accommodationist policy became clear during the debates over Russia’s new labor code, adopted in 2001 shortly after Putin became president. The existing labor code, although modified, was enacted in the Leonid Brezhnev era, and the government and employers, along with the World Bank, the IMF, and multinational corporations, had long derided provisions they viewed as incompatible with a market economy, such as the trade unions’ right to prevent firings without union approval, a provision that had little meaning in the Soviet era given the labor shortage (Gimpelson and Lippoldt 2001; L. Cook 2011, 324; Sil 2013). This was one part of the Soviet legacy that was fairly easy to transform, but it was made so only with the assistance of another part of that legacy, namely the FNPR, in a way that further consolidated its near-monopoly position. Russia’s unions, both the FNPR and independents, mobilized considerable opposition to the government’s initial draft of the labor code, and the FNPR can claim to have obtained important concessions on some of the more draconian measures in the government’s proposal (Chen and Sil 2006). Yet the new code includes most of the government’s original goals. As Minister of Labor Alexander Pochinok characterized the labor code, perhaps boastfully, “the new code will really remove unions from the economic sphere, they really will lose very serious possibilities, which they had before,” since they “will no longer have economic levers” (Moskovkii Tsentr Karnegi 2001). Although Russian business leaders and the business press still complain about the need to make Russia’s labor laws more flexible, “enabling entrepreneurs to get rid of excess personnel in a more timely fashion,” they also acknowledge that “managers have learned to force unnecessary or unwanted employees to leave ‘of their own volition’ or ‘by agreement between the parties’,” essentially violating employment protection laws at will (Vedomosti 2010), a point on which the World Bank also agrees (World Bank 2006, 96–97). Further, a recent comparative study found that despite relatively low levels of unemployment (relative to the economic conditions), Russian employees express a greater fear of unemployment than those in most other countries examined (Gimpelson and Monusova 2010).

6. RUSSIA’S LABOR LEGACY    129

Yet the most significant provision of the new labor code, especially for Russia’s trade unions, is another stipulation that was pushed by the FNPR. Whereas all unions were opposed to the government’s initial draft, the FNPR and independent unions were soon bitterly divided over a compromise version reached by the government and the FNPR, the version eventually passed by the Duma. Although independent unions criticized that version as weak, as it allowed for longer working days and removed the union veto over dismissals, they were most concerned about a provision stating that management must negotiate only with a union that commands a majority of the workforce. Specifically, the provision states that in cases of enterprises with more than one union, the unions should form a single organ representing the trade unions in proportion to their membership. However, “if a single representative organ is not created within five calendar days after the start of collective negotiations, then representation of all employees will be carried out by the trade union organization representing more than half of the employees” (Rossiiskaya Gazeta 2001). The provision is clearly a threat to the smaller, alternative trade unions, a point noted in commentary on the draft labor code provided by the International Labour Organization, which argued that the majority trade union will have little incentive to include smaller rival unions in the negotiation process and will effectively have a veto over the matter. With the exception of a few industrial branches whose unions have left the federation, FNPR unions are the numerically dominant union at virtually every enterprise with union representation, which gives it a near monopoly over collective negotiations throughout the country. By some accounts, examples of FNPR union locals compromising with smaller alternative unions within an enterprise are quite rare: “the old and new unions have been openly at war with one another,” and “it is almost impossible to find cases in which they have acted jointly to defend the interests of workers” (Bizyukov 2000, 30; see also Greene and Robertson 2010). A decade after the law was passed, one Russian researcher found that “the most important problem of the alternative unions continues to be their institutional exclusion, which is largely a consequence of the existing labor code” (Olimpieva 2011, 4). In some settings (including some postcommunist countries) labor union fragmentation is a serious hindrance to worker representation, and union consolidation into a single federation would most likely strengthen that representation. And the FNPR’s rhetoric in certain national-level debates, such as over the minimum wage, is often strident. Yet on the whole, the FNPR, given its closeness to both the state and employers, has not proven itself capable of effectively defending workers’ rights. With the government’s evident hostility toward alternative unions, combined with its warm relations with the FNPR (which have increased since their

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compromise on the labor code), relations between the government and unions have come full circle from the early 1990s when alternative unions, such as the Independent Miners’ Union, were close allies of the Yeltsin administration, while the FNPR was seen as part of the Communist opposition. For the government’s part, the tendency, initiated under Yeltsin but heightened under Putin, to treat the FNPR as the official and single representative of Russia’s working population is reflective of Putin’s overall attempt to co-opt certain Soviet legacies and shape a civil society amenable to his wishes. In this way one central labor legacy—the legacy union—rather than acting as a constant or gradually diminishing presence, became relatively more prominent through strengthened reliance on the state. This alliance became formalized when, after several failed attempts to find a political party that might be a reliable patron, the FNPR not long ago formed a partnership with Putin’s Edinaya Rossia (United Russia) party, and the two groups have coordinated “protest” actions that appear more like political campaigns (Greene and Robertson 2010). The FNPR’s Shmakov is seen meeting regularly with Putin, and one of Shmakov’s strengths is that he can claim regular access to the corridors of power in the Kremlin. However, as Greene and Robertson (2010, 89–90) observe, this is also a weakness as well, since an attempt by the FNPR to become a truly representative and combative union would “force the organization to break its relationship with the state.” In a sign that the government also takes this relationship quite seriously, there was a recent bid, later aborted, to replace Shmakov with Andrei Isayev, one of the top leaders of Edinaya Rossia (as well as of the FNPR) (Sadovskaya 2011). This close relationship between the FNPR and the Russian state fits with how the concept of “social partnership” has been translated into the Russian context, in a way that further illustrates the impact of the Soviet legacy on current practices. The ILO, among other entities, has promoted the development of “social partnership” or tripartism for Russia (and other postcommunist countries), modeled roughly on the corporatist arrangements in Western Europe. There are, however, a number of difficulties with trying to graft such a social institution, developed in a very different historical setting, onto contemporary Russian society (see also Olimpieva 2011, 4; Robertson 2011, 98). For example, strong labor movements in Western Europe provided powerful incentives for both the state and capital to seek a social compromise, creating the basis for corporatist arrangements. In contrast, in Russia social partnership is not built on the strength of assertive unions, but rather echoes the Soviet past, where the official ideology claimed that society was composed of classes with nonantagonistic interests, and a single union united all, including managers and government officials, in its membership. Thus in Russia, rather than conflict leading to compromise, the notion of

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social partnership has been pushed to defuse conflict altogether, replacing it with a purported harmony of interests. As the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta put it on the completion of the new labor code, “The authors of the labor code regarded as its ‘pearl’ the fact that it moves labor relations from the sphere of conflict to the sphere of social partnership: ‘What is good for the enterprise is good for the employee and the other way around’ ” (Shkel' 2001). Shmakov of the FNPR concurs: as he put it in a speech in 2000, “the trade unions consider a strike to be a ‘failure’ of social partnership. Either social partnership or class struggle!” (quoted in Ashwin 2004, 35; emphasis in original). Tripartism in the Russian context has not involved unions and industrialists looking to the state as a neutral mediator in settling their conflicts and establishing a framework for collective bargaining; rather, especially in the 1990s, it provided a further avenue for unions to join with managers along sectoral lines in appealing to the state for more resources, or for industrialists and regional authorities joining together to do the same (Gordon and Klopov 2000; Bizyukov 2000). In many cases employers haven’t even bothered to form an organization, leaving branch unions and industrial ministries to complete meaningless agreements, or to lobby on their behalf (Komarovsky and Sadovaya 1997; Olimpieva 2011, 4). To underscore the meaningless of this exercise, in 2002 the first vice premier, Mikhail Kasyanov, stated bluntly that “the government has not discussed this problem [of low wages] for nine years. The state has, in fact, lost hold of the instruments to influence the level of earnings in the nonstate sector,” adding that “such a mechanism as social partnership was not used at all” (Itar-Tass 2002).

Unions in the Russian Workplace Yet while “social partnership” in Russia might appear to be little more than empty rhetoric, at the level of the enterprise many FNPR unions continue to act in traditional ways, as if they are still allied with management in a common mission to provide for the “labor collective.” One recent study of Russian workplaces finds that FNPR unions tend to continue to operate under a “distributive model,” whereby they are “viewed by employers as a subdivision of the human resources department, the job of which is to motivate and support worker morale, or to help in distributing social benefits. As a result, most unions are involved in distributing resources, as in Soviet times” (Olimpieva 2011, 5; see also Kagarlitsky 2008; Ashwin 1999). Yet this distributive model has shifted since the Soviet period, since “there have been changes in the sources, size, and content of the goods that are distributed and the unions are constantly seeking new types of services and support for their members (for example, credit unions, special insurance

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systems, etc.). As a result, there is great diversity in the distributive models, ranging from ‘mutual help’ to ‘business services’ ” (Olimpieva 2011, 5; Olimpieva 2010). However, it is not only the legacy of providing services to members that prevents unions from taking a more assertive stance with management; the legacy of being allied with management continues to shape union behavior. Survey data from the recent past confirmed that, at the factory level, managers in many cases remained members of the trade union, as they were in the Communist era (Chetvernina 1998; Shalaev 2000; Ashwin and Clarke 2003). Nor has the leadership of FNPR necessarily opposed this practice: according to a manual for trade union activists, “In the difficult transition period to a civilized market economy . . . it is very important for labor collectives to keep a thoughtful, attentive director both in his position, and in the trade union” (Shalaev 2000, 20–21). Likewise, surveys suggested that workers believe their immediate supervisors better defend their interest rather than do trade unions (Chetvernina 1998). A more recent study found that alternative unions differ from FNPR unions in part because managers don’t belong to those unions (Kozina 2009). Moreover, union leaders tend to see their interests as being the same as those of managers, rather than in conflict (Bizyukov 2000; Karelina 2000; Kozina 2000). As with the FNPR on the national level, traditional unions at the firm seek above all to preserve their organizational structure and do so through dialogue with managers rather than through contentious collective action; they often aim to prevent such actions as strikes that might challenge their authority (Gordon and Klopov 2000, 216). In a study of labor conflict in Russia, Ashwin concluded that “the real power base of many unions within the enterprise continues to be their relationship with management rather than their organizational strength” and that such conflicts revealed “considerable continuity with Soviet practice” (Ashwin 2004, 33, 23). This continuity is only partially explained by the inability or unwillingness of legacy unions to change. Although direct evidence is limited, it certainly appears that the Soviet notion of the “labor collective” and enterprise paternalism continues to shape the expectations of union members themselves. As Olimpieva (2011, 3, 5) notes, “As in Soviet times, people do not expect the union to defend their rights, but to provide them additional benefits,” and even alternative unions “engage in social work in response to the traditional expectations of workers.” We should note that not all workplace unions affiliated with FNPR fall easily into the “traditional union” category. In 2010 FNPR claimed some 191,000 “primary organizations,” and despite its hierarchical structure, the federation is hardly a monolith. Some FNPR local affiliates dissented from the federation’s national-level policies and political alliances, for example, and the tendency of a

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workplace union to tend toward a more traditional or alternative union orientation often depended on such factors as the stance of employers and the sector and profitability of a given workplace. Nevertheless, most FNPR unions followed the more traditional model. Alternative unions remain quite distinct from traditional unions in form and practice, and this divergence between traditional and alternative unions highlights the significance of historical legacy for Russia’s unions. As mentioned, alternative unions, while small in size, have had an impact beyond their numbers. Although the 2001 labor code has constrained alternative unions, it has not eliminated them. In contrast to the “distributive model” more typical of FNPR workplace unions, alternative unions are closer to a social movement or “protest model” of unionism, and are directly connected with much of the recent strike and protest activity described below (Olimpieva 2010, 2011). Alternative unions generally attract younger and more able-bodied workers, including those found in multinational corporations (Kozina 2009). Union staff members are often unpaid activists, and, as distinct from most FNPR unions, some alternative unions avoid any formal contact with the enterprise, to avoid potential vulnerability to managerial pressure. Yet the informal nature of many alternative union structures, and the reliance of some on charismatic leaders, has hindered their ability to expand their influence. Although alternative unions have proven effective in certain enterprises in leading strikes and other protests, they have not been able to shape policy on the national level on such issues as, for example, the minimum wage. Even though some see the activity and influence of alternative unions growing in recent years (Olimpieva 2011), their membership numbers do not appear to have grown, and other than the auto industry (most notably Russian Ford and AvtoVAZ in Tol'iatti), alternative unions have not spread far beyond the sectors—primarily coal mining and transport—in which they first sprang up at the end of the Soviet period. Although there have been increasing attempts to merge the main alternative union confederations, the leadership of Sotsprof appears to have fallen under the sway of United Russia, the “party of power” formed under Putin’s leadership. In sum, the growth and institutional development of alternative unions has been limited, in no small part because of the labor code.

Strikes and Labor Protests Russia’s alternative unions first appeared with a wave of strikes at the end of the Soviet period. For alternative unions to grow substantially, and for Russia’s labor relations to change in essence from its current form, some form of shock leading to another wave of strikes and protests would likely be needed. Although the

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latter is certainly possible, Russian workers are hampered in taking such actions not only by the legacy of the FNPR but by a number of consequences of the old Soviet economy and society. For example, the expectation of Russian workers that their traditional unions carry out “social work” can be explained in part by the persistence of Soviet-era mentalities. But such dependence on the workplace, including legacy unions, has an important structural component as well. The Institute of Regional Policy, a Russian think tank, released a study in 2008 finding that of the many cities created during Stalinist industrialization, 460 were dependent on a single industry and hence were a “mono-city” (or monogorod). According to the study, the monogorods represented 40 percent of all cities, with 25 percent of Russia’s population, and produced 40 percent of Russia’s GDP. The largest monogorod is Tol'iatti, where one out of every seven residents, in a city of seven hundred thousand, is directly employed at a car factory producing the unprofitable Russian Lada, with many other residents employed in work dependent on the plant (Hodouchi 2009; Clover 2009). Although there is substantial variation in such a large number of cases, many of these enterprises, and their cities, were created to meet the needs of an economy that no longer exists. Many have been starved of investment even for simple upkeep, let alone renovation to meet the needs of new markets, even during the last decade of a relatively thriving economy. There are several reasons for the low level of investment in Russia’s workplaces, but one has been simply low wages, which provided little incentive for increased productivity. The fate of Russia’s monogorods is connected to another Soviet legacy and its continuing impact on the labor market. From the early 1930s until the end of the Soviet period, Russians had no experience at all with unemployment (not to mention bankruptcies). Russian workers faced a dramatic shock in the rapid conversion of the labor market from one of labor shortage to labor surplus. Yet despite an almost unprecedented economic decline, this labor surplus did not result in massive unemployment but instead in a dramatic decline in wages (Milanovic 1998, 29). It was not until 2007 that average wages in Russia officially exceeded those of 1991, the last year of the Soviet Union (Rossiiskaya Federatsiya 2010). The decline in wages rather than a rise of massive unemployment was at least partly due to state actions—deliberate if implicit—that have discouraged labor shedding in an effort to promote “stability.” Such actions have continued to the present. As one source puts it, “government policy so far has focused on avoiding lay-offs, with companies encouraged to reduce hours and salaries, rather than make redundancies” (Bentley 2009). As the business newspaper Vedomosti (2010) complained in an editorial, “The relationship that has developed between the government and entrepreneurs encourages the preservation of excess employment under the guise of ‘social responsibility’ on the part of employers.

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Employment problems are solved with a stroke of the Prime Minster’s pen or a phone call from a governor. This enables the state to maintain a surplus labor force and support social stability at the expense of business.” Twenty years after the Soviet collapse, remnants of the Soviet system of enterprise paternalism remain, and the Russian government (under Yeltsin as well as Putin) has believed that destroying this social fabric could well lead to social unrest. Such a concern would explain why so much of the “rents” from the oil and gas sector have been directed toward propping up the machine-building and other less profitable industries (Gaddy and Ickes 2011). Yet maintaining relatively high employment levels has led to other problems, such as a crisis in wage arrears: by late 1998 approximately two-thirds of Russian workers reported overdue wages, with those affected reporting close to five months’ pay in arrears on average (Earle and Peter 2000). And despite the effort to promote stability by avoiding mass unemployment, the result was a wave of strikes. Russia experienced a very significant if peculiar strike wave from 1996 through 1999 (Robertson 2011). The strike wave preceded, and may have directly prompted, Putin’s push for a new labor code soon after becoming president in 2000. Still, as Greene and Robertson (2010, 78) point out, “from an international perspective, the strikes of the Yeltsin era were quite unusual,” in part because most were prompted not by traditional worker grievances, but by wage arrears. Greene and Robertson (2010, 78) maintain that “more than 95 percent of strikes were about unpaid wages, legally owed by employers” (see also Desai and Idson 2000). Moreover, Robertson (2011) demonstrates convincingly that a large proportion of these strikes were actually coordinated by regional political elites (with the blessing of managers) trying to gain leverage in bargaining or political struggles with Moscow. This phenomenon provides further evidence, at least for the 1996–99 strike wave, that the dominant trade unions remained allied with managers as well as regional elites.3 Nevertheless, a significant number of the protest actions that occurred had a spontaneous character, and displayed a tremendous amount of anger and frustration (Katsva 1999; Kozina 2000). Examples include the “rail wars” of 1998, when coal miners blockaded the Trans-Siberian and other major railways; the hostage-taking of managers; the seizure of factories by work collectives contesting privatization; the hunger strikes and even the self-immolation of those not getting paid. Interior Ministry reports are said to record at least thirty cases of self-immolation or suicide by protesting workers, and more than 840 separate hunger strikes between 1997 and 1998 (Greene and Robertson 2010, 79). There are a number of reasons that workers employ such dramatic and desperate measures. One is the ineffectiveness of trade unions in addressing the grievances of their members (Zhelenin 2009). Another is the lack of “workplace

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bargaining power” (Wright 2000) of many Russian workers, since there is little leverage to be gained through shutting down production in, for example, an already bankrupt coal mine. But a third and crucial factor concerns the sizeable legal restrictions placed on strike activity. This is one area of Russian labor relations that is not the direct result of the Soviet past. In fact, before the first miners’ strikes in 1989, there was not even a strike law on the books, since strikes were simply not supposed to occur in the Soviet Union. The law on strikes (or more specifically, the Law on Collective Labor Disputes) is therefore newer, first written in 1991, and extensively revised in 1995. The law itself is arcane, and lays out extremely detailed procedures that must be followed before a strike can be considered legal (Crowley 2000, 163−64; Ashwin and Clarke 2003). According to Kozina (2009, 15), experts calculate that it would take no less than forty-two days to carry out all the required preliminary prestrike procedures. Even FNPR president Shmakov is concerned by the restrictions, stating “in world practice, Russia has the longest list of activities where strikes are banned. It is practically impossible to stage a legal strike” (Itar-Tass 2008). The upshot is that spontaneous strikes are almost always illegal, as are political strikes, or strikes about any issue that does not appear in the labor contract. This is a significant problem, since most overt conflicts have been localized, spontaneous, “wildcat” actions, often deemed illegal, and participating workers can simply be dismissed for absenteeism. Since FNPR unions are often opposed to such strike activity (Kozina 2009), those accused of illegal strikes can find it difficult to obtain legal representation. The law on strikes has been so restrictive that, in the run-up to recent elections, government officials considered expanding the scope of legal strikes, but at the same time increasing penalties for engaging in strikes with “non-economic or political demands.” Such discussion reflects the government’s concerns that workers have few legal and effective channels through which to express grievances, and also that, in the absence of such channels, workers’ spontaneous actions can quickly become politicized.4 By the time Putin became president, the strike wave of 1996–99 had already started abating, helped by a growing economy and a significant rise in wages, both in turn spurred by a boom in world oil (and other commodity) prices. Some have argued that another strike wave began in 2006, and that recent strike activity in Russia reflects less the legacy of the Soviet past, and more a “normalization” or convergence toward the practice of other countries (Greene and Robertson 2010, 76). Greene and Robertson argue that in contrast to past strikes in Russia, which were “counter-cyclical,” that is defensive responses to economic decline, the recent wave has been “pro-cyclical,” more typical they argue of both OECD and developing countries, and that “the majority of new strikes involve demands

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for improvements in wages and work conditions” (Greene and Robertson 2010, 74–75). The newspaper Trud (once the official union paper in the Soviet period, now largely reflecting the government view on social issues) in reviewing “20 years of strikes in Russia,” argued that in contrast to the often desperate and illegal strikes in the past, by 2007 “acts of protest in Russia began to acquire a civilized character” (Zainiev 2009). From a different perspective, Kozina (2009) finds that the new strike wave, differing from the “defensive” strikes of the past often aimed at government officials, has an “offensive” character, reflecting “class consciousness” and a “labor-capital” struggle often over the distribution of profits within the enterprise. Taken together, such a shift would mean a significant waning of the Soviet legacy, in that workers had shaken off dependence on the Russian workplace, have become more assertive—asking for more than legally owed back wages—and had adopted a class conflict mentality rather than one based on the notion of a united “labor collective” of the past. If the impact of the Soviet legacy is declining and such convergence in strike activity is taking place, we would expect to see an increase in strikes during periods of economic growth, and conversely a decline in strike activity during an economic downturn. We should also see fewer politically motivated “director’s strikes,” and more strikes involving demands for improvements in wages and working conditions, with fewer actions employing desperate measures such as hunger strikes and defensive demands as the payment of wage arrears. Some changes in strike activity have indeed taken place. There is much less evidence of politically managed strikes connected to struggles between Moscow and regional elites over the federal budget. This is clearly due in large part to Putin’s success in curtailing the power of regional officials through the creation of the “vertical of power.” It is also a result of the change of the labor code—one of Putin’s first initiatives as president—aimed at ending such strikes by subordinating the FNPR to the Kremlin (Robertson 2011, 150). Elsewhere the evidence of a trend toward more pro-cyclical and less defensive strike activity appears ambiguous. In a systematic analysis, Bizyukov (2011a; 2011b) created a database of media reports of labor protests from 2008 to 2011. Consistent with the argument by Robertson (2011) about the earlier strike wave, he finds evidence of many more strikes than captured in official statistics (see also Kozina [2009]). Interestingly, he finds that strike activity increased rather than decreased with the recent global economic downturn: the number of labor protests and strikes in Bizyukov’s database increased significantly from 2008 to 2009, when Russia’s GDP shrank by 8 percent and many enterprises cut pay and work schedules. Protests declined in 2010, when the economy recovered, and protest actions rose again in 2011. In short, there appears to be little consistent evidence of pro- (or counter) cyclical strike activity in recent years.

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In making the case for pro-cyclical strike activity, Greene and Robertson point to strikes in some foreign-owned enterprises, most prominently Russian Ford, as well as strikes in “some of the crown jewels in Russian industry” (Greene and Robertson 2010, 83). They argue that any continued actions such as hunger strikes over wage arrears “tend to be localized phenomena related to failing enterprises (or fraudulent management) rather than a systemic feature of the economic system” (2010, 88). However, despite significant economic growth over the past decade, failing enterprises (and perhaps fraudulent management) do indeed appear to be a systemic feature of Russia’s economy, and one that reveals just how deep the Soviet legacy remains. Yet according to Bizyukov’s data, as in the past, few Russian labor actions are considered legal: from 2008 to 2010, “9 out of 10 protest actions took place in forms not allowed by labor legislation,” while “extreme forms of protest,” such as hunger strikes, were twice as frequent as legal protests (Bizyukov 2011b, 8). Russia’s restrictive strike law explains which actions are considered legal. Yet the reluctance to engage in classic work stoppages also reflects the weak position of Russian labor. Most Russian workers have such limited power within the workplace that they prefer to march to the city square rather than protest within the enterprise. Likewise, if wage arrears are essentially a form of hidden unemployment, then a refusal to work is hardly the solution. Indeed, in the four years covered by the Bizyukov’s database, wage arrears remain a major cause of protest. However, the importance of wage arrears has declined over time, and while protests over low wages have increased, protests motivated by the reorganization or closure of enterprises have increased most significantly, from 13 percent of protests in 2008 to 35 percent in 2011. Of the three main examples of conflicts in domestic enterprises examined by Greene and Robertson, all were prompted initially be wage arrears or wage cuts, and in only one case—a strike in the oil industry—were the affected enterprises not in danger of failing. One of the cases took place in the monogorod in Tol'iatti, where the AvtoVAZ car plant employs one hundred thousand workers. Although a strike at a plant of this size is by itself dramatic, workers struck in 2007 over pay cuts, and by 2009 the company was teetering on bankruptcy, and the plant shut down for the month of August, and reopened with only one of two shifts, with workers on half pay. There was discussion of laying off as many as twenty-six thousand workers, or over one-quarter of the workforce (Hodouchi 2009; Clover 2009).5 Protests took place in other monogorods, notably in Pikalyovo in May and June of 2009, an event that was widely discussed in the Russian press. In the wake of the uprising in Pikalyovo, there was renewed talk of the potential for “social explosion” in Russia. The sociologist (and former deputy social protection minister) Yevgenii Gontmakher caused a sensation when he published an article about the potential for social unrest in monogorods provocatively titled

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“Novocherkassk, 2009!” (Gontmakher 2008). The article sketched out a hypothetical scenario where a labor protest in a single monogorod quickly spread, leading to unrest and violence all the way to Moscow. Gontmakher (and the newspaper Vedomosti that published the article) were criticized by the government for “inciting extremism” (von Twickel 2008). Still, while it is possible that such labor protests could present a significant challenge to Putin’s attempts to manage society, Russian workers face daunting obstacles to making themselves heard. Returning to Wright’s (2000) sources of workers’ power, all three appear problematic for Russian workers at present. The FNPR, given the Soviet legacy and its collaboration with Putin’s government, formally represents the overwhelming majority of Russia’s workers, leaving them with a very limited sort of associational power. Russia’s workers also lack marketplace bargaining power—there is simply too much overstaffing (and hidden unemployment), reflected in the fear of losing one’s job (Gimpelson and Monusova 2010). Moreover, except in certain sectors (such as transportation and raw materials extraction) there is little workplace bargaining power, since there are too many workplaces, including many of Russia’s monogorods, that are essentially bankrupt. For Russia’s labor protests to be truly transformative, they would not only have to unite disparate and often thinly organized local protests but would probably need to form some kind of cross-class coalition, most likely with political liberals protesting Russia’s limited democracy, uniting economic and political demands. As of yet, there is little sign of such a coalition in Russia. Nevertheless, whether viewed from the perspective of labor or management and the state—put differently, whether one prefers change or stability—Russia’s system of labor relations appears dysfunctional. The Russian state, in order to promote stability, has discouraged labor shedding and relied on the tradition of workplace dependence, but at the cost of wage arrears and festering monogorods. The restrictions on strikes and the subordination of the FNPR has limited legal strikes, but has led to simmering discontent, providing few if any institutional channels to contain protest were it to spread beyond the local level. Thus Russia’s labor relations leave workers with very limited means to protest or resolve conflict, but in doing so it leaves the Russian state with deep concerns about social stability. Although widespread labor unrest would appear unlikely for the present, a significant change in economic conditions, such as a steep drop in the price of oil, could alter that calculation significantly.

Russia’s Labor Legacies Let us summarize the impact of past legacies on Russian labor. The Soviet legacy is most visible in the continued dominance of the FNPR, which closely collaborates

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with the Russian state to promote “social partnership” rather than labor conflict. The Soviet legacy is also clearly visible in workplace relations, where FNPR unions often remain allied with management, in many cases siding against their own membership in times of conflict. Alternative unions are quite different, but though their influence extends beyond their numbers, those numbers remain relatively small, and their impact has not noticeably grown since they first arose two decades ago around the time of the Soviet collapse. The Russian state has managed to change labor laws—especially the law on strikes and the labor code—in substantial fashion. Yet Soviet legacies were important here as well, in interesting ways. The Yeltsin administration managed to enact a highly restrictive law on strikes, and did so fairly easily, largely because no previous law on strikes existed until the very end of the Soviet period. Indeed, regarding strikes, there was no Soviet legacy, legal or otherwise, whereby the past might be reflected in the present. The Russian labor code was also uprooted and rewritten, though here one legacy—the restrictive Soviet-era labor code—was changed with the support of another legacy, namely the FNPR, which in return for its help was able to further lock-in its near monopoly on labor representation. Hence the Russian case provides evidence for both the “punctuated equilibrium” and the “gradual transformation” models of institutional change (Streeck and Thelen 2005b; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). As for the former, despite the dramatic economic and political changes in the two decades since the Soviet Union, Soviet legacies continue to shape Russian labor politics in fundamental ways. Outside of labor law, the most dramatic changes to Russia’s labor relations took place in the tumultuous last years of the Soviet Union, when strikes first shook the Soviet Union and the first alternative unions formed. Yet, along with substantial continuity in industrial relations, Russia’s legacies have also been gradually transformed, in unexpected ways. Most important, Russia’s legacy union, the FNPR, has become more rather than less consolidated as a state-backed union federation with a near-monopoly on representation. This stands in contrast to the early years of the Yeltsin administration, when the FNPR was held at arm’s length as an obstacle to change, while alternative unions were embraced as political allies. Over time that relationship was reversed, and then deepened under Putin, who has adopted a number of Soviet-era legacies in an attempt to consolidate his rule. Invoking legacies to explain change may seem counterintuitive, especially if one conceives of legacies as the weight of the past, acting as a constant force (or one declining over time). But legacies can also be viewed as institutional and ideational raw material, found in the tool kit of powerful actors, that can be appropriated, refashioned, and combined with new innovations to shape outcomes (Swidler 1986; Steinmo 2010).

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Putin’s consolidation of power has been based on the promise of stability. In an attempt to ensure social stability, unemployment has remained relatively low, but at the cost of low wages and, particularly at certain times, of wage arrears. Low wages and such hidden employment have helped delay investment or restructuring in Russia’s numerous monogords or one-industry towns, many of which have questionable economic futures. Despite the accumulating grievances, few legal strikes take place, but at the cost of driving labor protest outside of legal channels, often in the form of extreme measures. Thus the Russian state has taken a number of steps—allying with the dominant union to create a passive “social partnership,” placing considerable legal restrictions on labor protest and strikes and on alternative unions—in an attempt to mollify and prevent labor conflict. These actions looks similar in many ways to the state form of incorporation the Colliers found in Latin America in the last century, where interestingly, such incorporation often led to the unintended consequence of spurring the democratization of an authoritarian society (Collier and Collier 1991). Indeed, the very steps taken to prevent widespread labor unrest run the risk of allowing accumulated grievances to boil over. Even though the latter is unlikely, such an event cannot be ruled out given the problematic nature of Russia’s labor relations.

7 STATE-CORPORATIST LEGACIES AND DIVERGENT PATHS Argentina and Mexico Graciela Bensusán and Maria Lorena Cook

The authoritarian legacies that shape labor today in Argentina and Mexico originated in an earlier labor-incorporation period, rather than in the authoritarian regimes that immediately preceded the most recent democratization.1 In this earlier period, relatively strong states incorporated labor through corporatist mechanisms of structuring, subsidy, and control (Collier and Collier 1991, 51). In Argentina, labor incorporation was initiated under a military regime and later expanded by a democratically elected, populist leader from that regime, Juan Domingo Perón (James 1988).2 In Mexico, where a single ruling party dominated politics for over seventy years, the populist government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) forged the party-labor alliance that endures today. In this chapter, we will refer to state-corporatist legacies rather than authoritarian legacies to signal that in these countries the relevant labor legacies originated in this earlier period. State-corporatist legacies persisted throughout the twentieth century in Argentina and Mexico, and remain important influences today. In both countries unions became relatively powerful political and social actors, buoyed in part by laws, institutions, and political alignments that sustained union monopolies with privileged access to organizational and financial resources. In both countries the state played a key role in the labor regimes. This state role helps to explain why subsequent military and democratic regimes in Argentina as well as civilian authoritarian governments in Mexico largely preserved the legal and institutional frameworks from the initial incorporation period. Even as Mexico and Argentina experienced political opening and market economic reforms in the last decades 142

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of the twentieth century, core features of labor institutions, labor law, labor-party relations, and union organization remained fundamentally intact. Yet the trajectories of organized labor in each country differed. This difference became especially clear in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when unions in Argentina managed to recover and reassert their role as important political and social actors as the government moved toward the left in the wake of a crisis of neoliberal policies. In contrast, in Mexico most unions continued to suffer a decline despite political opening, leaving workers to face a representation gap in which unions failed to meet workers’ needs and emergent alternatives were unable to expand. What accounts for these divergent trajectories? Differences in political and economic contexts help in part to explain this divergence, but contextual factors are insufficient for understanding how unions are positioned to take advantage of shifts in environments. We argue instead that differences in labor legacies, especially in labor laws and institutions, help explain why unions in each country followed such divergent paths in the 2000s. Unions in Argentina were able to use resources derived from legal, institutional, and political legacies to regain influence and power, while Mexican unions remained hamstrung by these legacies. In both cases, however, state-corporatist legacies also proscribed the possibilities of a union renewal that would include greater levels of internal democratization and expand representation to more workers. In the following sections we compare selected features of Argentina’s and Mexico’s state-corporatist legacies. We focus on key institutional and labor law differences and analyze how these differences shape the distribution of power among key actors. We then look at how unions draw on resources derived from legacies to respond to political and economic transition contexts. Finally, we assess the relative ability of unions in each country to represent the interests of their members and consider the prospects for union renewal in both Argentina and Mexico, given the constraints and opportunities that these legacies present.

State-Corporatist Legacies: Unions, Labor Law, and Party Alliances Labor regimes in Argentina and Mexico share legacies of state corporatism, including mechanisms of state control over labor, important organizational and financial subsidies for unions, and the structuring of labor organizations to limit competition. In both countries corporatist institutional arrangements were first forged when labor movements were incorporated into political parties formed during the years of state-led development and import-substitution

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industrialization (ISI), during the 1940s and 1950s in Argentina and the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico (Collier and Collier 1991). Corporatist institutional foundations produced lasting legacies in the form of dominant unions, favorable labor laws and institutions, and strong labor-party alliances, despite important changes in the countries’ development strategies, political regimes, and social structures. This section briefly describes these legacies and notes the similar role that state-corporatist features played in each country. In Mexico one of the legacies of the labor incorporation period in the 1930s is the alliance forged between key labor confederations and the ruling party. The Mexican labor regime emerged in the 1920s and 1930s in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. During a brief period labor itself contained worker mobilization in the form of the powerful Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, which functioned as part of President Plutarco Elías Calles’s government (1924–28) and worked with employers to prevent independent unions from challenging the regime. Because of its dependence on the state, the power of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana faded once it broke with Calles in 1928. Later, the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM) aligned with the government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), who brought labor into the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana alongside peasant, middle class, and military sectors. Although initially the government sought to channel labor support on behalf of the revolutionary state, by the 1940s the government was able to demobilize labor under the pretext of wartime national unity, which coincided with labor’s incorporation in 1946 into the new party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Although not the only labor organization allied with the PRI, the CTM played an important role in subsequent decades as one of the largest and most influential organizations in the labor sector of the PRI, the ruling party (Bensusán and Cook 2003). The PRI governed as a relatively stable authoritarian regime for over seventy years. The unions’ alliance with the PRI was based on an exchange in which unions delivered votes for PRI candidates in return for privileged state access and economic and political resources. Union leaders obtained seats in Congress and in top positions of the party at national, state, and local levels, and progovernment unions gained representation in government agencies, such as the Mexican Social Security Institute and the National Minimum Wage Commission, and were given control over others, such as the National Worker Housing Institute and the Workers’ Bank (Burgess 2004, 66–67). Labor organizations derived important economic resources and benefits from these institutions, which union leaders could then distribute to their membership (M. Cook 2007, 153). The main features of Mexico’s labor law were detailed in Article 123 of the 1917 Constitution, whose treatment of labor rights was ahead of its time and served as a model to other countries. The full labor code, however, was not fleshed out

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until 1931 (Bensusán 2000). The 1931 Federal Labor Law set the terms of union organization, representation, and bargaining in ways that permitted a significant degree of state oversight and intervention. Mexican labor laws granted the state a role in overseeing the formation and actions of trade unions and in deciding labor-management and intraunion conflicts, as well as discretionary authority to interpret constitutional labor protections through government control of tripartite labor boards and tribunals (Bensusán 2000). Despite the generally protective character of labor legislation, this strong state role in labor relations made it harder for independent unions to form. State oversight also eventually allowed governments to circumvent and even violate labor protections established by law in order to adapt to the changing demands of a more market-oriented economy in the 1980s and 1990s (M. Cook 2007, 152). The barrier to independent unions enhanced the state’s ability to control labor, but it also benefited legacy unions that were relatively protected from competition. In addition, progovernment unions in Mexico gained substantial influence over important aspects of collective worker rights, such as union registration, strikes, and collective bargaining, through their presence on federal- and state-level conciliation and arbitration boards. Political and economic developments in the period from the 1980s through the 2000s would limit union resources and diminish their power. Still, these institutional features proved important enough to organized labor and to the state and employers that even when an opposition party won the presidency for the first time in 2000, there was no significant dismantling of the corporatist arrangements between unions and the state. In Argentina, organized labor’s political-party ties also contributed to its influence and political strength. Perón’s political ascent depended heavily on the support of organized labor, and he rewarded labor with favorable legislation and political posts. In alliance with the Labor Party, and later the Peronist and Justicialist parties, union leaders were able to participate in Congress, in government, and as candidates in local and national elections. Yet in contrast to Mexico, where the labor-based party remained in power until 2000 and party and state were conjoined, in Argentina the Peronists held power only intermittently after labor’s initial incorporation in the 1940s and 1950s. In the post-Peronist era the Peronist party was often banned, and the existence of anti-Peronist governments and conservative military dictatorship disrupted labor’s relationship with the state (Collier and Collier 1991, 487). In part because of the Peronist party’s long absence from power, the unions’ strength often overshadowed that of the party (McGuire 1997). These developments meant that unions in Argentina enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy from the state and the party compared to Mexico.3 With redemocratization in the 1980s, union influence in the party began to decline,

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and by the 1990s this diminished influence made it easier for the Peronist party to adopt market reforms (Levitsky 2003). Still, unions remained largely Peronist. That allegiance would again lead to higher levels of influence in government policies after the 2001–02 economic crisis (M. Cook 2007, 61–62).4 As in Mexico, Argentine labor law also gave the state a strong role in overseeing unions. The Law of Professional Associations from the Peronist era established requirements for union registration and distinguished between registration and state recognition of unions.5 The latter, more favorable designation gave unions the legal status (personería gremial) to negotiate contracts, launch strikes, and collect dues (Ranis 1995). The law also established one union per area of economic activity (James 1988, 10; M. Cook 2007, 60). This labor regime featured a strong degree of centralization, reflected in a single large labor confederation, the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT). The CGT, first formed in 1930, remains the dominant labor organization today despite a history punctuated by splits and reunification (McGuire 1997; Etchemendy and Collier 2007). The law also established subsidies to unions in the areas of collective bargaining and financing. The 1953 law on collective bargaining established industry-wide contracts, mandated employers to bargain with the recognized union, and extended bargaining terms to all workers in the industry regardless of union membership (James 1988, 10). Unions were subsequently given control of vast social insurance funds, enabling them to set up health and other services for their members from worker and employer contributions. Managing these services provided unions with an important source of revenue, rivaling income from dues (McGuire 1997, 225). Despite the state’s central role, this package of legislation enabled the Argentine labor movement to become one of the most powerful in Latin America, and helped labor to sustain that strength even when antilabor regimes came to power (M. Cook 2007, 61).

Labor Law Legacies: Differences in Institutional Design Both their initial labor incorporation and evolution during subsequent decades marked Argentina and Mexico as state-corporatist regimes. Yet the institutional frameworks that structure the labor regimes in Argentina and Mexico reveal important differences (see table 1). In particular, labor law and labor institutions in each country distribute power among key actors in different ways (Bensusán 2006). This section considers differences in legal and institutional design in Argentina and Mexico as these shape key aspects of collective representation:

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(1) union formation and determination of the bargaining agent, (2) union affiliation, (3) the state’s role in conflict resolution and prevention, (4) the role of unions in labor justice and administration, (5) the level of collective bargaining, and (6) the existence of workplace representation. Union formation and determination of bargaining agent. In both Argentina and Mexico the law establishes that the majority union has the monopoly of representation. The difference lies with the way in which these majorities are determined. In Argentina, where union membership is voluntary, unions must show that they represent at least 20 percent of the workers of the economic branch where they want to bargain in order to acquire the legal standing (personería gremial) that entitles unions to carry out a range of activities. These include defending and representing the individual and collective interests of workers before employers and the state, engaging in collective bargaining, exercising the right to strike, managing the social insurance funds and programs, arranging for employers to provide a dues checkoff in their employees’ paychecks, and engaging arbitration and mediation procedures, among many others. This representation requirement guarantees a minimum level of representativeness and lends legitimacy to the process of union formation and negotiation. Even though levels of internal democracy are generally low in Argentine unions, union leaders must still work to represent rank-and-file demands, if for no other reason than to maintain levels of union membership in order to satisfy the requirements of personería gremial.6 In Mexico, unions at firm, craft, or industry levels can form with only twenty workers, but in practice the employer need only find one individual who has registered a union in order to sign the collective agreement, even before any workers have been hired.7 By inserting an “exclusion clause”8 requiring that employees

TABLE 7.1  Institutional differences in collective representation in Argentina and Mexico INSTITUTIONAL FEATURE

ARGENTINA

MEXICO

Union membership State role in conflict Labor justice system

By law, minimum representation of sector Voluntary Resolution, arbitration Courts

Collective bargaining level Intermediate levels of representation

Centralized Plant delegates; workplace commissions

By employer, via exclusion clause Coerced Preemptive Legacy unions on tripartite boards Decentralized None

Bargaining agent determination

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be members of the union, other workers are forced to join (often union dues are simply deducted from their paychecks) and an “artificial majority” is created that represents the interests of the employer (Bensusán and Alcalde 2000a). It is extremely difficult to dismantle this artificial majority, since any challengers tend to be fired and the process by which workers might contest the title to the collective agreement is riddled with obstacles. This practice serves to moderate union demands since the “majority” union relies on the employer in order to protect it from any challenges from the rank and file or from “real” unions. In these ways the exclusion clause extends power to the employer and the leadership of the union but not to the workers. This feature also enables the widespread use of “protection contracts” in Mexico. These are contracts that typically contain the minimum conditions required by law and which are signed without workers’ knowledge in order to preclude real unions from forming in the workplace (Bensusán and Alcalde 2000b). Such contracts used to be found in largely unregulated sectors of Mexican industry such as construction or garment production. In recent years, however, protection contracts have become commonplace in a host of companies that have emerged in the “new” economy, including banks, franchise establishments, and low-cost airlines. Employers in Mexico are therefore centrally involved in “selecting” the bargaining counterpart and enjoy a greater degree of intervention in the formation and activities of unions than do employers in Argentina. This feature of the Mexican labor regime reveals why unions generally face more constraints in Mexico than in Argentina. Differences in union structure also matter. Whereas in Argentina union organizational structure (and collective bargaining) is centralized, in Mexico multiple peak organizations have long existed. These peak organizations have historically competed to expand their influence and to secure favors from the state, despite their inclusion in the ruling coalition through the dominant political party, the PRI. Another structural disadvantage in Mexico involves the division of industries by federal and local jurisdiction. Federal jurisdiction applies to only a few industries, whereas the majority fall under the jurisdiction of local governments and local boards. It is not usually possible to form a union that includes workers from an industry located in both local and federal jurisdictions. This division can prevent organization along supply chains by industry in Mexico, whereas in Argentina unions are organized vertically by industry or economic branch. Moreover, decisions about which unions belong in what jurisdiction are often arbitrary or politically motivated. Jurisdictional differences in the application of labor law lead to fragmentation and facilitate control of unions. Means of union affiliation. Union membership is voluntary in Argentina. Since collective bargaining coverage extends to the entire workforce regardless

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of union membership, unions must produce incentives to attract rank-and-file members.9 Argentine unions have developed a range of linked services to encourage affiliation (Marshall 2005). In addition, union leaders feel some pressure to represent the interests of workers before employers and the government in order to retain legitimacy, even in the absence of genuine internal democracy. Unlike Mexico (at least until a 2012 change in the law), workers could leave the union without fear of losing their jobs. And if union leaders lose a significant number of members from a given unit, they may lose the legal status (personería) that enables them to bargain on behalf of workers. Argentine workers therefore have some degree of leverage to press the leadership to be responsive. In Mexico the workforce is also covered by the terms of the bargaining agreement, but because exclusion clauses are present in most workplace contracts, workers have little choice but to belong to the union that holds title to the agreement.10 The existence of such institutional protections as quasi-obligatory union membership and dues checkoff may have helped to avoid a more rapid decline of union membership and loss of resources for unions. However, because these institutional features fostered extreme dependence on employers and the government, such protections further weakened worker representation. Moreover, employer and government control of union leaders ensures limits on both wage demands and mobilizations. State role in conflict prevention and resolution. As in Mexico, the Argentine government can contain labor conflict through its role in recognizing union monopolies and limiting union competition. Even when this preemptive action fails, however, the government in Argentina may intervene to resolve a strike by imposing mandatory arbitration when the parties cannot come to an agreement. In contrast, in Mexico mandatory arbitration does not exist and there is no formal legal avenue for resolving strikes. Once a legal strike begins there are no legal limits on the length of time workers may be on strike and the employer must shut down production completely. Moreover, in practice strikes can be started by a minority of workers, given that proof of majority support may only be demanded once a strike begins, not before (Bensusán 2000). In this way strikes are relatively easy to launch and much harder to bring to an end. For these reasons both employers and the state in Mexico have historically worked to preempt even the possibility of a strike action. Employers contain the strike potential of their employees by selecting their bargaining counterparts. The government exercises control over the strike process through its presence on tripartite boards, whose role it is to certify the legality of strikes once they have begun, and through its oversight of union registration, which makes it harder for militant unions to form. The government has also relied on its subordination of union leaders to curb strikes and on dismissal of strikers, which is relatively rare in Argentina.

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Whereas the Mexican government uses its relationship with union leaders to suppress conflict, in Argentina the government manages the outcomes of conflict administratively. In Mexico the state sought to increase its capacity to intervene in interunion and labor-management conflicts, whereas in Argentina state intervention diminished over time. This was reflected in such actions as the Argentine government’s derogation of the decree that restricted strikes in essential services, as well as in the creation of an independent Federal Mediation and Arbitration Service (Goldín 2007, 22). Moreover, under the Center-Left government of Néstor Kirchner (2003–07), the government’s interest in conflict resolution coincided with its wage expansion policy, which itself provoked a number of labor conflicts. As the Argentine government’s capacity for conflict resolution expanded, so did its tolerance of strike outbreaks. Role of unions in labor justice and administration. Also important in the preemption of conflict in Mexico is the role of unions on labor conciliation and arbitration boards (in local and federal jurisdictions). These boards handle most industrial relations matters, including union registration, enforcement of contract provisions, elections to determine which union holds title to the collective agreement, strikes, and individual and collective grievances and disputes (Middlebrook 1995, 61). Typically, state-backed unions have representation on these tripartite boards along with employer and government representatives. With this composition, the boards rarely find in favor of independent unions when these attempt to gain registry, seek legal certification for strikes, or challenge incumbent unions for title to the collective bargaining agreement (M. Cook 2007, 154). Meanwhile, in Argentina the Ministry of Labor has jurisdiction over collective labor matters while the judicial branch oversees individual employment issues. Although this system affords the state a direct role in determining union formation, bargaining rights, and conflicts, the absence of a tripartite system of labor justice has also meant that employers and unions lack an institutional role in deciding these matters, in contrast with Mexico. Level of collective bargaining. Mexican law recognizes company and industry-wide bargaining, but these have become the exception, and decentralized bargaining at the plant level prevails. The decentralization of collective bargaining has increased opportunities for co-optation of union leaders by employers and facilitated employers’ intervention in the bargaining process. In Argentina, by contrast, bargaining has been largely centralized at the industry or branch (rama) level, despite an earlier trend in the 1990s toward more decentralized bargaining and a brief period in which the law prioritized agreements reached at more decentralized levels. Under President Néstor Kirchner, a system of “articulated” bargaining was instituted in which sectoral agreements established the floor for regional, local, or firm-level agreements (M. Cook 2007, 95).

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In this period the rate of expansion of centralized agreements outpaced those taking place at decentralized levels (Etchemendy and Collier 2007). Workplace representation. In Argentina the law allows for intermediate levels of representation at the workplace. These instances provide a more direct means to express workers’ interests and serve to reinforce ties between local leaders and the rank and file. This representation may take the form of either plant delegates or members of workplace commissions, both of whom are elected. Candidates for these positions do not need to be union members, which creates an extra incentive for union candidates to work to win the votes of their workplace colleagues. These intermediate instances can help to counteract the adverse effects of policies, as they did to some extent during the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. The presence of workplace delegates or commissions can also help to legitimize the idea of worker representation even when top-level union leaders are discredited (Roitter, Erbes, and Delfini 2011). For instance, the existence of these intermediate spaces has recently helped to revitalize union activity in some workplaces, such as supermarket chains, where differences between the rank and file and local and national leadership have emerged (Senén González and Del Bono 2013, 21). In Mexico the fact that most unions are formed at the enterprise level makes the need for intermediate representation less relevant. Nonetheless, given that most union leaders have achieved their position thanks to an arrangement with the employer or government support, in Mexico workers are effectively left unrepresented and alienated from unions. This weakness of representation was especially evident during the introduction of market reforms, when conditions deteriorated sharply for workers and little was done in their defense. In contrast, the existence of workplace representation in Argentina accounts in part for the relatively more combative way in which the labor movement in Argentina responded to neoliberal-era policies. This workplace representation has also helped to make employers comply with their obligations to their employees under the law and under collective agreements. This explains in part why in Argentina efforts to flexibilize labor relations required changes in the law, whereas in Mexico flexibility was attained without legal reform, through collective agreements in which provisions were gutted or through protection contracts that gave employers unilateral control.

Legacies as Assets and Liabilities in Economic and Political Transitions (1980s–1990s) Both Mexico and Argentina underwent major shifts in their economic and political systems during the latter part of the twentieth century. These shifts produced important challenges and opportunities for labor unions in both countries. A

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closer look at how labor fared under these dual transitions sheds light on the role of legacies in limiting or facilitating unions’ ability to adapt to contextual changes. In both countries, the more favorable economic context for labor was associated with ISI, which lasted from the early to the middle part of the twentieth century until the mid-to-late 1970s. In Mexico, for instance, the economy grew an average of 7.8 percent annually, annual inflation averaged 3 percent, and wages increased steadily (Lustig 1998, 14–15; Middlebrook 1995, 214–15). The main features of ISI included models of production that favored employment stability; labor laws that strongly regulated labor force use, especially in the areas of hiring and dismissals and conditions of employment; low unemployment rates; a wage policy oriented to expanding the domestic consumer market; the growth of manufacturing and public-sector employment; and the prevalence of men in the labor force, who were more likely to join unions. In contrast, a less favorable economic model began to take hold with the introduction of neoliberal policies after the crisis of ISI. This shift began in Argentina at the time of the military dictatorship in the mid-1970s and in Mexico with the debt crisis in the early 1980s. The policies included trade liberalization, privatization, industrial restructuring, and labor flexibility. Together they generated a context in which employers gained greater power, jobs that were formerly protected in manufacturing and the public sector were eliminated, and large numbers of women and young people entered the workforce under difficult and precarious conditions that made unionization more difficult. During the 1990s most new jobs in the region were in the informal sector (International Labour Organization 2002). To the extent that jobs were created in the formal sector, however, these new jobs emerged in unionized sectors in Argentina, whereas in Mexico they occurred in the border assembly plants (maquila), in new service industries with scant union presence, or under protection contracts. The sequence in which dual transitions to democracy and economic liberalization occurred also shaped the relative capacity of unions in each country to take advantage of institutional resources and party alliances (M. Cook 2002). Argentina’s transition to democracy preceded the more extensive implementation of market economic reforms. Argentina suffered a notoriously harsh military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Condemned worldwide for its systematic torture, disappearance, and killing of its own citizens, the dictatorship also targeted trade unionists. Among other actions, the military regime intervened in the administration of the unions and canceled the CGT’s legal registration, persecuted and jailed union leaders, and violently repressed worker protests. It also suspended the system of internal commissions and factory delegates; introduced new, more restrictive legislation to regulate unions; suspended collective bargaining; and

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took over the social welfare funds in an attempt to remove them permanently from union administration (Palomino 1986; Drake 1996). With the return of democracy, organized labor in Argentina was able to mobilize (it pulled off thirteen general strikes between 1983 and 1988) and pressure Congress through its Peronist party allies, who were in the democratic opposition. The CGT successfully pressed the (non-Peronist) government to restore collective bargaining by sectors, defeating a government initiative to decentralize bargaining; it was able to restore the Law of Professional Associations, which allowed the national craft union structure to prevail; and it secured the return of the law on social welfare funds, which returned control of the funds to the unions (M. Cook 2007, 66). In addition, a labor reform package proposed by the democratic government with the aim of weakening the Peronist unions was dropped (Ranis 1995, 48–49). These gains in the democratic transition amounted to a restoration of the Peronist-era legacy of labor laws and institutions, which then allowed unions to survive organizationally intact during the relatively unfavorable period of market reforms under the government of Carlos Menem (1989–94, 1995–99). In Mexico, by contrast, economic opening predated political opening, which limited the opportunities typically associated with democracy. PRI-led governments in the 1980s and 1990s pursued an aggressive antilabor policy aimed at containing union opposition to economic reforms, in addition to regressive wage policies and a radical flexibilization of collective agreements. These actions undermined unions’ capacity to represent workers and further delegitimized unions. Moreover, with the exception of unions affiliated with the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, a new labor central formed in 1997, and other smaller, independent unions, union leaders did not openly oppose the market-oriented policies of the government. Indeed, the CTM played a key role in supporting the PRI government during critical moments, including the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Zapatista uprising in the early 1990s. Most unions remained subordinated to the party and were instrumental in limiting the expression of more open social and political opposition among workers (Bensusán and Cook 2003). During the neoliberal period in the 1980s and 1990s, union leaders in both countries adopted defensive and largely pragmatic strategies. They succumbed to government and employer pressures for restructuring and flexibility in exchange for maintaining power resources that sustained union privileges and even enabled some unions to expand their financial resources (e.g., management of the social insurance funds and participation in privatized enterprises in Argentina [Murillo 2001]). Workers were unable to resist these pressures in either country, yet the defense of old institutional arrangements and party alliances had different

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consequences in each case. The Argentine unions’ conservative pragmatism was kept in check by the presence of workplace delegates and committees elected by the workers and by the fact that workers could disaffiliate from unions. In Mexico, because of the coercive nature of union membership and the lack of accountability between union leaders and the rank and file, no such constraints existed. In Argentina workers had the options of both voice and exit from the union, but in Mexico workers’ options were far more limited. Not only did workers generally lack voice, exit from the union typically meant loss of employment as well. In Mexico, moreover, the unions’ compliance in a succession of wage-cap agreements—beginning with the economic crisis of the early 1980s through to the “peso crisis” and devaluation of 1994–95—helped to bring about a severe loss of purchasing power for those earning the minimum wage, situating them below the poverty line (International Labour Organization 2008). Overall, minimum wages fell a cumulative 70 percent between 1981 and 1997 (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012, 29). Even after the wage-cap agreements were abandoned in 1995 and the economy began to recover in the late 1990s, unions did little to regain the trust they had lost through their complicity with government policies. In these years the labor-based parties in each country also forged strong commitments with business and employer groups, hastening a trend toward “de-unionization” of the ruling parties (Levitsky 2003). Although this process went deeper and began earlier in Argentina than in Mexico (after the Peronist party’s electoral defeat in 1983 versus the 1990s and 2000s in Mexico), in both instances the closer links with business enabled governments to adopt economic reforms and labor policies that were inimical to workers’ interests. In Argentina, party reforms enacted throughout the 1980s transformed the Peronist party into a clientelistic party with a significant loss of union influence in the Chamber of Deputies (Levitsky 2003). This did not mean that unions no longer supported the party, but rather that party candidacies depended on individual negotiations with political leadership instead of being distributed according to the relative weight of labor organizations within the party. This decline of union influence may have benefited the party, but the unions’ ability to resist market-oriented reforms was weakened (Stokes 2001). Nonetheless, the party was able to retain the support of workers, even those who were forced to enter the informal sector, through targeted compensation schemes that provided a social safety net for poor families. Moreover, splits in the labor movement as a result of economic policies produced a dissident current, a new labor central, and a more critical leadership in the CGT, which would become more prominent after the 2001–02 crisis. In Mexico a similar deunionization of the PRI occurred after the late 1980s, when unions proved unable to deliver the vote for the PRI. Even though the labor

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sector had exercised a formal role in the party since its founding, after the heavily contested 1988 elections it came to occupy a smaller number of seats in the federal Chamber of Deputies compared with the peasant and “popular” sectors of the party (Vargas Guzmán 2001, 229–53; Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012, 38). In contrast to Argentina, however, there was no corresponding leadership change in the CTM or in the Labor Congress, the umbrella labor organization. A new union central did emerge in 1997 and other political parties, including the left Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), began to compete seriously with the PRI. But the opposition parties and independent labor currents were loath to replicate the corporatist ties that the PRI had sustained with legacy unions and saw this as a relic of an authoritarian regime. During the economic shift in the 1990s, differences in institutional frameworks became especially important in setting out the challenges for workers in Argentina and Mexico. Even as the role of the state remained largely similar in both cases, the critical role that employers played in Mexico—for instance, in selecting their bargaining counterparts—marked an important difference with Argentina. As the economic development model was reoriented toward exports in each country and labor policy shifted to favor employers, the lack of enforcement of institutional protections for workers in Mexico became especially evident. At the same time, differences in labor market structure produced more adverse conditions for Mexican workers. Although in Argentina the size of the informal workforce grew in the 1990s, overall the formal-sector workforce remained significant compared with Mexico and other countries in the region. In contrast, in Mexico economic restructuring and liberalization increased layoffs in traditional manufacturing sectors and expanded an already large informal workforce. These differences in labor market composition were reflected in unionization rates. Whereas in Argentina unionization rates remained relatively stable despite the adverse effects of neoliberal economic policies on the labor market in the 1990s (Marshall 2005), in Mexico union membership declined substantially (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012, 28). In the neoliberal period governments in both countries sought changes in labor laws and institutions that would weaken worker and union protections and generate greater flexibility for employers. In Argentina union leaders were unable to block the passage of privatizing reforms and flexibility measures—pushed by the Peronist government of Carlos Menem—that primarily affected individual workers, especially in the areas of hiring and dismissals. However, they did manage to resist or shape those reforms that would most affect the CGT unions’ financial and organizational resources. Among these were the deregulation of the social welfare funds, further decentralization of collective bargaining, and the lapse of a contract’s terms and conditions on its expiration (M. Cook 2007, 81).

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Protecting these resources proved critical for the unions’ ability to recover once the economic and political environments became more favorable in the 2000s. In Mexico, the dominant unions successfully resisted proposals to reform labor legislation, but the result instead was a widespread de facto flexibilization that left workers even less protected. Whereas independent unions, democratic labor advocates, and the left PRD crafted alternative reform proposals that would “democratize” the labor regime and break the restrictive ties between labor and the state, employers pushed for legal changes that would grant a greater de jure flexibility in both individual employment and collective labor rights. Nonetheless, when faced with the prospect of a more militant labor movement and a leftward shift in politics (at a time when the Left party candidate was a serious contender for the presidency), the government, employers, and progovernment union leaders preferred the status quo. This was acceptable to employers because noncompliance with the otherwise protective labor legislation was widespread (and much greater than in Argentina). Retaining the status quo also proved effective at containing the incipient “new unionism,” even as the old unionism continued to lose credibility. In this case it was not union strength that staved off the formal flexibility of labor law, it was the interest shared by government, employers, and union leaders to avoid any changes that might expand pressures to democratize the corporatist system (M. Cook 2007, 188–89). These differences in transition contexts certainly matter, but they account only for part of the divergent trajectories of the labor movements in each case. The relative ability of organized labor to take advantage of transition contexts was shaped by specific legal and institutional legacies and the role of party allies. A weaker labor movement in Argentina, one not as well positioned by legal and institutional features that strengthened unions’ representativeness and autonomy, would have been less able to confront the new democratic government’s reforms that targeted labor. Here the transition sequence might have favored labor, but it alone could not determine the outcome—the restoration of the Peronist labor law legacy. Similarly, in Mexico democratization prior to extensive market reform might well have maintained a weaker labor movement, given the limits to union autonomy that are part of its state-corporatist legacies.

Divergence in the 2000s: Argentine Union Resurgence vs. Mexican Union Decline Although the neoliberal period posed serious challenges for labor movements in both countries, the divergence between unions in Argentina and Mexico grew stronger as political environments changed in the 2000s. For Mexico this change

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took the form of a political opening indicated by an opposition party victory in the presidential elections for the first time since the PRI’s founding. Although some analysts argued that democratization would enhance union autonomy and create opportunities for mobilization, continuities in the neoliberal economic model and the election of a more conservative, probusiness government did not favor union resurgence or renovation. In Argentina, a more favorable political and economic environment emerged after the 2001–02 economic collapse and political crisis. Not only did the government adopt economic measures that were less orthodox and policies that focused on wage recovery, it was also more prounion than preceding Peronist governments had been. In Argentina the left-of-center government led by Peronist Néstor Kirchner favored an alliance with organized labor and focused its attention on expanding social and labor policy, a move that benefited both workers and unions. Argentina also experienced high rates of economic growth with the commodity-export boom of the early 2000s, which was aimed at Asian markets. Economic growth coupled with the government’s employment policies expanded formal employment (Senén González 2011). The government also pursued a development strategy based on strengthening the domestic market, which entailed a sharp rise in the minimum wage and reliance on collective bargaining to drive wage increases. These developments helped produce conditions favorable to a recovery of union power. Led by a more militant leadership that had opposed the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, Argentine unions pursued a combative strategy to increase wages once economic recovery began, as evidenced by the sharp increase in strikes in the first half of the decade (Etchemendy and Collier 2007). Wage increases helped to increase incomes and set off new rounds of wage bargaining; between 2000 and 2010 the real minimum wage grew by 321 percent (OIT 2011, 46). Strikes were tolerated by the government, which saw them as a means to increase wages and expand the domestic market. At the same time, the government opened up political space to the Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos, whose member unions had split from the CGT in 1992, by including it for the first time on the tripartite Minimum Wage Council. Other indicators of positive conditions for unions and their members in Argentina included high rates of union membership, more centralized and expanded collective bargaining, and labor conflicts oriented around economic demands rather than political struggles (Etchemendy and Collier 2007; Palomino 2007). Union density rates in 2006 were 39.7 percent, among the highest in Latin America (Senén González 2011). The number of collective bargaining agreements tripled between 2003 and 2008. In 2010, 87.5 percent of all registered wage employees in the private sector were covered by collective bargaining (Senén González 2011). Finally, in a context of reindustrialization following

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economic recovery after 2003, strikes increased in manufacturing at the level of the economic branch (rama), reflecting pressure aimed at employers and focused largely on wage issues (Etchemendy and Collier 2007; Senén González 2011). In contrast, during the 2000s Mexican unions lost members and their ability to represent workers suffered. Economic growth also remained stagnant during much of the 2000s. Mexico’s ties with the U.S. economy through NAFTA and its reliance on low labor costs as its comparative advantage meant that Mexico was forced to compete with a more powerful China. The basic features of this economic development model were maintained by conservative governments in Mexico, despite its meager performance and despite the fact that the informal sector and migration no longer served the function of absorbing or diverting an excess labor supply. Even as the economy and manufacturing began to grow again in the 2010s, low labor costs and weak unions remained the cornerstone of the economic model (Malkin and Archibold 2012). Mexico’s political opening also fell short of the expectations associated with democratic transitions experienced in the rest of the region during the 1980s. When an opposition party won the presidential elections for the first time in 2000, the result was less a democratic opening and more a shift in power between conservative options. Presidents Vicente Fox (2000–2006) and Felipe Calderón (2006–12) came from the National Action Party (PAN), a conservative party with close ties to employer groups. The PAN governments did not substantially change the former regime’s economic and labor policies, and, like earlier PRI governments, they sought to remove those union leaders that opposed their policies while overlooking corruption and electoral irregularities in allied unions. This situation effectively blocked societal pressures to democratize the labor arena and led to the further erosion of unions as representative institutions. As a result, there was remarkable continuity in the labor regime from the 1990s through the 2000s. Minimum wages continued to erode through the 2000s. In 2009 the minimum wage had reached a level that was 28 percent lower than in 1994, when the financial crisis sent wages plummeting to a little over one-fifth of their 1982 value (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012, 25). The institutional framework also remained unchanged, with negative implications for union density and the right to strike. Union membership declined steadily in Mexico, from 13.6 percent of the economically active population in 1992 to about 9.7 percent in 2006 (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012, 28). The average annual number of strikes between 1989 and 1994 was 138; between 2007 and 2010 the annual average had fallen to twenty strikes. Moreover, the strike recognition rate (ratio of strikes to strike petitions) was consistently 0.7 percent or lower between 1996 and 2010, compared with 2 percent between 1989 and 1994 (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012, 32).

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Pockets of union activism emerged in Mexico, but these served as exceptions that proved the rule. For instance, buoyed by high mineral prices, in the early 2000s the mineworkers union launched a series of successful strikes to raise wages for its members. The government later moved aggressively against the union to displace its general secretary and divide the union (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012). Both PAN administrations reacted to militant unions with acts of repression more characteristic of authoritarian regimes. Despite labor’s declining influence in the PRI, many of the largest labor organizations continued to support the PRI.11 Union leaders sustained hope that their fortunes would rise with a return of the PRI to power. In the 2000s some union leaders became legislators under the banner of other parties, including the left PRD. But neither the PRD nor the conservative PAN showed interest in cultivating a labor base, despite their engagement in periodic pragmatic alliances with labor (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012). The Argentine political and economic context certainly favored unions, while the Mexican political and economic environments hastened union decline. Nonetheless, legacies are part of this story as well. The legal and institutional advantages that Argentine labor won back in the transition to democracy allowed unions to retain their organizational integrity and sources of financing during the market reform era. This in turn placed labor in an advantageous position once the political context shifted in its favor. In Mexico, the change in economic and political contexts in the 1990s and 2000s revealed just how weak the “corporatist advantages” actually were. The PRI out of power left labor even more vulnerable to employer and state influence via mechanisms in the law and labor institutions that had not changed. The PRI’s return to power in 2012 may be moderately better for legacy unions, but these remain a structure without a core, lacking representativeness and the ability to improve the lot of workers.

Prospects for Union Renewal State corporatism produces ambivalent legacies. On the one hand, the resources that unions derive from such features as party alliances, monopoly representation, and limits on leadership competition can provide a buffer against antilabor policies and stem further erosion and weakening of unions. On the other hand, restrictions on internal democracy and union competition can distance union leadership from its members and render unions less relevant as organs for representation of workers’ interests. With its links to democratization, union renewal can be a desirable goal, but it can also be risky, especially in adverse economic and political environments. Yet without renewal, unions remain dependent on

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favorable political openings and economic contexts, with limited prospects for broadening their role in democratic societies. Argentine unions were able to draw on legacies to retain important power resources, yet these same legacies prevented them from renovating. In the Mexican case, unions faced a more adverse environment, in addition to institutional and legal legacies that rendered them weaker than their Argentine counterparts. Argentine labor policies in the mid-2000s signaled positive changes for workers. Still, it is difficult to attribute these improvements to strategic innovations in union organizing or to unions’ ability to speak more broadly to workers beyond the traditionally unionized sectors. Analysts have argued that these changes were instead the result of more favorable economic and political contexts in the post-neoliberal period (Senén González, Trajtemberg, and Medwid 2010). For these reasons, most authors suggest that Argentine unionism has experienced resurgence or a simple recovery rather than renewal (Atzeni and Ghigliani 2008).12 Any such constraints on union renewal are due in large part to labor legacies of the state-corporatist period, which limited internal democracy and the emergence of new union leadership. The Argentine government’s support for a reunified CGT bolstered that organization’s leadership and allowed it to stave off more radical demands coming from other sectors, such as the unemployed and “unregistered” (informal) workers, who in 2010 comprised approximately 35 percent of the labor force (Ministerio de Trabajo, Empleo y Seguridad Social 2010, 34–35). The CGT also opposed the granting of legal recognition (personería gremial) to the Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos, a rival confederation with strong links to these sectors. Similarly, the transformative potential of an increase in labor conflict after 2001 was limited by unions’ lack of alliances with sectors engaged in new forms of social protest and mobilization, which included movements by the unemployed and by cooperatives of worker-owned enterprises (Epstein and Pion-Berlin 2006). Labor conflict remained relatively contained, due in part to the role of traditional union leaderships and a reliance on collective bargaining rather than social protest to channel and resolve conflicts. Nonetheless, pressure on union leaders mounted in the form of younger workers, many in nonunionized workplaces, who posed challenges to union leaderships in the election of workplace commission delegates. At the same time, legacies have made Argentine labor better able to adapt to less favorable economic and political contexts. Even as pressures increase inside and outside dominant unions, union leadership remains representative, committed to defending its members and capable of standing up to the government. In contrast, in Mexico neither an economic upturn nor a leftward shift in national government are likely to enable Mexican unions to recover without a profound change in the web of institutions, structures, and practices—most

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of these legacies of state corporatism—that continue to define unions’ relations with their members, employers, and the state. With few exceptions, unions in Mexico have lost their capacity for mobilization and representation. Despite the persistence of state-corporatist legacies, these do not go unchallenged. Even as most union leaders continued to defend the labor laws, the smaller yet more dynamic “new unionism” in Mexico repeatedly called for a reform of labor law that would put an end to the legal and institutional legacies of corporatism. However, while Congress finally did pass a reform bill in 2012, it failed to address changes critical for union renewal, such as an end to protection contracts and a requirement that workers directly elect their union leaders (Bensusán 2013).13 Moreover, in both Argentina and Mexico the highest court has begun to question long-standing laws and practices. In Argentina the Supreme Court singled out the regime of monopoly unionism, stating that it violates both the Argentine Constitution and ILO Convention 87 on freedom of association.14 In several public-sector cases, the Mexican Supreme Court declared unconstitutional laws or statutes stipulating that only one union may exist in a specific workplace because they violate the constitutional guarantee of freedom of association. The Supreme Court also found the exclusion clause that obligated employers to dismiss workers expelled by the union to be unconstitutional (M. Cook 2007, 190). This decision paved the way for the clause’s elimination in the 2012 reform. These decisions by the courts in Argentina and Mexico reflect important pressures to liberalize the corporatist provisions of labor law and practice in both countries. Nonetheless, union renewal and democratization in the labor arena require a more comprehensive reform of the remaining labor institutions and laws that are a legacy of the state-corporatist era. Up to now, powerful actors in both countries have continued to benefit from the preservation of these legacies, making any significant reform difficult to achieve.

Conclusion State-corporatist legacies continued to shape the labor regimes in Argentina and Mexico throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Although such legacies provided important resources and helped to bolster the dominant labor organizations, they also presented constraints in the form of reliance on the state and limited competition among unions that might otherwise serve to expand union democracy. Examining differences of legal and institutional design in Mexico and Argentina reveals how these legacies have served as assets or liabilities for unions in each country.

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In general, differences of institutional design have been overlooked in the literature on state corporatism. Yet within state-corporatist frameworks, where the state is commonly able to exercise a significant degree of intervention in the labor regime, we find different distributions of power among key actors. In Mexico labor institutions enabled both employers and the state to exercise discretionary influence in union affairs and to limit the registration of more militant, independent unions. The differential ability to “resolve” labor conflicts also shaped the way in which the state and employers acted to preempt the possibility of prolonged strikes in Mexico, whereas these were addressed administratively in Argentina. In this regard, the Mexican case illustrates the perverse influence of employers’ ability to “choose” with whom they bargain, an influence that has expanded with economic liberalization. In the Argentine case, laws regulating union structure and union affiliation, legacies of the Peronist era, limited the degree of influence that employers could exercise in such areas as union formation, strikes, and collective bargaining. Other features of institutional design, such as quasi-obligatory union affiliation and mandatory dues checkoff, would appear to ward off union decline in unfavorable economic environments. Nonetheless, in Mexico these mechanisms were subject to the discretionary intervention of government and employers, both via direct intervention by the Ministry of Labor and through the tripartite structures that rule on union formation, bargaining, and strikes. Coupled with the predominance of relatively compliant union leaderships, these features facilitated the introduction of further union-weakening changes, such as measures that increased labor flexibility. In Argentina, however, important differences with Mexico—including the representation requirements for legal recognition and union management of the social insurance funds—have forced unions to pay attention to workers in ways that Mexican unions have not had to. Finally, in contrast to Mexico, the presence of intermediate instances of representation in Argentina has made for strong worker representation, and the absence of tripartite institutions engaged in the mediation of interunion and worker-employer conflicts has produced more disinterested conflict resolution. These institutional differences enabled Argentina to escape the levels of influence by employers and the state that are seen in Mexico. Despite a decline in bargaining power of Argentine unions during the years of neoliberal reform, once the political and economic contexts grew more favorable under Left governments in the post-neoliberal period, unions were able to recover by drawing on resources associated with institutional, legal, and political legacies. In Mexico, in contrast, the crisis of corporatism posed by political opening and neoliberalism, together with institutional features that increased conservative government and employer influence and established weak internal mechanisms of union

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affiliation and representation, resulted in a situation in which unions did not recover, much less experience resurgence. Nonetheless, in both Argentina and Mexico, state-corporatist institutional, legal, and political legacies offer enough incentives to contemporary actors to block a renewal of unions—one based on internal democracy and new strategies and practices that would expand alliances with other social movements and benefit a broader range of workers, including those outside of the formal sector. In both countries democratization of the labor regime remains restricted, the product of state-corporatist legacies that continue to grant monopoly unions privileged access to collective rights.

8 “YOUR DEFENSIVE FORTRESS” Workers and Vargas’s Legacies in Brazil Adalberto Cardoso

In 1978 Brazilian trade unionism reemerged as a renewed social force from the ashes of its defeat by a fourteen-year-long authoritarian military rule. After a series of manufacturing workers’ strikes in 1978 and 1979, the labor movement became the natural repository for the various more or less anonymous forms of resistance to the military regime (Sader 1988). The regime was confronted with a significant rise in the costs of repression of the “emerging society” (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 71), which saw in the “new unionism” a pressure point that could bring about the downfall of authoritarianism.1 This particular context contributed to the instantaneous politicization of the new unionism, and in the months and years that followed, scholars and workers’ militants would be very effective in constructing its identity as a complete novelty in Brazil. The image of novelty combined the idea of a competitive and participatory occupation of the authoritarian union structure created by the first Getúlio Vargas government in the late 1930s; the construction of a parallel, autonomous organizational structure freed from state control; strong grassroots mobilization “of the masses” (and not only represented workers) against the authoritarian and postauthoritarian political regimes; and leftwing political identity-formation, which resulted in the creation of a political party in 1980, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party), all of which were seen as the antipode of the workers’ organizational tradition in Brazil.2 The alter of the “new” was the entire Vargas legacy, a pattern of union action characterized by the new unionists and the prevailing literature alike as 164

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corporatist, state controlled, and devoted to political bargaining instead of grassroots mobilization.3 Unions lacked effective control over their constituencies, had no plant-level penetration, were ineffective in collectively bargaining over working conditions, and were dependent on the state for wage bargaining. They were also controlled by political parties and served the parties’ (not the workers’) interests as intermediaries in mass maneuvering the disorganized workers in populist political arrangements. Unions derived their legitimacy from this connection, not from direct, autonomous representation of workers’ interests. The literature on which these diagnostics were based would also say that the Consolidation of the Labor Laws (CLT), the legal framework designed by Vargas in 1943, had a “narcotic” effect on union action: on the one hand, it assured union survival irrespective of the number of affiliates because of the “union tax”;4 on the other hand, it regulated work contracts in a way that made collective bargaining unnecessary (Cardoso 1969; Martins Rodrigues 1966). Union leaders had pragmatically relinquished their autonomy by adhering to the benefits of the CLT, which freed them to act as political, not union, leaders. This had led to promiscuous relations between union leaders and state officials and politicians, all of which detracted from workers’ real needs and interests. This dichotomous interpretation is no longer sustainable, of course. A vigorous new labor historiography has put the events of the 1980s in perspective, and the “new” emerged as the heir of a multidimensional and complex past. From this revisionist standpoint, the “old” was neither that old, nor was the new completely novel (Santana 1998; Negro 1999, 2004). I will argue that revisionism has gone too far, because the new unionism was actually new in many respects: a new generation of militants, new demands from employers and government, and new practices, among other things. However, future events would also confirm this revisionist view, and even the most skeptical analyst would have to concede that Vargas’s legacies are still here and are still strong. I will offer a novel perspective on the Vargas legacy, showing that his was a project of inclusion of workers in the capitalist dynamic via labor and social rights, and that this project captured workers’ hearts and minds, becoming a central aspect of working-class collective identity. Labor law shaped the labor movement despite its recurrent and failed attempts to create parallel institutions, which in the end reinforced the legal union structure and Vargas’s legacy. Any attempt to combat or reform this structure would result in its strengthening, even against reformers’ will. This resilience is still an enigma, and I will try to interpret it here. In this chapter, I first propose a reassessment of the Vargas political project and show how it bonded the fate of individual workers and their union leaders with that of the emergent urban capitalism while consolidating an institutional

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framework that proved very resilient and appealing from the labor movement’s point of view. I then discuss the impact of military rule on the reproduction of this framework. Although it was effective in dismantling the previous militant unionism, the military did not ban union elections, which opened the way for the slow but steady renovation of the union leadership. I then show how the union structure that survived the military regime was central to the rapid reorganization of the labor movement into a “new unionism” after 1978. While combating Vargas’s legacy, the new unionism would slowly but steadily come to occupy the official union structure with a project of renovation from within. This project would face a series of hurdles. Competition from other union factions and the economic crisis that neoliberalism unleashed in the 1990s reduced the new unionism’s will to reform the Vargas legacy. I argue that the government of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) introduced new incentives for labor leaders to adhere to the pillars of the Vargas project, such as participation in concertation mechanisms and inclusion of the central federations in the union system, something Vargas did not envisage. Any intent to circumvent, combat, destroy, or renovate the legal and union structure bequeathed by Vargas was enervated by its strong hold on institutions, militants, and especially individual workers’ expectations and aspirations.

Vargas’s Legacy: A Reassessment The Vargas legacy is a typical state-corporatist one, just like those of Argentina and Mexico (Bensusán and Cook, this volume). The main pillar of the system was and still is the Consolidation of the Labor Laws enacted in 1943, an authentic labor code that instituted the tutelary role of the state in every aspect of capital-labor relations. The regulations encompassed a series of formal standards for collective representation and bargaining, including the shape of union structures for labor and capital, their duties and obligations in terms of social benefits to their rank and file, control of elections by the Ministry of Labor, conflict mediation (by the Ministry of Labor until 1946 and by the newly created labor courts since then), and many others. They also encompassed substantive rights related to working conditions, health standards, minimum wage, working hours and other rules, which, as in Mexico, were enacted before the existence of a massive urban labor market (Bensusán 2000). In this way, workers’ legal rights constituted the standards and formed the outlines of the labor market. While regulating the labor market, the law exerted strict control over the labor movement. State regulation granted unions the monopoly of representation in a given jurisdiction (the municipality), and unions were, and still are,

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financed by a compulsory tax charged on all workers of that jurisdiction, the “union tax.” Union membership was not, and still is not, necessary for workers to benefit from collective bargaining outcomes. During authoritarian periods strikes were controlled or forbidden by the public authority, and although state control over union actions varied intensely throughout history, collective bargaining was actually displaced at many points, replaced by repressive control of unions by state officials, by judicial collective bargaining in labor courts, and also by state-imposed wage policies. As Noronha (2000) put it, the labor law is the most enduring feature of the Brazilian system. This feature has set the parameters for union structure and action over time, and to speak of Vargas’s legacies one must speak of the labor law and its enduring consequences for labor relations in Brazil. These provisions were a direct result of the compromises arising from the 1930s coup d’état that brought Getúlio Vargas into office. The program of the Liberal Alliance (Aliança Liberal) for the 1930 presidential electoral campaign acknowledged the “social question” in the cities and the hinterland as central to governability (Vargas 1938, 26–28). Vargas addressed that question in his first speech as president of the provisional government in November 1930. One of his first acts was the creation of the Ministry of Labor to “take care of the social question” and protect and shelter urban and rural workers (Vargas 1938, 72–73). The Constitution of 1934 inscribed labor law in its body for the first time in Brazil, and in 1937 it inaugurated the Vargas dictatorship’s Estado Novo and reinforced the constitutionalization of the labor law, of which the 1943 authoritarian CLT is a direct consequence. Labor regulations are indeed a major legal artifact of Vargas’s first government. What is important here is that the constitutional provisions, especially those regulating the labor market, did not automatically go into effect, for the state seldom had the willingness or the institutional mechanisms to ensure employers’ compliance (French 2004; Fischer 2008). This, I will argue, gave way to a social and political dynamic that is at the heart of the consolidation of the bourgeois order in Brazil and is key to understanding the actual legacy of the Vargas era. The Constitutions of 1937, 1946, 1967, and 1988 have all accepted the terms of the 1934 Constitution, which first acknowledged labor rights. But the 1946 Constitution introduced an important ambiguity that would survive Vargas. Vargas was expelled from office in 1945 by a military coup d’état, followed by elections for president and for a Constituent Assembly. Gathered in 1946, the assembly was expected to destroy the pillars of the proto-fascist Estado Novo, the authoritarian corporatist regime instituted by the 1937 Constitution. But this did not happen. While condemning fascism and corporatism, the 1946 code did not derogate the CLT, in either its individual or collective labor rights. The authoritarian union

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structure created by Vargas and the detailed regulation of the labor market remained intact. The constraints on the right to strike and the state-controlled collective bargaining system were also left untouched.5 This cohabitation of a series of authoritarian regulations in a democratic institutional setting would characterize the Brazilian industrial relations system ever since, and would affect workers’ and their representatives’ strategic action in profound ways. In fact, the Brazilian Communist Party was proscribed in 1947,6 and the new democratic government headed by General Eurico Gaspar Dutra intervened administratively in all major unions controlled by the Communists and other union leaders linked to Vargas’s political project (Motta 2002; Ferreira and Reis 2007; Ridenti and Reis 2007). The interventions were legal, once they were provided for in the CLT. But they were ambiguously constitutional, for the 1946 national code stated that unions were free, adding that the law would regulate their constitution and practice. The ambiguity of the constitutional provisions inaugurated a process of legal, judicial, and political disputes around the definition of workers’ collective rights that would continue until the 1964 military coup (Moraes Filho 1979). But this is only a symptom of a larger political dynamic that has shaped the system’s overall identity much beyond the labor law itself. When the Dutra antilabor government ended and prolabor or relatively neutral governments took office,7 the corporatist union structure proved to be a powerful tool in the hands of militant union leaders. In fact, Vargas thought that organized labor would sooner or later “be the government.” Vargas was returned to power in democratic elections in 1951, and served until his death in 1954. On May 1, 1951, in a speech at the Vasco da Gama stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Vargas exhorted workers to “unite and gather in your unions as free and organized forces. The authorities will not be able to curtail your freedom, neither will they be able to use pressure or coercion. The union is your fighting weapon, your defensive fortress, your instrument of political action. Presently, no government will survive or have an efficient power to implement its social policies if it does not have the support of the workers’ organizations” (Vargas 1952, 324). The words free, freedom, weapon, and action are crucial here. They are the antipodes of the authoritarian union structure that the Vargas dictatorship had created in 1939. He was channeling workers’ militance to oppose the institutional, state-sponsored apparatus. He was telling workers that this very apparatus should be “freely” occupied by them, not as a way to overcome capitalism but as a support base for Vargas’s redistributive state-led project. He offered workers in general and workers’ leaders in particular a project with which they could identify that was essentially political. Dissidence, of course, was not tolerated. Union leaders still had to secure an “ideology statement” in order to be entitled to take part in elections.8

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But this was about to change. In the second half of 1951 Congress passed a law derogating the need for that statement, which was confirmed by the Senate in August 1952 and sanctioned by Vargas in September (Buonicore 2000). This was a crucial decision. Vargas knew that the banishment of this repressive mechanism would open the way for the actual renovation of the union structure he had rhetorically advocated in 1951. The doors of the official union structure were finally open to electoral competition, and this would soon change the power balance within it in favor of the Communists and other left-wing militants. It is interesting to note that the existing literature has never recognized this crucial measure as a turning point in the Vargas political project. The sanction of the law might have played nothing but a symbolic role at that particular juncture, when Vargas was seeking the support of left-wing forces that opposed him. But the further consequences were such that the political system at large and the Ministry of Labor in particular would soon lose control over the labor movement. Indeed, contrary to the classic interpretation of the period (Cardoso 1969; Martins Rodrigues 1966; Weffort 1970), in many sectors grassroots participation became the norm, not the exception (Nogueira 1997; Negro 1999). A few years after 1952, banned Communists and other proscribed or repressed political militants would pragmatically combat the repressive union structure and at the same time compete for its control via elections. After winning official union elections, left-wing militants would restrict further competition, and a good part of the militants’ energies were devoted to winning and keeping control over official unions. The Ministry of Labor remained the sole power that constrained militance, and an important one, but after 1951 labor ministers were seldom explicitly antilabor (Erickson 1970). Critique of the union structure and the CLT was part of the overall process of identity formation of the Brazilian Communist Party’s union action. From within the authoritarian union structure, the militants would gather fiduciary and institutional resources that fed their recurrent intentions to build an autonomous union structure, especially a central federation that could coordinate a national workers’ movement. The General Workers’ Command (Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores, CGT), created in 1962 and controlled by the Brazilian Communist Party until its destruction in 1964, was an autonomous central federation that was formed irrespective of the labor law’s explicit provisions forbidding intercategory organizations (Delgado 1986; Santana 2001). The demand for an autonomous union structure by some of the pre-1964 unionists, then, materialized in a new organization that was in many respects similar to what the “new unionism’s” Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) would become in 1983. The same institutional and legal resources gave the proscribed Communists a niche in which they could thrive and from which they would influence the

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political process. Just like the new unionists at the end of the 1980s, the Communists and their Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (Brazilian Labor Party, PTB) allies were virtually hegemonic in Brazilian unionism prior to the 1964 military coup (Martins 1989; Santana 2001). They controlled both the autonomous CGT and the major official unions, including most federations and confederations (Weffort 1970). These very brief remarks should suffice to show how flexible the “corporatist” authoritarian union structure was from organized labor’s point of view. That is why I have used “corporatist” in quotes. The overall legal system was formally corporatist and authoritarian, but if the government was not explicitly antilabor, corporatism was synonymous with militance for Communists, left-wing PTB affiliates or Catholic militants, Marxists not aligned with the Communists, and independent leaders not aligned with the Ministry of Labor. The union structure did actually shape the union’s political market, but the ministerialistas—unions directly controlled by the Ministry of Labor—were one among myriad other political and syndical affiliations (Martins 1989, 82–86). By the second half of the 1950s they were already a minority. At a more structural level, as workers’ representative institutions were consolidating, workers were moving in large numbers from rural areas to cities in search of better living conditions. Especially after 1950, there they found state-protected jobs and a militant labor movement demanding the effectiveness of existing provisions for employed workers and the extension of those provisions to ever larger proportions of the working class, as well as a better place for workers both in the emerging democracy and the capitalist distribution of wealth. The restricted scope of the formal labor market and the employers’ resistance to complying with the law made this more of a promise than a reality (French 2004), but for most workers it was a credible promise, capable of feeding their desires and aspirations. The credibility of the system was ensured by the labor movement’s ability to make of labor rights the boundaries of its collective identity: the very identity of the system was the production and reproduction of a project of universal inclusion of all workers in the dynamics and benefits of “organized capitalism.” This created a system of incentives, vested interests, and political action on the part of labor leaders and different governmental bureaucracies and party militants, on the one hand, and of strong aspirations of inclusion by the emerging working class, on the other, a system that explains most of the political and social dynamics of the 1945–64 period. The struggle for the effectiveness and efficacy of the legal social rights instituted by Vargas gave stability to the project, since the rights were embedded in the Constitution and thus worth fighting for. It also made the labor movement, which used the resources offered by the official union structure to promote militance and participation, a central element in the consolidation of

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the Brazilian (restricted) welfare state. And these were the very outlines of Vargas’s inclusive political project, which was to give capitalism a legitimate, institutional, competitive, and state-controlled framework of development, the reality of which depended on workers’ willingness to organize and act to make it real.

The Endurance of Vargas-Era Institutions under Military Rule (1964–1985) Military rule would test the strength of the inclusive mechanisms created by Vargas in unexpected ways. The authoritarian regime banned the Communists, silenced the labor movement, and reinforced the dormant repressive features of the corporatist union structure, reintroducing the “ideology statement” in union elections. Some 760 interventions in unions took place in 1964–65, and the vast majority of the militants in unions with more than a thousand affiliates were simply sacked (Martins 1989). However, control over the union structure, strict as it was, was never totalitarian. Union elections were not banned. They were formally controlled, but the military dream of uncontested domination was never fulfilled, as shown by a series of strikes in the São Paulo and Belo Horizonte metropolitan regions that preceded the enactment of Institutional Act No. 5 in 1968, a repressive law that opened new avenues for the implacable repression against dissidents, leaving little room for any union action at all except elections. But elections, even when presumably controlled, can be energetic moments. They mobilize strategic discourses in the search for adherents, motivate part of the rank and file, involve actual voting procedures and open the way for dissidence, if this is intelligent enough to grow unnoticed by the panoptic eyes of authoritarian rulers. One cannot explain the new unionism without immediate reference to this subterranean, mute process of leadership building under the military regime (Negro 2004, 279–304). Lula was elected for the first time in 1969 to a secondary position in the São Bernardo Metal Workers Union (in the São Paulo metropolitan region) and again for its executive board in 1972, becoming its president in 1975 at the age of thirty. Most future new unionism leaders were already in office, and many others were competing for the leadership of existing unions against military-nominated union bureaucrats, and some of them would succeed (Sluyter-Beltrão 2010; Antunes 1988; Nogueira 1997; Cardoso 1999b; Negro 2004). It is of no minor importance that this new generation could thrive despite the military regime’s will to control unions. Many of them had close connections to the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Operária (a social ministry whose goal was to evangelize and reflect on workers’ lives) and its theology of liberation. After

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Institutional Act No. 5, Brazil was under a state of siege, and public meetings and gatherings were forbidden. But the Church’s events were not. Within churches or in events coordinated by the Church many left-wing militants, most of whom belonged to a myriad of Marxist groups that dissented from official communism, could gather and “keep the flame burning” while awaiting better times. Their survival within the authoritarian union structure must also be taken into account in explaining the rapid reorganization of the labor movement after 1978 (Martins Rodrigues 1989). Official unions would again be the vehicles for the renovation of the labor movement. The military restricted and most of the time forbade the struggle for the effectiveness of labor rights, thus subjecting workers’ capitalist inclusion to the brute force of the labor market. This created tensions in the very core of the authoritarian regime, and helped to reinforce its repressive character at the very moment that a fraction of the military elite decided to prepare its withdrawal from power (Stepan 1986; O’Donnell et al. 1986). This, I argue here, explains the regime’s inability to respond to the new unionism when it became a mass movement demanding better wages and working conditions. And the mass character of the new unionism cannot be explained without mentioning the regime’s repression of workers’ demands for the effectiveness of labor rights, especially for the recovery of the purchasing power of their wages. Military rule also encountered the strength of Vargas’s legacy. Workers would not accept as just the denial of constitutionalized labor rights. They fought, among other things, for dignity at work (Abramo 1999), and since they did this led by new labor leaders that thrived in the legacy union structure, the military had the illusion of strict control. This structure was again the workers’ “defensive fortress,” their “instrument of political action,” to use Vargas’s words.

“New Unionism” and the Vargas Legacy (1978–1989) The Vargas legacy was a project of inclusion of workers in capitalism through the regulation of the labor market and the framing of workers’ collective identity mediated by labor and social rights, since workers had to fight for these rights and the fight had legitimated the legal order itself. The core of the legacy was the legislated labor relations system, that is, the law as the ultimate arbiter of conflict between labor and capital. This would be strongly opposed by the new unionism after 1978. The new militants thought that the renewal of labor relations in Brazil should include a national collective agreement freely negotiated between workers’ and employers’ central federations. This would be created as part of a reform

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of the union structure that would ban the union tax and compulsory jurisdiction (the municipality) and ratify ILO Convention 87 on freedom of association, among other central issues (Sluyter-Beltrão 2010). If accomplished, this would mean a shift from a legislated to a contractual model anchored in free unions. But the new unionism would also have to confront the strength and resilience of the Vargas-era institutions. Although the dichotomous interpretation opposing the new unionism to the labor movement prior to 1964 is flawed, the recent revisionism has gone too far. In many respects the new unionism was actually new. First, thanks to the military regime the previous left-wing political elite had been virtually eliminated from the political arena by 1978. Those who had survived in exile would return in 1979 amid the effervescence of the antimilitary movements headed by the new unionism.9 They had to cope with a social force over which they had no institutional power or political influence, and about which they knew little or nothing. Most of all, this social force was building its identity as new against that of a group of the returning militants, who were blamed by many for the failure of the pre-1964 democratic experience (Weffort 1970). The CUT was created in 1983 in opposition to the remaining Communists and old pelego bureaucrats,10 thus establishing a clear break with past labor movement militants. Second, the working class was also new. By 1978 most of the workers who had been around in 1964 had already retired or were considered too old in an urban labor market that had to make room for two million or more new entrants every year as a result of rural-urban migration and natural population growth (Faria 1983). The new unionists were young themselves. Lula and the prominent oil workers’ leader, Jacó Bitar, two major new unionist militants, were both around thirty years old. Bank workers’ union directors (such as Gilmar Carneiro and Olivio Dutra) were even younger, as were the leaders of the São Paulo Teachers’ Association. Many of these militants had had no contact whatsoever with the previous “populist” or Communist militants; they were some of the most influential leaders among the new unionists. The new unionism did contribute to a partial yet important renovation of the corporatist union structure while thriving within it (Cardoso 1999a), but in this respect it replicated central aspects of labor dynamics before 1964. Although only 14 percent of all unions were affiliated to the CUT in 1989, this included all major public-sector associations, both in public services and public enterprises. And much like the CGT in 1962–64, major unions of metal, machinery, chemical, bank, oil, electricity, urban services, transportation, and the vast majority of rural workers’ unions that were affiliated to a central federation, were all CUT affiliates. In the 1990s the CUT would slowly but steadily consolidate a parallel federation and confederation structure to compete with the corporatist bureaucratic bodies

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ruled by old pelego administrators,11 thus coordinating the actions of its affiliates. As a consequence, the new unionists would enlarge the scope of workers’ rights in a wide array of economic sectors, sometimes far beyond the labor law provisions. Contractual rights concerning working conditions, safety at work, shop floor union representatives, rights to information and access to workers at the plant level, regulation of working hours, work shifts, fringe benefits such as transportation, food, housing, and health subsidies were among the new issues negotiated by the new unionism for millions of workers, especially after 1980 (Sluyter-Beltrão 2010).12 The main novelty of the new unionism, in terms of Vargas’s state-corporatist legacy, was a proposal for a project of inclusion of workers in the emerging postdictatorship sociability constructed from below. Its identity was also socialist, though the nature of the movement’s socialism has never been clear except for its anticommunist and anticapitalist character. A socialism built from below based on mass mobilization in the cities and the countryside, headed both by the political party (Workers’ Party) and the central federation (CUT), each playing a complementary role in bringing ever more adherents to the project, who in the process would shape the nature of its socialism: this was always the proposal of leaders such as Lula in 1980 and Jair Menegheli, CUT president from 1983 to 1994. In this respect, the new unionism was certainly an effort to overcome the strictures of Vargas’s legacies, now from below, since the identity of the workers’ movement was shaped against and in opposition to capitalism and its state, in contrast to Vargas’s project of giving a state-organized capitalism a legitimating mechanism. Neoliberalism explains part of the failure of this project (more on this below). Another part of the explanation must be attributed to the resilience of Vargas’s legacy. In 1988 another federal Constitution was enacted that freed unions from state control, thus changing the 1939 provision according to which unions had to be approved by the Ministry of Labor, which had legal control over union affairs, including elections, budget, expenditures, and so forth. The 1988 Constitution provided that unions no longer had to be recognized or registered by the public authority. Nonetheless, workers’ and employers’ organizations were still entitled to tax their constituencies, the jurisdiction of which was also kept untouched (the municipality). This increased the fragmentation of the union structure, as new unions were created within the territorial jurisdiction of existing organizations while claiming to represent fractions of the original constituency (e.g., an existing larger finance workers’ union confronted by a new bank workers’ union claiming to represent workers in banks). Labor courts resolved jurisdictional problems and conflicts in the midst of much uncertainty, since most decisions were made at the discretion of political

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incumbents. Competition in the union market increased as a result, and the CUT, an unchallenged hegemonic force in the 1980s, would face serious competition from Força Sindical, a new central federation created in 1991. Força Sindical drew dissidents from the traditional unionism the CUT had combated on its road to hegemony; both Força Sindical and traditional unions had opposed the introduction of freedom of association in the Constituent Assembly of 1987–88. With most of its power coming from unions dependent on the union tax, the Força Sindical supported Vargas’s legacy unionism, opposing any reforms of the union structure. Along with the consequences of neoliberalism and with some unforeseen outcomes of democratic consolidation, this led to a pragmatic revision of the CUT’s project.

Neoliberalism Confronts the Vargas Legacy and the New Unionism (1990–2002) The new unionism would renew the inclusive mechanisms of Vargas’s legacy in a way that certainly would have appealed to Vargas. In the 1990s a majority of the new unionists would become resolute supporters of labor rights, that is, of the CLT and, to a lesser extent, the union structure it helped to frame. One of the main reasons for this, as I show elsewhere (Cardoso 2003), is the fact that in Brazil, as well as in most Latin American countries, neoliberal policies undermined the main pillars of the labor movement. Fernando Henrique Cardoso was elected in 1994 with a “modernizing” discourse (as had been Fernando Collor de Mello’s),13 the core of which was antistate, anti–labor rights, and antiunion—that is, against the very legacies of the “Vargas era.” As a result of the economic restructuring that followed, from 1988 to 1998 1.7 million formal jobs were lost in manufacturing, 500,000 in finance, and 450,000 in privatized state companies (Cardoso 2003, 228–31). More than 900,000 formal jobs were destroyed in public administration and all of these were in CUT unions. Considering the entire economy, the loss of registered jobs was almost 2.4 million during the 1990s, and eight out of every ten new jobs created in the period were informal and thus outside the reach of the labor movement. The formal labor market shrank from 56 to 40 percent between 1990 and 1999 (Cardoso 2003, 42–43). Rising open unemployment rates (from 4 percent in 1990 to 8 percent in 1999) reduced workers’ bargaining power; unions lost funds and capacity for collective action and grassroots mobilization; collective bargaining became concession bargaining; real wages fell nationwide; constitutional labor rights related to working hours, wages, and types of labor contracts were flexibilized, and so forth. In this context, Força Sindical won elections against the

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CUT in many crucial unions that represented workers in privatized companies, especially in metallurgy, and also in sectors with high unemployment and turnover rates. The state had unleashed market forces that assaulted the new unionism’s proposed renovation from below of Vargas’s legacies, and the labor movement could neither control nor tame these forces. In this uncertain scenario, the labor law appeared to most union leaders as something worth fighting for, and even the proposed reform of the union structure was put on hold. In a catastrophic neoliberal scenario, ILO’s Convention 87 sounded like an invitation to organizational suicide. The legacy union structure became the trench from which workers’ leaders would try to survive neoliberalism. Most important, the struggle for labor rights was again a central issue on the labor movement’s agenda. Amid these structural changes, the CUT consolidated a parallel structure of federations and confederations that centralized and coordinated the actions and collective bargaining of affiliated unions in some crucial areas such as metals, banking, chemicals, and oil (Cardoso and Gindín 2009). But this structure also had to confront the strength of Vargas’s legacies, since, as in Argentina and Mexico, the law would not recognize collective agreements signed by other-thanofficial unions, thus reducing the parallel institutions’ reach in labor relations. Besides, affiliated unions voluntarily financed these institutions, whereas official federations and confederations affiliated with Força Sindical had access to a share of the union tax. These two remnants of the Vargas-era union structure, which had been constitutionalized in 1988 and were now much harder to reform, helped force the CUT into the official system. In the beginning of the 2000s, one after the other, all of the CUT’s parallel federations and confederations asked for recognition by the Ministry of Labor in order to be entitled to the union tax. The project of renovation of the union structure from within was dead.

Back to Vargas? (2003–) The resilience of the Vargas-era institutional framework is remarkable. So is its appeal, from a militant’s point of view. When recognized by the Ministry of Labor, a union has immediate access to the union tax, to the monopoly of representation of the relevant workers, and to the right to bargain collectively in their name. Strong opposition to this framework has historically come from those who were outlawed by the authoritarian regimes of Vargas and the military. But the suspension (in the 1952–64 period) or elimination (after the 1988 Constitution) of the authoritarian barriers has resulted in a slow accommodation of the opposition to the system consistent with the opposition’s expanded access to union

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power via democratic elections. This happened in the 1950s and 1960s with the Communists and left-wing militants, and it happened again after the 1980s. Competition within the union market is an important explanation here. While it insisted on reforming the law, the CUT lost space to other political currents that benefited from the law. The legal nature of the union structure made it very difficult to combat, and those favoring the law had the clear support of state officials and the myriad institutions created to enforce the law, including the judicial system. Even President Cardoso benefited from the union structure since his government promoted Força Sindical against the CUT and the PT, the main social and political forces opposing neoliberalism. Why would the CUT insist on freedom of association if its hegemony in the union market was being undermined by competition with official unions? The election of Lula in 2002 was also relevant in explaining the accommodation of union leaders to a system most of them had opposed. Once in office, Lula created a vast array of new concertation mechanisms that included social and labor movements in the direct administration of the state. The macroeconomic neoliberal policies—fiscal austerity, inflation targeting, free currency and financial markets, central bank independence—were shielded from political battles, but the substantive aspects of policymaking were not. Dozens of consultation councils at the federal administration level were created after 2003 that mandatorily included labor movement representatives, especially from the central federations. This generated a domino effect throughout the union system that increased the need for stable leaders and institutions, thus strengthening adherence to Vargas’s structural design, even if modified by the 1988 Constitution. As a consequence, Vargas’s institutional legacy remains. The CLT still defines the institutional structure of the labor market.14 The majority of workers would prefer a formal job if they could choose. Unions are still financed by the union tax and have the monopoly of representation in a given jurisdiction. And unions must still fight for the efficacy of the labor law since many employers still refuse to comply. In 2003 the Supreme Labor Court mandated that it was up to the Ministry of Labor to decide which one among any number of competing unions would have the right to represent a given category of workers (Cardoso and Gindín 2009). In 2008 the Congress approved a measure supported by the central federations that would allow these to be funded by a share of the union tax. With this move the Lula administration ensured a stable funding mechanism for the reproduction of labor-based political elites. Now in government, top union leaders have pragmatically relinquished the project to reform the labor laws and the union structure, since workers and social movements are now important elements of the government’s presence in civil society. From this point of view, workers are

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really “the government,” and in office they are concerned with the survival of their cradle institutions: the partially renovated union structure inherited from Vargas and the social movements that in one way or another are linked with the PT and its allies. These are their “defensive fortress.” Lula and allies have also brought the state back in, in two important ways. First, the PT administration has partly repoliticized the economy. The neoliberal macroeconomic orthodoxy was shielded from political disputes, but the state became a central engine of economic growth by directly investing in infrastructure and financing private investment with all sorts of subsidies.15 Second, the state is again the main coordinator of the capitalist order, a role that neoliberal governments had tried to hand to the market. This is not pure political rhetoric. By offering the population a credible project of socioeconomic inclusion and security, and by struggling alongside opposition forces to implement it, the state has once again nourished workers’ expectations and aspirations. Once again, this is bonding the fate of the nation with that of its population, thus providing capitalism with a smooth path in order to thrive. President Vargas was the first to incarnate this project in Brazil. Lula has been its most recent personification. And the majority of Brazilians have supported it. The Vargas legacy was an encompassing political project of nation-building and consolidation of the bourgeois order, which gave workers an institutional trench from which their leaders could find their way into the political arena while struggling for better living conditions in the present. The legacy is still alive, for workers still dream about a formal job and union leaders still consider the CLT an important reference point for their collective action. But the horizons of the workers’ movement are no longer limited by the labor code. Workers’ leaders are now facing the challenge of administering the capitalist state well beyond the world of work. And this was certainly envisioned by Getúlio Vargas back in the 1950s.

9 LIVING IN THE PAST OR LIVING WITH THE PAST? Reflections on Chilean Labor Unions Twenty Years into Democracy Volker Frank

How do political, ideological, and institutional legacies shape labor unions’ ability to become effective defenders of workers’ interests? In what way, shape, and form do these legacies present themselves in contemporary Chile? To what degree do these legacies undermine the new democratic regime’s two most important promises: first, that in post-transition Chile, civil society is not only represented by its government but is an important social actor for itself; and second, that there will be economic growth with equity (Concertación 1989, 1988; CUT 1990)? Analytically, as well as empirically, this is no minor point. For if legacies from the authoritarian regime impede labor’s ability to defend its interests, what is, from the worker’s perspective, so new about democracy? I first encountered such views during research in Chile between 1990 and 1992. Many workers adamantly denied that democracy had returned. The election that brought the first Concertación government (Patricio Aylwin, 1990–94) to power was seen as insufficient. Aylwin had been chosen by what was then (1988–90) the Coalition of the Parties for Democracy. These parties (the most important of which were the Christian Democratic Party and the Socialist Party) had defeated Augusto Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite and were thus the logical opposition choice to compete in the first election held in December 1989. Democracy was restored, but questions about the quality of democracy and the degree of democratic deficit remained. The electoral system was still strongly shaped by Pinochet’s electoral reform. The military remained powerful and

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influential, appropriating for itself the country’s copper export earnings. And then there were the labor laws. Workers expected more substantial gains from democracy. The literature of the 1980s and 1990s referred to these divergent views on democracy as the difference between formal and substantive democracy (O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986). Yet more than twenty years into democracy, such critical views persist. There is ample evidence for this “democratic malaise” despite the fact that since the return to democracy in 1990, the Concertación government had lost a presidential election to the Center-Right opposition only once. Three successful reelections of the Concertación (Eduardo Frei in 1994, Ricardo Lagos in 2000, and Michelle Bachelet in 2006), one electoral victory of the reconfigured Concertación (now called Nueva Mayoría), once again led by Bachelet (who began a new four-year term in 2014), and only one electoral defeat in 2010 to the conservative opposition leader Sebastián Piñera (2010–14), speak more of a successful Concertación government than a failed one. Yet voter discontent emerged already in the Aylwin period, and not just from the labor camp. The student rebellions, on and off again since 2006, had by 2010–12 culminated in the largest and most violent nationwide protests since the return to democracy. And because these student rebellions began in 2006 when Bachelet was president, the argument that they targeted the Piñera government does not hold. Instead, then as now, they address the compromised capitalistic democracy Chile has become since 1990 (Garretón 2011). Similarly, since 1990 the leadership of the trade union central, Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), has consistently warned that this democracy is deficient and that workers deserve more voice and more bargaining power than Chile’s democracy has delivered. CUT leaders certainly no longer call for a workers’ democracy—that dream died with Salvador Allende. But they have insisted that this is not a democracy for workers.1 How deep can political, legal, or institutional legacies reach into democracy’s reservoir of broken or unfulfilled promises before one reexamines not only what or where the legacies are, but what or where democracy is? This will be the main question this chapter seeks to answer. The Chilean case offers a unique opportunity to study authoritarian legacies and how they affect new democratic regimes, specifically organized labor and the working class. First, Chile is interesting because economic reforms preceded the return to democracy. Chile is perhaps the most well known case of neoliberal market reform in all of Latin America. The origins of this reform—often referred to as “shock therapy”—go back to the 1970s and the so-called Chicago boys.2 The Pinochet regime’s economic reforms led to the worst economic crises Chile had seen since the 1930s. By the early 1980s, poverty rates and unemployment had skyrocketed to unacceptable levels. The regime was forced to introduce a more

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pragmatic version of neoliberalism with some demand-inducing measures. This led to an economic recovery throughout the 1980s with annual growth rates of 8 percent and, for Latin America, record low inflation rates (Winn 2004). Second, economic reform, market liberalization, and structural adjustment also entailed the remaking of labor institutions and labor legislation. A new labor code, repression of workers and labor unions, prohibition of the CUT, and imprisonment and assassination of some of its leaders aimed to eliminate communism and social unrest once and for all in Chile. In Pinochet’s vision of a modern Chile, workers and labor unions had no place. Third, if economic and labor reforms preceded democratization, what would the new democratic regime do about them? How far would the new democratic governments be willing to go in order to democratize or redemocratize industrial relations? In other words, how much of the authoritarian regime would be removed under democracy, perhaps even in the transition to democracy? Fourth, and perhaps most important, what role would labor itself play in redemocratization? First and foremost for labor was participation in the reform of the Pinochet labor legislation of 1979. Answers to these questions will provide an understanding of the role of authoritarian legacies in Chile and the degree to which they affect organized workers in democracy. Following the editors’ conceptual and theoretical framework, this chapter will address legal and ideological legacies. In Chile, unlike in Mexico or Poland, for example, there are no “legacy unions” allied with the previous authoritarian regime. Not having to deal with competing players does help unions, especially in the workplace. However, the labor legislation of 1979 encouraged the formation of parallel unions and so-called negotiating groups within the same firm. Both restricted unions’ collective power and thus created a legal basis on which employers could deepen the economic rationalization process from the 1980s through the 1990s and up until today.3 This volume demonstrates that authoritarian legacies often persist into the democratic period. But this perspective involves an implicit assumption that democracy (whether of the post-transition, consolidating, or deepening phase [O’Donnell 1996]) has arrived and the authoritarian regime is gone, except for its legacies. A transition marks the time from the start of the exit of the authoritarian regime to the entry of the new political regime (Garretón 2003). In Chile that was the period from Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite until Aylwin’s inauguration in March 1990. During this time, important negotiations over institutional changes, including Pinochet’s amnesty law, took place (Allamand 1999). Although this precise definition of a transition period ending in 1990 may make sense from some perspectives, including an academic one, it may not from others. For example, there was considerable disagreement and anguish in Chile well into 1993 about whether the transition was over and democracy was fully

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restored, and whether it was reflected in the reality of a labor law and labor relations still infused with authoritarian elements. Political and intellectual leaders of the Concertación government never delivered a satisfactory answer, at least not to the general public. This makes the student and worker protests in Chile (especially those between 2006 and 2012) all the more relevant and “loaded with historic significance” (Sehnbruch 2009). This chapter examines the legal and ideological legacies of the Pinochet regime, especially in the labor institutions it created. First, it examines the labor reforms of the Pinochet legislation undertaken by the new democratic governments of President Aylwin (1990–94) and, to a lesser degree, by President Lagos (2000–2006). It then explains why reforms of the Pinochet laws and institutions were incomplete because of the very ideological legacy of the Pinochet regime. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the type of democracy established in Chile, given the legacies that endure.

Labor Legislation in Twentieth-Century Chile Before proceeding to the discussion of the Pinochet labor legislation and subsequent reforms by the Aylwin and Lagos governments, a brief overview of Chile’s twentieth-century labor legislation is in order. Broadly speaking, we can identify three “projects.” The first encompasses the original labor legislation created in 1924 but subsequently changed to some degree, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, under the more progressive governments of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei (1964–70) and the Unidad Popular government led by Salvador Allende (1970–73) (Angell 1972; Valenzuela 1976; Zapata 1976). The Pinochet labor legislation was enacted in 1979, six years after the bloody military coup, and marks the second project. The principal architect of these laws (referred to as Plan Laboral) was José Piñera, labor minister under Pinochet in 1979. The third and final project in twentieth-century labor legislation commences—and for now ends—with the reforms to the Plan Laboral introduced by the new democratic governments under Aylwin and Lagos.4 The Plan Laboral outlawed the CUT, abrogated supra plant-level collective bargaining, set a maximum strike length of sixty days, and drastically limited the scope of collective bargaining by making subject to negotiations only the initial wage readjustments, the time period for inflationary adjustments (usually three to four months), and the levels of inflation adjustments. Unions were strictly prohibited from making proposals that pertained to the broadly defined “organization, direction, and administration of the firm” (Article 82), leaving most workplace matters under the unilateral control of management. Until then,

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such narrowly defined collective bargaining had not existed in Chile. In fact, the pre-1979 legislation allowed unions to discuss promotions, staffing levels, work crews, machinery, new technology, and other production-related issues (Valenzuela 1979). The state was also much more directly involved in industrial relations. Between 1968 and 1974, tripartite commissions fulfilled an important function. The goal of these commissions was to prevent or solve labor conflicts through the creation of sector-wide norms. Either side could initiate the creation of such commissions, and their findings were binding and extended sector-wide.5 Prior to the Plan Laboral, the state also exercised an important and more indirect role in other areas. Labor legislation stipulated that if the union started a legal strike, the firm was not allowed to continue production. Moreover, employers were not allowed to hire a new labor force. The ability of employers to continue production during a strike was established only with the 1979 legislation. And while the legislation prior to the Plan Laboral also included incentives for workers to break away from their striking colleagues, it made reinstatement to the workforce once the strike was over obligatory for employers (Article 348). In the aftermath of the military coup, the Pinochet regime eliminated the tripartite commission’s binding character and reduced its role to “advisory.” Under this new labor regime, the purpose of these commissions was to study economic conditions and make proposals to the labor ministry, which was under no obligation to act on the recommendation of these commissions. Their duration was shortened to two years and their permanent status ended. Typically, the commissions were called into session only when it was deemed necessary. Workers and employers could delegate four representatives; the government appointed one chair who also had four votes. This institution was dissolved in the early 1980s. In hindsight, it is easy to see how employers and workers differed in their views of the new labor institutions created in the 1960s and early 1970s. For employers, these signaled the deepening of unnecessary state and worker involvement in private employer decisions. In the Allende period, they were seen as signs of an increasingly radical working class intent on illegally seizing private property and installing communism at the workplace. For workers, however, the beginning of real participation and greater collective negotiating power in the factory were historic advances. Piñera’s design of the 1979 labor code took shape with the memory of the Allende years still fresh. Since 1924 labor unions had consistently gone the “political road,” turning to the state for solutions to their grievances. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, the CUT (then the Central Unica de Trabajadores) offered the best example of this at the national level. The same turn to governmental authorities was also practiced by most plant-level unions, federations, and confederations over more localized disputes and grievances until 1973. However, with the

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introduction of the Piñera legislation, labor unions started to focus much more on the plant level, not because they wanted to, but because they had little choice. Paradoxically, it was this very “narrow” union activism that not only led to better organized and more cohesive unions, stronger collective bargaining, and union growth, but also to the resurgence of labor movement opposition to Pinochet in 1983 and up through 1988, the year of the plebiscite (Frías 1994; Frank 1995). The Piñera labor legislation had important and to some degree unintended consequences. The 1979 changes limited workers’ ability to negotiate favorable contracts with their employers, forced them to follow extremely complicated and narrowly defined bargaining processes, and decreased their opportunities for creating a strong network of organized unions. However, by decoupling party-union ties, unions were forced to rely much more on their own ideas, creativity, and negotiating skills. This reduced the level of politicization within the labor movement and among rank-and-file union members and individual unions at the workplace, at least on a daily and practical level. It was simply no longer effective, in fact it was dangerous, to combine political and workplace issues. Whereas Piñera, in particular, and the Pinochet regime in general saw themselves as apolitical and nonideological, they were of course political and ideological. And yet their ideological belief that state-labor relations or capital-labor relations can be purely economic became the seed for a new labor paradigm in democratic Chile, one that reflected a direct ideological connection between the Piñera labor legislation and the new democratic governments’ outlook on the purpose, scope, and limits of labor institutions. The Aylwin labor legislation has important differences and parallels to the first labor laws enacted after 1924 and to the 1979 Plan Laboral of the military regime. One of the fundamental reasons for reforming the labor laws in the 1990s was to institutionalize a framework that would prevent renewed polarization of antagonistic interests between employers and workers. Knowing that employers would not fundamentally alter their behavior toward workers and unions without the control of the state, government authorities in 1924 as well as in 1979 and again in the 1990s were fully aware that labor unions would sidestep the legal restrictions and attempt to defend their interests and demands by other means, should that other strategy appear to have greater potential for success. Therefore, the Aylwin reform of the early 1990s was also an effort by the new democratic government to create institutions that would allow the state to regulate and oversee labor-management relations. The new democratic government sought to accomplish simultaneously two seemingly contradictory tasks. On the one hand, the state was taken out of labor-capital relations (this was the so-called “decongestion of the state”) and, on the other hand, the state promised that organized labor would be granted much more participation in industrial relations (the so-called “equality between

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labor and capital.”) Perhaps the primary purpose was to obtain or to induce social peace. The greater the legitimacy of the labor laws, the greater the likelihood that employers and unions would abide by them, and the better the chances for peaceful coexistence. Here it is important to remember that even though Pinochet was no longer president, he was not gone. The Constitution allowed him to exercise his senatorial vote. More important, he remained commander-in-chief of the armed forces and thus a powerful threat to the new democracy should he perceive that democracy was going “too far” politically, economically, and in terms of any attempts to bring him or the military to justice for human rights violations. Chileans did not have to look very far; the experience of neighboring Argentina was a constant reminder of how difficult it was to bring justice to those who had suffered under the military regime. Other aspects of the new legislation under Aylwin and Lagos distinguished it from previous labor laws. The 1924 laws were enacted by the Arturo Alessandri regime (1920–25, 1932–38) under pressure from rebellious military officers who were not so much interested in solving the social question as in weakening and controlling the hostile working class. The Pinochet government decreed the laws in 1979 under an authoritarian regime. This leaves the reforms of the 1990s as the only ones implemented during a democratic regime.6 This distinction makes them all the more meaningful and brings our discussion of authoritarian legacies in new democracies to center stage. The 1924 and certainly the 1979 laws were created in the spirit of acquiring more state control over the working class, limiting its ability to disturb or threaten social peace and, most important, reconciling its perceived hostile interests by integrating it into an institutionalized system of labor-management relations. The 1990 legislation presumably intended to pry open a very closed and unequal industrial relations system to strengthen workers’ organizations and to make this system fairer and more equal. Thus, from a historical perspective, the 1990 reforms to the labor legislation included elements that were difficult to reconcile with each other. The dilemma for the new democratic governments was, on the one hand, to rewrite labor laws that would maintain state control over the organized working class and, on the other, to gain employers’ and workers’ recognition and support for social concertation and to provide workers with a more effective tool to defend their interests.

The New and Not So New Democracy in Chile: Reform of Labor Legislation The defining principles of the current labor relations system exhibit the same characteristics as the Plan Laboral. Among others, these principles

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seek to prohibit interference by unions in the labor market; protect to an extreme degree the discretionary powers of employers . . . [and] maintain a wage and salary system that, with minimal regulations, is based on economic theories guided by market-driven cost analyses. . . . In this sense, with the possible exception of the reform of the first democratic government which eliminated the ninety-day [sic] maximum strike length, all the rest of the reforms have had no effect whatsoever on the basic functioning of the economic system. This is evidenced by the concrete and absolute inefficiency of the [labor] reforms as well as by the progressively diminishing significance of collective bargaining, which today [in Chile] is merely a symbolic right. (Feres 2008, 32–33) This remarkable assessment by an advisor to the CUT and one of the leading participants in labor reform in democratic Chile captures the essence of the authoritarian legacy in Chile. To understand this assessment requires going back to 1989 and the transition to democracy. By the time the Chilean labor movement approached the spring of 1989, a lot had been accomplished. After many failed attempts, Center-Left political parties (mainly associated with the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, but not the Communist Party) had overcome their differences and created the Concertación, which ran as a united coalition against the two other major electoral blocs, the Pinochet right (Unión Democrática Independiente) and the more moderate right (represented by Renovación Nacional). Importantly, the labor movement had been instrumental in getting the Concertación parties to that point of unity (Frank 1995). After nineteen years of dictatorship, Pinochet stepped down as president. The Concertación prevailed in elections for a new democratic government in March 1990. The new government, led by Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, announced that it would pursue one of its biggest campaign promises: reform of the Pinochet labor legislation. Over the next two years intense negotiations between the Concertación government and the political opposition in Congress took place. The government also negotiated with CUT as the peak labor movement body. These exchanges led to a series of reforms of the Pinochet labor laws.7 Yet, although the Aylwin government undertook the most significant reforms of all the Concertación governments, even these fell short of expectations. For instance, the Piñera code denied bargaining rights to many categories of workers and to unions in many sectors. The Aylwin reform did not make any attempt to extend collective bargaining rights to important sectors of the Chilean economy, such as the new commodity export sectors and to workers organized in “transitory unions,” which included port, construction, and agricultural workers.8 When the new democratic government came to power, collective bargaining was narrowly defined and flawed.9 Collective bargaining was narrowly defined

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because unions could negotiate only over wage readjustments, but not working conditions. Yet it was also flawed because it did not entail a real negotiation over wage readjustments. In Chile there are two types of collective bargaining. One is the contrato colectivo, the other the convenio colectivo. Under the contrato unions can strike, while they are prevented from doing so under a convenio. Even though acting through the convenio also implies a collective union decision, it sends a clear signal to the employer that the union has decided not to enter into long or tiresome negotiations. Instead, under the convenio the union accepts the employer’s readjustment offer (likely forthcoming, hence the union’s decision to go this route), but if it does not like the readjustment, there is little it can do since the union cannot strike under a convenio. The only way to negotiate and possibly go on strike is by choosing the contrato colectivo. But since 1990 there has been a significant trend among Chilean unions to opt for a convenio (Feres 2008). It is possible that the move from contrato to convenio indicates a weakening effect. Faced with employer intransigence, unions may increasingly send out nonconfrontation signals to employers. It is also possible that the increased use of convenios reflects improved relations between unions and employers. Not all employers were staunchly pro-Pinochet (Bartell 1992; Montero 1990). Although it is difficult to explain this preference for convenios with any certainty, the most likely explanation must be sought in the employer’s ability to counter a union’s threat to strike. Labor reform under Aylwin included the elimination of the sixty-day maximum strike length. In theory, and assuming the union has enough financial savings, it could opt for a strike that could last a long time. Yet in practice, employers are able to thwart such a move because the cornerstone of the new laws on collective bargaining is the employer’s last offer to the union. If this offer includes the same stipulations as those of the old contract and if, additionally, wage readjustment is at least at the level of inflation, the employer has the right to replace striking workers from the first day. And although the new law stipulates that those who participated in collective bargaining could not be fired from the ten days prior to the presentation of the unions’ new contract until the signing of the contract by both parties, in practice from the moment a strike begins workers do not know whether or not they will be able to keep their jobs. Should the employer’s last offer not include identical stipulations and the necessary wage readjustment, the employer can only replace strikebreakers after the fifteenth day, and workers can start joining the nonstriking labor force after the thirtieth day. Even if workers opt to cross the picket line, the employer has the right, regardless of the offer made, to reject those workers and continue to rely on strikebreakers. By law every worker who has participated in a strike should be allowed to return to the workforce once the strike is over. In practice, however, this does not happen. The new law simply requires employers to “justify” the dismissal

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of workers, which they usually do by arguing that dismissal is “necessary” for economic reasons. An employer’s final decision is extremely difficult to contest. Even though there is legal recourse through the Dirección del Trabajo (Work Directorate) or labor courts, few workers opt to do this in court.10 In the end the employer can only be forced to pay additional compensation. Therefore, employment protection during strikes is effectively eliminated by the employer’s de facto unrestricted power to fire workers. The Frei government made no attempt to revisit this aspect of the labor reform, nor did the first Bachelet government. Only Lagos addressed it. With the Lagos reform, the employer’s right to replace strikers from day one is maintained provided the employer offers a wage readjustment at the level of inflation. Should the employer decide to replace strikers, he or she has to pay a fine of approximately $100 to every worker who is replaced. Moreover, employers have to reveal at least three months prior to collective bargaining all necessary information that unions or negotiating groups require to prepare their new contract demands. Specifically, unions have the right to request from the employer financial statements, including the labor costs of all departments. The employer also has to hand over information with regard to investment plans. Although somewhat vague, this stipulation does provide unions with more insight into company finances though it still does not give unions greater power in collective bargaining. There is also some improvement in employment protections for collective bargaining as well as for regular employment periods. Should a labor court decide that a dismissal is not justified the worker or the employee has to be reinstated. Previously, the employer had to pay severance but could not be forced to rehire the worker. All workers involved in collective bargaining now enjoy one month’s job protection from dismissal once the new contract is signed. The maximum period of severance pay is eleven months, but with the new reform it must be paid in one lump sum and can no longer be paid over an extended period of time. Just prior to its departure the Lagos government introduced a new system of unemployment insurance, which Congress passed in April 2001. Plans for unemployment insurance had first emerged in 1992, but neither Aylwin nor Frei were able to make any progress. After nine years of negotiations between CUT and the major employer association, the Confederación de la Producción y del Comercio (CPC), the law was finally introduced into Congress and approved. Unemployment benefits are now paid for a maximum of twelve months and are financed by the employer, workers, and the state. This insurance does not cover workers retroactively. Unlike collective bargaining, where unions had sought an extension of their rights, with severance pay and unemployment insurance workers sought to

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protect an existing right. The first Frei government introduced severance pay in the mid-1960s in order to protect workers from dismissal. Should a worker be fired, the employer had to pay severance of one month’s pay per year on the job. The Plan Laboral of 1979 reduced the maximum severance pay to five months and effectively gave employers the right to fire workers at will since the justification for dismissals was abolished. Unions staunchly opposed this, but there was nothing they could do. The Aylwin reforms increased severance to eleven months but were strongly opposed by employers who considered this an unnecessary introduction of labor market inflexibility. As a result, currently there are two unemployment schemes, the old but reformed severance pay and the new unemployment insurance system. Both have their shortcomings (Carnes 2009), yet because each side (employers, unions, and the state) has a vested interest in one or the other, no effort has been made to reorganize unemployment insurance more systematically in Chile. Although some progress has been made in Chile in terms of reducing poverty—introducing pensions to previously excluded populations (Carnes 2009), initiating a new unemployment scheme, and even according wage increases to many workers—much remains to be done. The promise of “growth with equity” has yet to appear.11 By many accounts, the Chilean labor market is highly precarious because it is too flexible (Winn 2004; Sehnbruch 2009; Feres 2008; Frank 2004; Stillerman 2004; Drake and Jaksic 1999; M. Cook 2007). There are no signs that this is going to change in the near future. Then as now, employers have a clear advantage over unions and workers in terms of collective bargaining power. Moreover, employment conditions for a significant portion of the Chilean labor market have worsened. Precisely because employers have been able to operate in a flexible labor market, workers have suffered the consequences. Outsourcing and subcontracting by private firms together with privatization of state sectors such as the copper industry have become defining features of the Chilean labor market and economy (Agacino, González, and Rojas 1998; Agacino and Echeverría 1995; López 2008). These developments call into question the degree of democracy for workers in democratic Chile.

Democracy for Whom? The Role of Ideological Legacies For the Concertación governments, a modern industrial relations system was understood to have an instrumental character, to serve as a means to an end, with the end being the ability to avoid conflict. Unlike in many central and northern European countries, however, where labor-capital relations are relatively consensual

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as a result of an industrial relations system that gives both sides decision-making power, where unions enjoy collective bargaining power and capital is willing to share information with workers, in Chile state-labor-capital relations were not able to move in any significant way beyond the level of intentions. As long as labor and capital were willing to maintain a minimum of dialogue (which they did), and as long as the country was not plagued by too many strikes (it was not), the Concertación had little to worry about and hence it did not share labor’s demands for more substantive progress. This minimalist conception of an industrial relations system was well expressed by Labor Minister René Cortázar in 1991. In that year, the CUT had already complained to Aylwin that it was deeply disappointed over the level of labor participation. Looking back at the year and the apparent progress of state-labor-capital relations, Cortázar stated, “last year we discussed readjustments, this year we’ll add unemployment insurance. In this way, we are establishing procedures to accomplish participation.” Yet the CUT and the Chilean Communist Party disagreed with the government’s assessment. They argued that what had happened was anything but participation, let alone the accomplishment of concrete goals. As one adviser to the CUT said, “There has not been on the part of the government a clear decision to grant . . . room for decision making. Moreover, there is a tendency to reduce the concept of concertation to what has been produced in practice: a mixture of partial and strictly instrumental results, with a vague notion of dialogue which likens social concertation to the ‘politics of agreement’ ” (Alburquerque 1991, 13). This understanding of social concertation was first demonstrated by Cortázar and continued by labor ministers in the Frei and Lagos administrations. Another factor that accounts for the democratic government’s instrumental view of industrial relations is an excessive concern for consensus, which is in turn related to the structure of government set up in 1990.12 The so-called supra-party governments of Aylwin, Frei, and Lagos enjoyed unprecedented autonomy from and influence over the coalition’s political parties. This is another reflection of what Concertación politicians would call “the lessons learned from the past,” where the state was often held hostage by the party or party coalition in power. Aylwin, Frei, and Lagos all agreed that party political differences should be kept out of the executive branch as much as possible. Thus, the subordination of political parties to a strong government produced a handful of key political players who enjoyed great decision-making power (Fuentes 1999) and who shared a belief in pragmatic, nonideological, and efficient “priority politics” (Huneeus 2000). To the extent that a labor reform might produce tension and not consensus among labor, capital, and the state, it is logical that reform would be displaced from the government’s agenda. What is surprising is that the governments got

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away with this strategy in a country where labor parties have a history of defending workers’ interests. The concerns of the labor movement were not irrelevant to the parties of the coalition. Precisely because the labor movement had played a supportive role in defeating Pinochet it was not considered a “risk factor” by the incoming Aylwin government and the political parties of the Concertación. Therefore, while the social question was important to Christian Democrats and Socialists, it was not a particularly worrisome concern. What worried them more were the political Right and employers, because their opposition in Congress and their refusal to invest in the economy could seriously jeopardize the transition to democracy. This in turn could produce political and social instability, which the armed forces under Pinochet—himself a vital ally of the Right and capital—might interpret as a return to the final days of the Allende regime in August-September 1973; hence, they might once again perceive the need to rescue the country from itself. Just as much or maybe more than the developments during the transition years, the long dictatorship is primarily responsible for what came later. Even before Aylwin assumed the presidency in March 1990, particular understandings of the politics of the transition and the causes of the breakdown of democracy in Chile had already taken shape among members of the democratic opposition. For instance, one of the most important themes in the transitions to democracy literature is the degree to which labor can or even should “rock the boat.” Too much rocking could jeopardize the transition. Therefore, “demand moderation” was a theoretically useful ingredient for the successful completion of the transition as well as the establishment of the new democracy. Unsurprisingly, demand moderation was a major concept circulated by the Aylwin government in its dealings with the CUT through the various offices of the Ministry of Labor and the many union advisory bodies. Any talk of social concertation was lip service to keep labor in line with the government’s plan for redemocratization, political and social stability, and economic continuity. Such understandings foreclosed alternatives that might have resulted in new ways of building a democracy, ones that would include real participation by employers and workers. In this sense, there were plenty of “missed opportunities” (Garretón 2003). In Chile, therefore, the ideological legacy of the Pinochet regime “translates” into the type of democracy envisioned by democratic political elites. These ideological factors speak to a political will about what is and what is not possible or desirable in a new democracy. Authoritarian legacies are also a product of the new democratic governments in Chile, to the extent that these governments have failed to remove them. The continued existence of a labor market that strongly favors employers must be understood, paradoxically, as a result of the collective wisdom—undoubtedly

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influenced by many painful memories of past mistakes—of the political leaders of the Concertación governments. For many workers and especially for many unions, these legacies signify concrete limitations on their ability to raise wages and demand better working conditions. Unfortunately and paradoxically, too many Concertación politicians, especially those who were in powerful decision-making positions from 1990 to 2006, have remained in the past both in terms of their ideology and their political agenda (Schumpeterian and elite, narrow transition, and limited democracy), regardless of the discourse about new economic realities facing Chile in the twenty-first century. The “caudillista tendencies” of new democracies (O’Donnell 1996), exemplified by democratic leaders who claim to have a new understanding and appreciation of democracy, are a useful if disturbing reminder that not all is new in Chile’s democracy.

A Modern Labor Movement? Why did the CUT not pressure the government and employers for more concessions with regard to social concertation in general and the reform of the labor legislation in particular? Can one deduce from the outcome of the reform, and from CUT’s critique of it, that the labor movement had attempted all it could but was unable to prevent the outcome? What are the consequences of failed social concertation for the CUT and the labor movement? In hindsight, it is easy to answer why the CUT consented to framework agreements that may have had symbolic value but did not have a lot of punch, at least not for organized workers.13 At the time, barely three months into the first democratic regime, it seemed as if these agreements could really be the beginning of new industrial relations in Chile. In addition, the agreements were seen in their historic moment—that is, given the CUT’s role in the demise of the authoritarian regime and the return to democracy, its leaders had reason to believe that the CUT was indeed going to play a major role in the democratization process. This aspect cannot be separated from yet another historical dimension of state or party-labor relations in Chile. CUT leaders had reason to believe that their historical party allies were serious and honest in their promises to establish concerted action in Chile. The first sign that things were not going well for the CUT in the new democracy appeared with the results of the December 1989 elections. Because of Pinochet’s designated senators and the binomial electoral system,14 the rightist opposition obtained a majority in the Senate. Hence, CUT leaders understood that the government needed to “rationalize its agenda,” but what they did not expect was that the new democratic government, fearing that its plans for

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“democracy on the installment plan” might be delayed or derailed, quickly took the reform out of the hands of the CUT and CPC (the employers’ confederation) and decided unilaterally to take it to Congress, where a quicker compromise solution was worked out within a year. Additionally, CUT’s political-ideological identification with the political parties in government led its leadership to identify too much with the success of the Aylwin government, even if that meant—paradoxically—a loss for their organization. Therefore, while political identification with the Concertación parties may count as a reason for labor’s moderation, there is yet another ideological factor at work here. The union leadership, too, had drawn lessons from the past, including its mistakes. This goes a long way to explain the CUT’s insistence on consensus and cooperation rather than dissent and confrontation, even when this would have been necessary or opportune. The CUT may have been unwilling to press for more concessions, but it was also unable to do so precisely because it lacked the necessary strength to apply pressure. This lack of strength was due to the nature of Chile’s decentralized labor movement. Top-down decisions were difficult to impose on local union leaders. Therefore, the CUT could not simply call for strikes or protests, unless these were meant to be illegal. Few if any plant-level leaders were willing to risk having their rank and file fired, which left massive mobilizations as the only alternative. Yet the CUT knew full well, at least until 1994, that few plant-level leaders would follow its call to arms. This explains why the CUT leadership sometimes threatened to but never actually called on its rank and file to protest against the government. In essence, this was a strategic game played by both the CUT and the government. On the one hand, as long as the CUT did not have to expose its weakness, it could continue its threats, which the government knew it could not deliver on. Yet it was also in the interest of the government to respond somewhat to these threats and not ignore them, so as not to reveal CUT’s weakness. Such a move would have entailed a political cost for the government and in all likelihood would have forced it to make concessions to employers as well. The CUT has not yet found a solution to this dilemma. By the end of the 1990s, the CUT’s relevance as an important player in the new democracy had sharply declined. This outcome was not inevitable, but the CUT would have had to carry out much more organization building than it did to avoid such a result. Early in the Aylwin government, the CUT predicted that it would have one million members within a couple of years. This was by no means unrealistic, and in order to reach that number, the CUT would have had to more than double its membership. The circumstances were unusually favorable: a growing economy, the euphoric climate among a majority of the population, the appearance of a labor-friendly government, and national attention to the “social question” in general and to the “labor question” in particular.

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Yet the CUT failed to reach its goal. In fact, by the end of 1992 the increase in union membership began to slow down. This is all the more dramatic if we compare CUT membership rates to plant-level unions and especially to federations and confederations. Both in terms of rank-and-file membership and number of unions, the labor movement grew throughout the decade. Most important, during the second half of the decade, public-sector unions maintained a high profile of protest and staged numerous illegal and legal strikes, especially around 1996 and 1997. One of these unions, the Colegio de Profesores (school teachers), staged a national mobilization in 1996 that was so impressive that observers compared it to those “the country had not seen since the days of Allende” (Frías 1998, 33). Consequently, while intermediate and low-level union organizations were able to grow spectacularly, the CUT enjoyed only a brief period of growth, which then quickly declined. CUT leaders tended to complain about a labor movement that was unwilling to fight and that had no clear strategies. Rather than reflect the reality of plant-level unions, this false impression reveals the degree of “distance” that the leadership had put between itself and its followers, who increasingly perceived the CUT as “too political, not willing to fight, and elitist” (Frank 2004, 113). Here, then, is a corollary to the ideological legacy that infused the new democratic government. Just like their presumed allies in political parties and in government, CUT leaders had drawn a number of lessons from the past. They now believed their past ideas were either too radical or utopian for their times, unrealistic, or while good in theory, difficult to put into practice, perhaps because of strong opposition from employers and their political allies. Yet it did not have to be this way. During the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Plan Laboral and with the Pinochet dictatorship still in control, unions did not despair in the face of the extremely repressive labor legislation and political situation. They actually managed to get stronger and recruit workers committed to the cause. Why couldn’t the CUT repeat or sustain such a “revival” at the onset of the new democracy? Why were CUT leaders largely content with the new political reality? Perhaps more puzzling, if they were really so opposed to the process, why did they not opt for a different strategy? The easy answer would simply be that despite all public discourse to the contrary, the CUT leadership shared important political and ideological perspectives and visions with the Concertación governments of Aylwin, Frei, Lagos, and Bachelet. In this case, labor and the state are closer to each other than one might think or than they themselves admit, both having inherited the authoritarian regime’s ideological legacy. This is not an unreasonable answer because, after all, what could labor have done differently in the new democracy, and how exactly would workers build

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or contribute to more democracy? Before Pinochet, workers’ primary concerns were often oriented toward plant-level or industry-wide negotiations. Strikes were usually expressions of an economic demand, and only rarely were they political in the sense that they addressed noneconomic aspects, such as education or health care. The fact that legal strikes far outnumbered illegal strikes attests to the fact that workers usually focused more on their immediate best interests and did so with the means given to them as workers or unionists. Here we need to move away from a simplistic though understandable image of the worker-rebel (Landsberger, Barrera, and Toro 1964). But the story takes on a qualitatively different character during the Allende presidency. It is often argued that the entire organized working class in Chile during that time was revolutionary, indeed so much so that the workers themselves contributed to the breakdown of whatever democracy was left in Chile in 1973. Ultimately, or perhaps even from the very beginning of the Allende regime, workers saw democracy as a necessary means to another end (socialism) and not an end in itself. To be fair, it was not just the working class. Unidad Popular politicians as well as Christian Democrats and right-wing parties all perceived democracy as a mere instrument to reach their particular objectives (Valenzuela 1976; Garretón 1987), ultimately all contributing to the bitter end in September 1973.

Conclusion In today’s Chile, legal and ideological legacies from the authoritarian Pinochet regime have negative consequences for workers and unions alike. They raise serious doubts about what exactly Chile is today: A democratic state that is pushing for more—or resisting more—democratization? A significant portion of the Chilean labor force lacks important social rights. Seemingly, twenty-four years after Aylwin assumed power this situation is still acceptable to most of the country’s political leaders. Prospects for further reform of the labor laws inherited from the Pinochet regime are virtually nonexistent. This chapter sought to demonstrate the existence of authoritarian legacies—legal and ideological—in both the new democratic governments’ and the labor movement’s understanding of democracy and their proper role in it. As such, the new democratic governments may be more “comfortable” with these legacies, more so since they were internalized to such a degree that they have become a part of the governments’ and thus the Chilean state’s modus operandi. The ideological legacy as expressed in the new democratic governments’ approach and vision for social concertation is elitist to the extent that it does not allow more participation by civil society, in part because of fears of ghosts from

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a distant past (the populist democracies, the breakdown of democracy), in part because of lessons learned from the recent past under Pinochet. These legacies are thus layered in historic episodes, and retrieved in the democratic present in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways. As far as the labor movement is concerned, a certain “discomfort with democracy” has persisted ever since the return to democracy. Lessons from the past have taught them that too much politicization, too much political party interference in union and worker business, is ultimately self-defeating, even if such a relation does occasionally produce significant benefits. Yet the experiences during the long dictatorship years have also left a mark on the Chilean labor movement. Two are most significant: democracy is not just a means to an end, and real autonomy from political parties does have favorable consequences; in this case unintended, because autonomy was imposed on both the labor movement and the political parties. Yet for both the new democratic governments and the Chilean labor movement, objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear. In other words, Pinochet and the authoritarian regime may be gone, but their legacy endures. This legacy places concrete limitations on workers’ ability to raise wages and demand better working conditions. Because of this legal and ideological legacy, the labor movement today has few options other than appealing to the new democratic governments. The labor movement pursued this approach from 1990 to 2006, but the results were disappointing. As a new Center-Left government takes power, workers and trade unions still face the daunting task of confronting and overcoming these legacies and closing the democratic deficit they created in the Chilean workplace.

10 TRANSFORMATION WITHOUT TRANSITION China’s Maoist Legacies in Comparative Perspective Mary E. Gallagher

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; C. 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

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2012; Kennedy 2010; Fligstein and Zhang 2011). Although no analyst of global labor trends researches the Asian region without reference to the “rise” of China and its “emergence” as a global manufacturing power, we do not find many comparative scholars linking China’s developmental success to its labor institutions and politics, a major focus of the varieties of capitalism framework. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, comparative analysis between China and transitional countries continued, with some focus on labor institutions (for example, see Chen and Sil 2006), but comparison has become less frequent as the respective political institutions have diverged. Electoral politics and links between parties and unions are the new foci of studies of postsocialist labor while China’s labor politics are still embedded in the strictures of a single-party state. This chapter discusses China’s labor institutions and the legacies of the Maoist period using concepts and theories from the comparative field while not ignoring China’s somewhat unique current situation of sustained rule by a Communist Party since 1949 accompanied by radical economic changes since 1978. General theories and concepts should be used not only to highlight how China differs from countries that incorporated labor unions very early or from countries that underwent political and economic transitions simultaneously in the 1980s or 1990s, but also to underscore how, despite these differences, some of the challenges that workers and labor unions face emanate from global processes of industrialization and economic competition. Although China is often set apart from other cases because of its lack of political transition, this treatment underscores the similarities that exist despite this difference. In addition to global pressures, China also shares some important postcommunist legacies with Eastern Europe, for example, ideological exhaustion and distrust of state-controlled institutions. China’s lack of political transition, however, and the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also mean that Maoist institutions continue to influence directly China’s labor politics today. Despite some important institutional similarities from the legacies of communism and similar economic pressures emanating from global economic trends, recent trends in Chinese labor politics also indicate the rising activism and contentiousness of a workforce with newfound political, economic, and social power. The instability, reflected in strike patterns and increased legal activism, has put pressure on the state to pass more protective and inclusive labor legislation, to enhance the power of the only legally sanctioned labor organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), and to expand campaigns to unionize firms in the private and foreign sectors. In some ways, the Chinese labor movement’s situation holds more potential when compared to the declining union density and the beleaguered labor movements of many developed democracies. However, the potential future political role for labor is linked to the

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instability endemic in contemporary Chinese society and the increasingly apparent unsustainability of China’s developmental model (Gallagher 2014). The legacies discussed below help account for the success of China’s transformation from a poor, isolated Communist country to the global powerhouse that it is today, but the relative stability of these legacies is in question, as the fundamentals that undergirded them are also in flux. Changing demographic trends in China are providing new opportunities for greater bargaining power and more political space. The regime’s concerns about widening inequality provides elite support for public policies that support labor, such as increasing wages and better social welfare coverage. Finally, the next generation of migrant workers from the Chinese countryside is better educated, more technologically astute, and more demanding than earlier generations. All of these trends challenge the sustainability of the current development model, which relies on low-cost migrant labor and starkly unequal treatment of urban and rural citizens.

Transformation without Transition: The Role of Legacies In a book about the role of authoritarian legacies on post-transition labor politics, we must acknowledge that the Chinese case has continually defied predictions of political change, revolution, or breakup. China was one of the first socialist countries to experience widespread social mobilization in 1989 and only a few years later, it was one of only a few socialist regimes left standing. Unlike other cases presented in this book, authoritarian institutions in China are not “legacies” in the formal sense, as they are still functioning albeit alongside a transformed economy and society in terms of firm ownership, employment, personal life, and political socialization. For this reason, this chapter focuses on three legacies of the Maoist period, traces their transformation through the reform period, but ultimately shows how important continuities between these two periods exist despite the profound institutional and social changes that have also taken place. Three key legacies of the socialist era on contemporary labor politics are the dualistic nature of China’s labor market, the CCP’s incorporation and control of worker representation via the official trade union, and the importance of vertical authority relations at the workplace. The structure of the labor market affects the distribution of employment across the population, the mechanisms used to manage employment flexibility and security, and the structure of compensation and benefits, both by individual employers and the state through legislation and institutions. The Communist Party’s political control over the union is a critical factor for understanding how labor interests are or are not incorporated into the

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political process, how representation of workers is or is not realized, and how collective worker organizations are or are not permitted to operate. Workplace authority relations constitute the workplace manifestation of these higher-level institutions, but they also reflect cultural and social practices, as the workplace is the most intimate reflection of power dynamics between employers and the employed. These power dynamics are not merely a reflection of the market for labor, but are mediated by political institutions, which place limits on the commodification of labor. I argue that these legacies are critical to explain the relative stability and success of the economic model put into place in China after 1989 when political reform was taken off the table while economic reform sped up and deepened. This economic model was a mixture of East Asian developmental state policies (an activist state with reliance on export industrialization) and labor subordination via the Leninist system of party control over trade unions and the suppression of collective organizations outside this rubric. In addition to the maintenance of the older system of socialist “transmission belt” control, Western institutions have been selectively adopted, including individualized labor relations and contract labor relations via the revived legal system. Although China’s success has much to do with its initial conditions, especially the relative proportion of the population still in rural agriculture and left out of the socialist welfare state, China’s transformation from an autarkic, planned economy to an interdependent economy built on trade and foreign investment was smoothed by the stabilizing force of these legacies. The dualistic labor market facilitated China’s adoption of export-led industrialization by opening up untapped rural surplus labor for employment in coastal development zones. Rural migrant workers in the “workshop of the world” were not formally recognized as part of the working class by the state until 2003. Until then the state maintained an ideologically driven division between the urban working class and rural migrant workers. This division prevented migrant workers’ inclusion in the ACFTU and restricted ACFTU attempts to protect or organize migrants.1 Exploitation and substandard working conditions were easier for a socialist state to tolerate when those working in the factories were not part of the working class. Reforming the economy via these new private and foreign sectors also insulated the state and collective sectors, which employed the vast majority of urban workers until twenty years after the onset of reform. The Leninist trade union system has closed off independent organizing and representation of workers. Activism outside this system is either spontaneous and fleeting or co-opted into the system so that the party can manage and curtail challenges to its authority. Finally, China’s reliance on legal individualism via the individual labor contract system reinforced and built on the strong hierarchical authority relations already in place at socialist workplaces. Managerial despotism in the

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reform era took advantage of an atomized and fragmented workforce that had long ago learned to cultivate vertical relations with party and managerial leaders in the absence of meaningful collective institutions such as the trade union and worker assemblies (Walder 1986).

Labor Market Institutions: The Ongoing Role of Dualism The most critical legacy inherited from the prereform period is the dualistic nature of China’s labor market. In the Maoist period, when a labor market did not exist in a formal sense, administrative dualism was strictly enforced by the hukou system, a system of household registration that denied rural citizens the ability to migrate or leave the agricultural sector, and the administrative system of job assignment, which strictly limited labor mobility even among urban workers (Wang 2005; Chan and Buckingham 2008). These legacies have been partially reformed over the past thirty years of reform. First, the state has relinquished its administrative role in employment. Local labor bureaus no longer match graduates to employment positions; in most cases labor markets function for employment searches. The household registration system has also been relaxed to allow rural residents the right to reside temporarily in urban areas for employment. Rural to urban migration has exploded and labor mobility has increased dramatically. Labor market dualism persists, however, as does persistent urban bias in social policy (Meng 2012; Cai and Chan 2000). Moreover, the widespread growth of labor subcontracting may also indicate a new, more pernicious type of labor market dualism that continues the urban bias in Chinese state policy despite new urbanization policies that allow for some degree of social and educational mobility through hukou reform and more inclusive social welfare policies. The household registration system (hereafter “hukou”) was put into place during the high socialist era of the late 1950s though it has corollaries in the imperial and republican periods (Wang 2005; Solinger 1999; Cheng and Selden 1994). It continues to have a large impact on the life chances of Chinese. This system creates an identity and a place for each individual citizen in the country. It divides people by locality (where they are from) and by identity (whether that place is rural or urban). For example, a person born in an outlying rural district of Chongqing (a provincial-level city in western China) would be designated by the place (Chongqing) and the district (rural). Children of migrant parents inherit their status even when they are born in urban areas. Since the 1950s, the hukou has been extremely critical in dictating the benefits and entitlements doled out by the state, dividing rural and urban citizens into two separate and

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unequal welfare systems. Even though the hukou system has been significantly relaxed and amended over the reform period, it remains the single most important institution affecting labor mobility and employment. The hukou system’s genesis in the late 1950s is connected to China’s economic transformation to a planned economy focused on heavy industry and fueled by investment surplus from the agricultural sector. The Chinese population, at that time overwhelmingly rural, was cut into two. The urban population was absorbed into the planned economy, built on state and collective enterprises with extensive social welfare obligations. Rural citizens were included in the rural commune system with much fewer welfare entitlements except access to rural land (Cheng and Selden 1994). Although this change had immediate catastrophic impact on rural citizens during the famine that followed the ill-fated Great Leap Forward (1958–60), it also had long-term negative impacts on rural citizens’ mobility and their access to employment and social insurance in the reform era. The hukou system was gradually relaxed in the 1980s and 1990s to tolerate large-scale migration of rural residents to cities for employment in labor-intensive industry, low-level services, and construction. However, the hukou has remained in place as a barrier to full and legal permanent migration of most rural residents. In other words, rural Chinese may live for long periods of their life working in cities with little hope of ever becoming a permanent resident in an urban area. Urban bias in employment and social insurance policies in China has existed since the 1950s when the incoming Communist regime turned its back on its supporters in the peasantry in order to strive for rapid industrialization. Investment in agriculture was reduced while that sector was squeezed to provide greater investment for heavy industry and cheap food to urban residents (Cai and Chan 2000). Social security and welfare were basically granted for the 20 percent of the population that lived in urban areas while rural areas were pushed into relative self-sufficiency and reliance on central government transfers for poorer regions. These differences were further strengthened by the restrictions on mobility and migration. Any normal rural-to-urban migration that might have occurred in the course of normal development was suspended from the late 1950s to the 1980s (Wang 2005; Cheng and Selden 1994). The gradual relaxation of the hukou system opened the low end of the labor market to rural migrants. In most cities, preferential policies were adopted to close out certain types of jobs and certain types of workplaces, reserving them exclusively for local hukou holders. Rural migrants were allowed to become temporary residents of the cities in which they worked, but the labor market remained segmented in important ways to protect urban workers from direct competition (Solinger 1999). Rural migrants also took jobs that urban residents no longer found desirable. As cities began to compete for high-skilled and highly educated

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labor, many cities also developed policies that facilitated greater labor mobility at the top of the labor market, especially for college graduates, with far more restrictions on permanent migration of low-skilled rural migrants (Meng 2012). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rural-to-urban migration increased rapidly as China’s export sectors enjoyed rapid growth, especially after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 (Meng 2012). During this period, significant reform of the urban state and collective sectors was also completed, resulting in massive layoffs in the state sector and a sharp overall decline in public employment. This smashing of the “iron rice bowl” also affected the socialist system of social insurance, which had tied social welfare benefits for most urban residents to their workplace. Almost concurrent with the restructuring of the state sector, the central government also began to reconstruct social insurance programs that relied on social pooling rather than the direct supply of welfare from the workplace. However, China’s pension and medical insurance programs were still tied to formal employment as the programs are funded by joint contributions of employers and employees. These programs were also set up to exclude rural migrants, although in more recent years (since 2006) there has been a push by the central government to develop social insurance programs that cover all workers, including rural migrants, and that are also more portable so as to encourage greater labor mobility between different localities. Despite these recent changes, gaps in social welfare between urban residents and rural migrants remain stark. In the 2010 China Urban Labor Force Survey, less than a quarter of migrant respondents reported receiving social insurance benefits, such as pensions and medical insurance, while over 85 percent of urban respondents received such benefits (Gallagher et al. 2014). In the early reform era, the marked urban bias of the PRC government shifted as migration was permitted to fill new job opportunities in cities, particularly in the growing private and foreign sectors. Differences in benefits and employment security between the state and nonstate sectors made urban residents reluctant to give up their secure state jobs for posts in these new sectors that employed labor contracts and did not necessarily provide the same level of security. The segmentation of the urban labor market became entrenched. Although subsequent reform of the urban public sectors at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s reduced the security of urban workers overall, urban residents continued to enjoy preferential policies for employment and benefits. In many cases, urban laid-off workers preferred to remain unemployed (or semi-employed in the informal sector) rather than take a formal job in the new private sectors and risk losing the benefits of their former state positions (Gallagher 2009). Labor market dualism reinforces inequality of job opportunities and social welfare benefits. It also reinforces divisions between workers even within the

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same skill or educational level. This division among Chinese workers is also one factor in explaining the lack of unity and class consciousness of migrant workers in particular, as they were not even formally considered to be members of China’s working class until 2003 (Pringle 2011). This designation also prevented migrants from joining the ACFTU, and ACFTU policies and advocacy were restricted to urban workers’ issues until the central government approved a new definition of workers to include rural migrants in 2003. Even though dualism and large informal sectors exist in many developing and developed economies, in China the hukou policy made barriers between the two labor markets more rigid and long lasting. In recent years the central government has been more invested in breaking down hukou restrictions to boost interregional labor mobility and reduce inequality. However, local government policies have kept these divisions in place during the 1990s and 2000s to insulate urban workers (somewhat) from the pain of restructuring and reform and to restrict the amount of local funds that would be spent on public goods for nonlocal residents even when migrant workers had lived for several years or decades in the same locality. Alongside the hukou-related divisions of the Chinese workforce, new divisions and stratification have occurred with the rise of labor subcontracting. Employment via an employment agency with reduced salary, welfare, and security burdens became very popular after the passage of the 2008 Labor Contract Law as one means to evade the new law’s protections for formal workers (Gallagher and Dong 2011). Although labor subcontracting is not necessarily replacing hukou-related dualism, it is gradually becoming the more acceptable way for companies to reduce labor costs and retain flexibility (Zhang 2011). As hukou-based differences in policy and law become less acceptable, hiring of lower-level workers via labor dispatch allows dualism to persist. Of course as rural migrants also face disadvantages in educational attainment and social status, it is not surprising that many agency workers are also nonlocal residents. Although there is not one reliable data source for the number of subcontracted workers, government agencies estimate that it may be as low as twenty-seven million or as high as sixty million (Wang 2012). In 2013 the new administration of Xi Jinping announced ambitious plans for rapid urbanization of millions of rural citizens, including existing migrants and rural and suburban residents. From 2014 to 2020, the CCP aspires to transform one hundred million rural migrant workers into permanent urban citizens.2 They also hope to extend social welfare, education, employment, and housing benefits to urbanizing citizens as rapidly as possible. If successful, these changes will greatly impact labor markets and reduce segmentation. More inclusive policies are also likely to exacerbate tensions over scarce resources between new and old urban residents.

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Party Incorporation and China’s Legacy Union The concept of labor incorporation applied to the relationship between the ACFTU and the ruling Communist Party reveals the major facets of the union’s power and its weaknesses. The concept of labor incorporation was developed most extensively by Collier and Collier’s (1991) comparative historical analysis of Latin America. Their period of study is that of “initial incorporation” from “repression to institutionalization, from exclusion to incorporation.” In all cases the end result was the “institutionalization and legalization of an organized labor movement controlled and regulated by the state.” Studies of state socialist labor movements and post-transition labor reforms acknowledge that the type of labor incorporation in state socialist regimes is the most extreme and, as such, is not captured in any of the Latin American cases studied in Shaping the Political Arena (Collier and Collier 1991). As the introduction to this volume argues, unions in Communist regimes pursued state paternalist policies of labor incorporation, which placed the labor movement under a single umbrella and subordinated the leadership and the goals of the labor movement to those of the Communist Party. Although the Chinese labor movement was an active participant in the revolution, after its success the trade union lost political autonomy; it faced no competition; and its role as worker representative was exchanged for one of worker control. The experience of trade unions in socialist countries is initial incorporation by the Communist Party and mobilization of the trade union for revolutionary goals prior to socialist revolution and state-building goals after the revolution. In China, as in other socialist regimes, the labor movement was demobilized during the postrevolutionary period while political repression became more important in the subordination of labor activism that departed from the party’s own agenda, which was at the time usually one of heavy industrialization, economic development, and labor peace (see Perry’s discussion of the fate of Lai Ruoyu, a trade union activist in the 1950s, in Perry 1994). In China, the incorporated labor movement, which covered workers in the urban state and collective sectors, exchanged independent political power for political access and elevated social and economic status, which included lifetime employment security, stable (but low) wages, extensive welfare benefits, and preferential employment and educational opportunities for their children (Walder 1986). The most typical shorthand expression for this Leninist institution is the “transmission belt model.” The union acts as a link between the party and workers, but in a subordinate relationship vis-à-vis the party, which inhibits any independent role of the union as the representative of workers (Ashwin and Clarke 2002; Chen and Sil 2006).

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Out of the three legacies discussed in this paper, this institution is the most unreformed, but in the context of China’ current economy, with vast labor market changes and marked labor unrest, the ACFTU’s position vis-à-vis the party and the state accords it significant “within- system” power. The CCP’s early incorporation of the ACFTU typifies the mixture of control, mobilization, and populism that Communist parties have used to tame labor and to enact policies that benefit certain strata of the working population over others. During China’s reform era, populism and mobilization have shifted and, even at times, waned. At the most critical junctures, during large-scale strikes and periods of labor unrest, the ACFTU is least effective, underlining its anachronistic identity.3 As I detail below, however, it continues to serve critical political functions in the service of the Communist Party and political stability. Studies of the ACFTU have shown its subordinate position, its close connection to the Chinese government, and its inability to adequately represent workers especially at the enterprise level. The failures of the ACFTU have become only more pressing and obvious as the “transmission belt” machinations of the ACFTU continue despite clear signs of labor unrest, including wildcat strike waves, increasing labor disputes, and scandals involving sweatshop labor, forced labor, and copycat worker suicides. The transmission belt model has survived even while the flip side of the agreement—a labor aristocracy for state-sector workers and the “iron rice bowl of urban workers—were eliminated in the late 1990s. Unlike other transmission belt unions that met the challenges of political transition and economic reform simultaneously, the ACFTU has continued its dominance and legally mandated monopoly on organized labor despite massive economic changes (Taylor and Li 2007). A widely disseminated photograph of local trade union officials in fisticuffs with striking Chinese workers at a Honda factory in 2010 aptly captured the problems of China’s anachronistic trade union. Recent articles on the ACFTU detail the challenges of a “fake” union pretending to do real union work. Bill Taylor and Li Qi take up the question of authenticity directly, asking, “Is the ACFTU a real union?” They conclude that the ACFTU is not a real trade union, but rather a bureaucratic arm of the party-state. However, given the importance of international trade unions’ engagement in China and with Chinese labor issues, they advise that international trade unionists should treat the ACFTU “as if ” it were a real union in the spirit of engagement and in the hope of some future political opening (Taylor and Li 2007). Feng has examined the capability of the ACFTU in legal mobilization and in settling strikes (2003, 2010). Although not dismissing the mostly middleman functions that the ACFTU takes in strike settlement, Chen notes that the ACFTU has no role in organizing workers to strike and, in fact, acts most assiduously in getting workers back to work as soon as possible. In

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transmission belt style adjusted to a marketized economy, the trade union plays an important middleman role between the state, the employer, and the workers (Chen 2004, 2010). Jude Howell examines the struggle to make the ACFTU more democratic with enterprise-level elections for trade union officials. She finds that despite good intentions from top ACFTU and party leaders, democratic reforms of the ACFTU at the local level have been thwarted by institutional and interest-based inertia (Howell 2008). Most trade union officials at the enterprise level are not directly elected despite regulations and laws that so specify. Worker trust in and satisfaction toward the enterprise union remains low and the trade union’s role at the enterprise level is usually minimal. In studies of the recent campaigns to conduct collective bargaining and sign collective contracts, researchers have tended to agree that these agreements are formalistic, completed in a top-down manner with little worker input, and often do not go beyond the legal minimums mandated by center and local regulations (Ngok 2008). In comparative studies of trade unions, it is not hard to find unions that are co-opted, bureaucratic, and politically reliant on a stronger and wealthier political party or ruling regime, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate. The ACFTU might lie on the extreme side of measures of dependency and lack of autonomy, but it is not unique historically. Unlike many state-socialist unions in Eastern Europe, which were brought in “on the backs of the Red Army” (Ost, this volume), however, the CCP and the ACFTU are also tied by their shared revolutionary legacy. Lack of independence and autonomy should be analyzed separately from analysis of power or influence. In the paragraphs below, I focus on three aspects of ACFTU power: bureaucratic, policymaking, and symbolic. These powers are related and interconnected. Bureaucratic power comes from its position within the CCP and vis-à-vis other government or nongovernment actors that seek influence on labor issues. The ACFTU’s superior bureaucratic position bequeaths it significant and exclusive rights to certain types of policymaking. Its policymaking power affects the direction of China’s labor legislation, which affects workers across the board even if the union has little role at the enterprise level. Finally, and especially at the grassroots level where the union is most ineffective, the union has significant symbolic power. This symbolic power crowds out other actors. Rather than using sheer repression to keep out independent labor activists, the existence of the ACFTU at the enterprise level creates the appearance of a union. It is “as if ” a union was present, even though in a functional sense no union exists. The ACFTU’s bureaucratic power is a function of its incorporation into the Communist party-state. Collier and Collier’s (1991) distinction between party and state incorporation at the initial period of labor incorporation is helpful to underscore how Communist Party incorporation, while combining aspects

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of both types of incorporation, was often a result of political competition and contestation for support. As part of a revolutionary struggle, it emphasized mobilization over control. State incorporation, related to the need to accommodate strong oligarchic elites, emphasizes control over mobilization. None of the Latin American cases in their study experienced a full socialist revolution as was the case in China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. As with other state-socialist cases in this volume, the ACFTU’s incorporation by the party left open the possibility of state-sanctioned labor mobilization. In the early years of Communist state-building, however, the state emphasized co-optation of the urban working class through the “iron rice bowl.” The urban working class was also protected through the state’s strict control over internal migration, which effectively stopped rural to urban migration from the 1950s to the 1980s. The power of a transmission belt union comes from its connections to both state and party. Following the Colliers’ method of distinguishing party from state control, I emphasize here the importance of CCP dominance (that is, party dominance) over the ACFTU. Although most studies of the ACFTU have linked its bureaucratic power to its function as part of the government bureaucracy, it is important to distinguish analytically whether the ACFTU’s bureaucratic power emanates from the CCP or from the government. The ACFTU’s role and responsibilities in governance and policymaking are bequeathed by its subordinate relationship to the Organization Department of the central CCP. This party bureaucracy controls the appointment system of the government, state-owned enterprises, and mass organizations like the ACFTU, the Communist Youth League, and the Women’s Federation. The relative power and influence of individual trade union officials are the result of their positions within the party in which they almost always serve concurrently (Chen 2010). As a bureaucracy tied to the party, the ACFTU enjoys privileged access to positions of power. As China’s labor problems have grown more complex during the reform period, the CCP has attempted to empower the union as a balance against local governments fixated on growth. The two key mechanisms it has used are (1) placing ACFTU officials high up in the legislative bodies at all levels and (2) allowing the ACFTU to pursue unionization of foreign and private firms and extending membership to rural migrant workers. The CCP uses the power of the appointment system to place ACFTU officials in key government offices. These appointments have increased and grown more systematic during the later reform era. High-ranking ACFTU officials now usually have high-ranking party positions as well as concurrent positions in other bureaucracies in the government. Most often these concurrent government positions are within the legislative bodies (Chen 2010). As capitalist development and ownership diversity grew in China over the later reform period (as did social unrest and labor instability),

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the party has moved to balance out the political system by granting the ACFTU more power against other more powerful bureaucracies at the center and against local governments focused almost exclusively on rapid growth. Although this has not done much to improve the individual status of company-level trade unions, which remain captive to management, the strengthening of the trade union in recent years has had effects elsewhere, most markedly in policymaking and legislation (Liu 2008). Since the 1990s, the ACFTU has played a central role in the passage of new legislation, especially the 2008 Labor Contract Law (Gallagher and Dong 2011). No other institution that purports to represent the interests of either labor or capital was granted a formal seat in the legislative process. Input from the interests of capital or employers was done either by local governments worried about the employment effects of more stringent labor protections, government units such as the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, or outside commentary and lobbying by companies and business associations. Although their influence was not inconsequential as the final version of the law did weaken many of the protections pushed by the ACFTU, the ACFTU’s ability to put these other actors on the defensive came from its exclusive position as the representative of labor interests during the legislative process (Ngok 2008). This power is strongest at the central level because the ACFTU is less constrained by the pressures of economic development and investment felt by local governments, but as the provincial and lower-level unions have also been granted concurrent positions within legislatures at the same level, their role in local lawmaking has also expanded (Cho 2006). In addition to this important role in the formal lawmaking process, the ACFTU was also a powerful player in the thirty-day period of public comment for the draft Labor Contract Law. This law received more than 191,000 public comments, vastly exceeding the level of public attention garnered by other recent laws, even controversial laws such as the draft Property Law. However, many of these public comments were mobilized via the ACFTU bureaucracy, as higher-level unions solicited comments from grassroots units (Gallagher and Dong 2011). This ability to mobilize public opinion is another important aspect of ACFTU’s bureaucratic power. The ability to mobilize public opinion in favor of protective labor legislation has been aided by the second mechanism expanding the bureaucratic power of the ACFTU. Since 2003, the ACFTU has been given the go-ahead to represent the interests of rural migrant workers and to organize grassroots trade union organizations in the foreign and private sectors. A more inclusive ACFTU has reversed the decline in trade union density that followed the restructuring of the state-owned sector from 1998 to 2001. By 2008, the ACFTU had more than 212 million members and an overall union density of 65 percent.4 It is the largest

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trade union in the world, with more members than all other trade unions combined (Qi 2010). Even though numerical strength does not equate with increased autonomy or militancy, the large and growing presence of the ACFTU crowds out other actors who sporadically attempt to address workers’ grievances. Finally, the ACFTU’s presence as the only legal trade union in China requires that whenever a trade union is needed to play a role normally expected of a trade union, the ACFTU steps in. It is inconsequential whether it accomplishes this role well or badly. It is simply important that it does it and, by doing so, takes up space that cannot be taken up by other actors. This applies to union activities such as organizing workers, collective bargaining, and crisis management during strikes and disputes. This symbolic power is the power of being present. Public opinion and worker sentiments are often full of ridicule and mockery for the official trade union. This symbolic power does not grant the ACFTU domestic legitimacy nor does it constitute hegemonic power over workers; it simply exists and closes down opportunities. Compared to brute repression and suppression of unions totally, this is a far superior method. Moreover, the ACFTU gains some degree of international legitimacy by its presence, particularly if international actors do not fully understand the political constraints on the union and its incentives as a bureaucracy within the larger party-state. The symbolic power of the ACFTU as the existing and only trade union in China is all the more critical in the contemporary economy because, unlike the previous period in which different interests between workers, managers, and the state could not be recognized, contradictions and conflicts between labor and capital are no longer denied. But despite this importance and the critical need for new institutions to manage labor-capital conflict in China, such as collective bargaining, legal aid, and dispute resolution, it is striking that most evaluations of the ACFTU work in this regard are negative. Negativity about the union’s work seems to follow a pattern showing that the ACFTU is most highly regarded for its work on new legislation (the most abstract) and less regarded for the formalistic signing of collective bargaining agreements (the most concrete) and other work that constitutes direct representation of workers’ interests vis-à-vis an employer. My emphasis on the importance of the “as if ” presence of the ACFTU draws from Wedeen’s analysis of authoritarian Syria under the Hafez al-Assad regime (Wedeen 1999). Her analysis of the symbolic power of useless or ridiculous ideology is drawn in part from Václav Havel’s depiction of compliance in state socialism. Of course the Chinese trade union is, first and foremost, a typical state-socialist institution that professes to an ideological role that it does not fulfill. Even more so, in a market economy with a vibrant private sector, the trade union falls short and the gap between professed role and real function is more glaring. Wedeen’s analysis is useful for the ACFTU because it is an institution

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that similarly garners little or no respect and little legitimacy. Yet it exists; it plays an important political role; and it crowds out other would-be organizations that might more effectively do the work of a trade union. Its presence at the workplace and then at every level of government serves as a forceful reminder that “representation” and “organization” of workers in China is already complete. Even though the trade union does not do either adequately, its existence closes out other options. (See the co-optation and absorption of NGOs in Guangdong in Cheng, Ngok, and Zhuang 2010.) As with the institutions analyzed by Wedeen and by Havel, the presence of the ACFTU achieves compliance by thwarting the development of independent trade unions but it fails to garner legitimacy. The ability of the ACFTU to enjoy symbolic power without fulfilling its own ostensible goals, as delineated in the 2001 Trade Union Law, is under threat as labor activists, NGOs, and “rights-defending” lawyers have filled the need for more adequate representation of Chinese workers. In a 2014 strike by Lenovo workers in southern China, for example, the local ACFTU stepped in to negotiate a settlement only after a law firm had helped to organize the workers and begin an informal collective bargaining process (Ruwitch 2014). The ACFTU has realized the importance of the “game of numbers” (Qi 2010) by building its membership rolls, but it has not solved the dilemma of representation.

Workplace Authority Relations: From Vertical Authority to Legal Individualism The third legacy is the atomized and fragmented nature of the Chinese workforce at the workplace. The atomization of the workforce is usually attributed to the regime’s postreform emphasis on legal individualism and the individual labor contract system as the key mechanism governing industrial relations. Although legal individualism and neglect of collective organizations and collective mechanisms to regulate labor is a trend globally, China’s adoption of this trend has been particularly successful, especially for a regime that professes to socialist ideology. I argue here that there is a strong connection to the current legal individualism and the system of “vertical authority relations” as described by Walder in his depiction of the Maoist workplace, with individual workers relying on patron-client ties and activist networks to be successful. The emphasis on individual legal rights and the consistent downgrading of collective organization and collective rights has its foundation in the legacy of vertical authority, which also limited horizontal connections between workers, emphasized the power of individual managers over worker welfare, and reduced the likelihood of collective challenges from workers below.

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As mentioned earlier in the discussion about labor market institutions, not all past institutions become legacies. In addition to ending the state’s administration of employment, the Chinese state also destroyed the “organized dependency” of lifetime state employment and “the iron rice bowl” of welfare benefits. With the rise of labor markets and contract employment, there has been a commensurate increase in employment insecurity but also much greater flexibility, mobility, and reward, especially for workers with skills and education (Meng 2012). This difference is important for the legacies that persist because they do not operate in the same environment alongside other institutions that were complementary and often reinforcing. After describing the basic contours of this social institution during the Maoist period, I then turn to its reinvention in the current era. Walder (1983, 1986) argues that vertical dependency via patron-client networks was fostered by a workplace of near total importance for each worker. With extremely limited labor mobility and an enterprise welfare system that provided, at its maximum, employment, medical care, retirement funds, child care, housing, and key basic necessities during times of shortages, the Chinese urban worker was nearly entirely dependent on his workplace for survival. (However, it is also true that he could not be terminated except in very exceptional cases.) In addition to supplying the workers’ material conditions, the workplace was the key basic social unit aside from the family (and in some extreme times, replacing the family); workers’ political and social lives were also monitored and managed there. The lack of mobility and the extreme degree of worker reliance on the workplace for income, housing, and key goods like medical care created a system of “organized dependency” that tied workers to managers. Workers were encouraged to form patron-client ties to higher levels of authority in order to cultivate good relations. The reward and compensation system was extremely subjective and granted individual managers much discretion in awarding bonuses, special benefits, and other perks such as housing. Managers not only rewarded workers for their efficiency and workplace contributions but also for their political behavior and attitude. During much of the Maoist era, political goals and attitude were more important than technical skill or production. This increased the discretion and control that individual managers retained over the workforce. In Walder’s interpretation, traditional Chinese values such as connections, human relations, and emotional ties were strengthened and reinforced by the institutions of communism, leading to “neo-traditional” authority relations at the workplace. In this way, the Chinese socialist workplace was a function of the institutions that it borrowed from the Soviet Union, but these institutions gave rise to behavior that could be identified with traditional Chinese culture, such as the cultivation of network relationships and the importance of hierarchy.

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When urban reforms began in the early 1980s, the socialist institutions of the workplace began to change, but at varying paces and degrees. Perhaps most important, privatization of state and collective firms was not initially pursued. Instead, the government focused on changing the internal practices of the workplace first. Managers were allowed to keep profits over a contractually agreed-upon amount that had to be turned in to the state; enterprises were given more autonomy in setting wage levels and bonuses; and finally, new workers in the system signed term employment contracts instead of entering the previous system of lifetime employment. Although turnover initially remained low, the introduction of the contract system signaled an eventual end to the iron rice bowl. In addition to internal reforms in the public sector, the government also allowed the entry of new firms, both domestic private firms and foreign-invested firms. These firms were regulated separately from the existing public sectors. Over time, competition and institutional friction between the sectors created more pressure on the public sectors to reform to enhance their ability to compete with the new market-based sectors (Gallagher 2005). During this critical period of gradual, yet unrelenting, reform of the socialist workplace, workers’ dependency on the enterprise declined over time. Workers were released from the stricture of lifetime employment. The opening up of the new private and foreign sectors created more and better employment opportunities, especially for those with skills and education. However, managerial discretion and control over workers increased during this period. In terms of nearly every aspect of the workplace, managers had more power, not less, to decide key issues as higher-level government units granted them more room to raise efficiency and profits, what Ching Kwan Lee (1999) called “disorganized despotism” as she traced the decline of state paternalism in state-owned enterprises in the 1990s. As the labor contract system was extended to the entire workforce in 1994, managers were then given the right to negotiate individually with each worker the terms of the employment arrangement. The atomization of the Maoist era that was predicated on socialist control moved almost seamlessly into a new realm of legalistic labor relations based on the individual labor contract. Even though the creation of labor markets and the related expansion in labor mobility also increased the range of choices for workers, their bargaining power was not significantly enhanced given the macro environment of significant surplus labor. Urban surplus labor was exacerbated by the even larger amount of rural surplus labor that existed in the countryside, waiting for an opportunity to get city jobs. Legal individualism, in the context of widespread employment insecurity and surplus labor, reinforced worker alienation and reduced the capacity for collective mobilization. Despite the radical transformation of the Chinese workplace in a relatively short period of time, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, labor

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protest was sporadic and concentrated, never leading to cross-regional strikes or general protest, though some regions experienced significant and large-scale labor protests. The largest and most consequential protests were laid-off workers of the restructured public sectors, but in the end thirty million public-sector workers were let go and employment in the public sector declined dramatically. The two most aggrieved sectors of the workforce, laid-off state-sector workers and rural migrant workers, remained confined in their own repertoires of protest and in their own different articulations of their class character and their relationship to the state as well as the state’s obligations to them (C. Lee 2007). Higher-level state and legal institutions have reinforced this emphasis on legal individualism through policies and tactics that break down collective grievances into individual ones. Although collective handling of a grievance might more effectively tackle a problem that is systematic—for example, if an employer fails to pay overtime or social insurance for his entire workforce—individual handling of these disputes reduces the likelihood of collective action. Given their dual roles as legal and political (party-controlled) institutions, Chinese courts must pay more attention to the threat of social instability when dealing with collective grievances. Collective grievances are routinely broken down into individual disputes (Su and He 2010; Chen and Xu 2012). This is a tactic at every level of the dispute process, including more informal processes of mediation and the more formal channels of arbitration and litigation (Gallagher 2006). The rise of legal individualism in China’s labor relations is part of a broader trend. Anthropologist Yunxiang Yan argues that the “individualization of society” is a consequence of the state’s single-minded quest for modernity (Yan 2010). Individualization ironically began during the high tide of Maoist socialism as the party-state attempted to strip people of their previous connections to family, village, or clan. These connections were to be replaced by an individual’s connection to the party-state and their absorption into state-directed organizations, such as the mass organizations, the work unit, the commune, and the neighborhood committee. As many of these organizations have decayed or been transformed in the market economy, the individual now finds him or herself in an even more extreme situation of individualization via the market and privatization. Yan argues that this process is both liberating and terrifying; for example, it can be socially empowering to youth who are released from the strictures of traditional family obligations, but economically devastating for those who do not have the skills, education, or connections to succeed in the new economy. Although his account mostly focuses on the unfettering of labor markets through the reforms of the socialist institutions of the Maoist period (the freeing up of individuals), we should also not ignore the state’s very active construction of individualizing institutions: the new institutions of the legal system, the individual labor contract, and the

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system of labor dispute resolution, which overwhelmingly emphasizes individual cases over collective ones. These institutions are not accidental, but are important policy choices made by the reformist state. Legitimate and effective collective labor organizations and feasible collective bargaining reforms have not been put into place, though they exist formally within the ACFTU.

Conclusion The legacies of the Maoist period discussed above have been important in smoothing China’s transformation from an autarkic, planned economy to a globally consequential economic superpower. Although the state has not totally retreated, retaining dominant positions in strategic sectors via state ownership and maintaining its central role in labor control and subordination, markets have become vastly more important in dictating employment opportunities. Individuals now have more opportunities, but they also face increased employment insecurity and bear a greater burden of the provision of social insurance. Labor markets, while still dualistic, are becoming more competitive, particularly at the lower end of the labor market (Meng 2012). Labor shortages in many regions have been reflected in rapidly rising wages for migrant workers and increased labor conflict, including legal disputes and strikes (Gallagher et al. 2014). In 2010, copycat strikes in the automotive industry forced Honda to shut down its entire production in China before it reached a collective agreement with workers on wages and other issues. This “strike wave” of 2010 underlined the lacuna in effective institutions for collective representation and bargaining. Although there have been calls for enhanced collective institutions (and even some regional experiments), the state has been reluctant to radically reform the current approach, which relies on the subordinate trade union to act with the local party-state in mediating and “harmonizing” large collective disputes (Su and He 2010; Chen 2012). The state prefers to put out fires as they occur, not to prevent their occurrence, because prevention requires institutional reforms that might empower workers outside the strictures of the transmission belt. As the other chapters in this book show, the global challenges that labor faces are more difficult in the context of strong authoritarian legacies, particularly the legacy of a controlled and co-opted union. The fewer democratic legacies that exist, the less likely will labor be able to adjust to a new global situation that is adverse to collective labor mobilization. As with Russia and Poland, China’s authoritarian corporatism is likely to have lasting effects, encouraging worker distrust in the organized labor movement (see Ost and Crowley, this volume). The legal system’s overreliance on individualized labor relations has already and

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will continue to contribute to an institutional vacuum for collective bargaining and negotiation, including interest-based bargaining. As Caraway (this volume) shows for Indonesia, however, these weaknesses do not necessarily lead to labor quiescence. Perhaps a “post-transition China” would be quite similar to its current situation, following a path common to postauthoritarian regimes of weak collective organizations, spontaneous labor unrest via wildcat strikes, and individualized labor relations through the legal system.

Conclusion

THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF REGIME CHANGE AND LABOR LEGACIES Ruth Berins Collier and Andrés Schipani

The organizers of this volume have focused on a set of interesting and important issues about contemporary political economy. The post–World War II order of economic growth broke down in the 1970s, when the international economy began a remarkable transformation. The multifaceted change has often been referred to as “globalization,” a broad term that on the one hand does political, ideological, and mobilizing work (both for its supporters and its opponents) but, on the other, is not very helpful for political analysis. Specifically, while the term can be endowed with economic meaning (multiple aspects of international economic integration), it gives no hint of the politics of this change, that is, how the interaction of domestic actors brings about economic and policy changes. Indeed, although it had earlier been anticipated that the economic forces of globalization would lead to cross-country convergence, it was later recognized that sociopolitical structures and arrays of actors have been important in effecting variation in outcomes across countries. This book centers on the structures and resources of one important actor, the labor movement, and its capacity to defend itself in the face of the challenges it confronts as a result of greater integration of the international economy in the last decades of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the new century. The book focuses particularly on three world regions where these decades saw not only changes to more market-oriented economic models but also regime change. Countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America underwent regime changes that have generally been regarded as democratic transitions. 217

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The two transformations would seem to point in opposite directions. On the one hand, economic changes privileged—and resulted from the influence of—powerful actors, particularly the strongest sectors of capital, which had the resources to compete internationally. On the other hand, democratic political change might have been expected to empower more popular sectors, those with mobilizational and electoral resources. Against the background of these two transitions, the volume then asks: What are the political resources of unions, which have often been considered at once the best organized lower-class actors and also the losers under the new economic models? The chapters more specifically focus on the role of labor structures and resources that are inheritances, or legacies, of pretransition authoritarian regimes. What are the structural resources and constraints that survived the regime transition, and how do they affect unions’ capacity to preserve or advance workers’ rights and well-being in the globalization era? This volume thus opens an interesting research agenda. It has presented a stimulating line of argumentation and a suggestive set of case studies. With its concentration on in-depth case studies, its focus has been to generate hypotheses within a new causal perspective. The next steps in the research agenda are to undertake systematic comparisons to refine the hypotheses and to move toward hypothesis testing. In this conclusion we offer some comments in an effort to push this agenda forward and provide some guidance for further systematic comparative studies.

Authoritarian Labor Legacies The basic question of this volume is the trajectory of labor institutions across democratic transitions, which, as the editors say, “promise more influence and power for unions.” Yet the puzzle is that there is often substantial continuity in labor traits inherited from the authoritarian regime. As future research seeks to explain further the persistence of these labor traits from the authoritarian past, three points should be borne in mind. First, some of these traits are not “inherently” authoritarian or at least not uniquely instituted by authoritarian rather than democratic regimes—even traits we often associate with labor control. Many democratic countries put at least some limits on the right to strike; for instance, some categories of workers experience considerable limits on their right to strike because they perform a job that is considered an “essential service,” such as doctors or policemen. In a similar vein, in many democratic countries public authorities have the right to intervene in collective bargaining disputes if the parties cannot solve those disputes.

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Provisions that mandate compulsory arbitration or conciliation or cooling off periods under certain circumstances are other examples. The point is that there are degrees of restrictions and controls. It seems clear that some provisions are widely considered “inherently” authoritarian in that they violate some basic right or freedom that has become widely accepted as a part of a democratic regime. If we return to the above example, the right to strike is widely recognized as a democratic right, and provisions forbidding any strike activity could be uncontroversially considered repressive or authoritarian. Not even the Soviet Union legally enshrined a ban on strikes in labor law. However, as mentioned, most democratic regimes, while broadly recognizing the right to strike, nevertheless introduce a variety of restrictions on the use of the strike—up to some point. These restrictions are a means of controlling labor activity at the same time that they may be considered consistent with democratic governance. But here we enter a gray area. Some labor traits of authoritarian governments correspond to controls that also appear in democracies or lie in this gray area. It is thus not an easy matter to distinguish where the line should be drawn to label a trait inherently authoritarian, a fact in light of which one must interpret continuities across democratic transitions. A second point about the authoritarian status of inherited or legacy traits is a further ambiguity that lies in the fact that some provisions or regulations are context specific. The original distinction between “state” corporatism and “societal” corporatism (Schmitter 1974) made the interesting point that similar provisions were initiated by different actors in different contexts, and often with conflicting motivations either to empower or to control unions. It is often the case that a given provision can be implemented in a pro- or antilabor way, a fact that doesn’t depend on the nature of the provision per se, but on the nature or intentions of the agent that implements that provision. It has been argued that many provisions of labor law can be seen as “inducements.” That is, they constitute benefits bestowed on existing unions, but they may nevertheless become mechanisms of control. Again, these provisions are not inherently “authoritarian,” but rather the degree to which control is exercised through inducements is context specific. One example is state subsidy of union activities, which can empower unions, but the possibility of the withdrawal of a subsidy clearly raises the possibility of union dependence on and potential subordination to the state. The actual state-labor relationship, however, cannot simply be read off these possibilities. Rather, depending on other conditions, subsidies may lead to either empowerment or control. Another typical example is the provision for a monopoly of union representation in a given industrial sector. Undoubtedly, authoritarian governments have

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used this provision to prevent the emergence of alternative, more democratic unions that could potentially challenge the hegemony of government-sponsored or government-allied unions. However, monopoly of representation can also provide formidable bargaining power to unions vis-à-vis employers in a context in which governments allow unions to freely negotiate collective bargaining agreements. These ambiguities are apparent in the case of Brazil, where it is striking that against a history of opposition to the “corporatist” labor laws that date to the authoritarian Vargas period, many unions affiliated to the newer, independent CUT, which emerged as a direct challenge to the established monopolistic unions, have nevertheless been reluctant to abolish monopoly of representation once they were able to benefit from the provision in the democratic period (Cardoso, this volume). Third, this example raises the related complication of the distinction between labor traits that are “democratic” and those that are prolabor, such as those that empower unions. These prolabor traits have a resonance with democracy to the extent that they seem to strengthen an organization in a way that distributes power and countervails that of capital and the state. However, two points must be made. First, of course, even authoritarian regimes may pursue some types of prolabor (or proworker) policies and such policies may actually build support for the state rather than countervail it, as in some forms of state corporatism. Second, prolabor traits are not the same as “democratic” in the macro sense of being a fundamental component of a democratic regime, nor in the meso sense of an internal democratic process within unions that gives the choice of leadership or strategic decisions to the rank and file. To some extent, then, the above discussion points to theoretical reasons to expect at least some degree of continuity of provisions from authoritarian to democratic regimes. Future research should explore which provisions are more likely to persist under which economic and political conditions.

Comparative Legacies The volume is primarily concerned with assessing whether legacies inherited from the pretransition authoritarian regime have served as assets or liabilities for workers in new democracies. The chapters in this volume address this question in different ways. Some assess the extent to which a specific legacy shapes contemporary labor politics. This is the case in the Cardoso and Bensusán and Cook chapters, in which they show how the continuity in labor laws in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico had a crucial effect on unions’ power resources. In a similar vein, Lee’s chapter on Korea and Taiwan analyzes how the party-union ties

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inherited from the authoritarian period shaped unions’ internal organization as well as their capacity to form autonomous labor parties after the transition to democracy. Other chapters cast a wider net, examining a multitude of traits inherited from the authoritarian past in a single country and analyzing their impact in the democratic period. For example, Crowley shows how the persistence of a powerful legacy union combined with labor laws that make workers’ collective action incredibly difficult has conspired against the emergence of more militant union confederations in Russia. For Slovenia, Grdešic´ shows how the combination of an ideology of “self-management” among workers and a dominant, reformist legacy union within the labor movement facilitated the adoption of a German-style system of industrial relations. A similar approach is adopted by Caraway, Hutchinson, and Ost in their chapters on Indonesia, the Philippines, and Poland, respectively. Future research should look systematically at the “stickiness” of individual traits, as well as the way they combine in particular cases—or subsets of cases—to produce effects on labor movements. On the basis of material presented in this volume, we now pull out, below, some suggestive commonalities and differences that could form the basis for further investigation. We consider, in turn, labor law, legacy unions, and party-union ties.

Labor Law Labor laws do not show a consistent, overall pattern of either continuity or change after the transition to democracy, partly as a consequence of the diverse array of legal provisions that existed in each country during authoritarian rule. However, certain provisions, such as those that regulate collective bargaining or restrict strike activity, seem to be stickier than others, for example, those mandating monopoly of representation. To understand these patterns, it is important to start by analyzing the nature of labor laws and how they affect union activities. Labor law reveals much about the structure of unions and is a formal expression of state-labor relations (even though it may not reflect the ways it is—or is not—implemented). Labor law, of course, refers to a huge range of provisions, and the editors suggest some of the main dimensions. For present purposes, we start with a basic distinction that earlier research identified as central to a pluralist-corporatist dimension. The distinction is between (1) inducements, consisting primarily of provisions for structuring and subsidizing the labor movement, which are in some sense favorable to labor organizations but which may also be used by a government seeking to control them, and (2) constraints, consisting of provisions that are straightforward restrictions on union activities,

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leadership, and so forth. (For a further specification of corporatist provisions in labor law, see Collier and Collier 1979.) The distinction is important for the question of legacies because inducements may serve to protect dominant unions—or the dominance of existent unions—while constraints serve to restrict union activities and militance. In drawing out patterns from the analyses presented in this volume, we focus on two basic inducements and a basic constraint, which, in different ways, are generally covered in the empirical chapters above. The first refers to provisions that regulate union recognition and, as such, structure the union movement in a particular way. Prominent among these are provisions that regulate the right to form a union, undertake collective bargaining, and engage in other activities to represent workers. For example, granting one union monopoly of representation clearly benefits that union and potentially strengthens union bargaining power by avoiding fragmentation, at the same time that it may have obvious downsides. Second, some provisions distribute power resources among different organizational levels within union structures and centralize or decentralize the labor movement. Finally, we consider a provision that is a clear-cut constraint: the regulation of the right to strike. To what extent did these inducements and constraints in labor codes that were in effect under authoritarian regimes survive during the democratic period? As we consider the question of continuity or stickiness of these provisions in labor law, we must remember the point made above regarding the context-specific nature of institutions more generally. That is, their political effect may depend more on the political orientation of the government and particularly how it chooses to implement the legislation than by what is objectively written in the labor code. In terms of union recognition, for instance, provisions that in effect granted a monopoly of representation were obviously double-edged for the labor movement. Such provisions advantaged the unions that had them but prohibited dissident or more militant challenger unions. For this reason, a provision that in the authoritarian regime provided for a state-penetrated, controlled union sometimes persisted into the democratic period, when it may not have been opposed by the existing union because it insulated the union from competition. The cases analyzed in this book do not display a consistent pattern in terms of the continuity of labor law provisions for monopoly of representation, largely because of the legal diversity during the authoritarian period. In most of the Asian cases examined—with the exception of the Philippines—and all of the Eastern European cases, authoritarian governments recognized only one state-backed union. In all of these countries, newly democratic governments reformed their laws to permit union pluralism—although with some delay in the

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formal recognition of union pluralism in Korea. In these cases the prohibition of unions not backed by the state was so antithetical to core democratic principles that to some extent reforms to the labor code allowing for some pluralism emerged as a “natural” corollary of democratic transitions. By contrast, in most of Latin America, where labor regulations did not impose mono-unionism, labor law reform resulted in a less dramatic change. In Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, authoritarian regimes retained earlier laws that granted monopolies of representation based on geography or industrial sector. These aspects of labor law remained after the transition to democracy in large part because dominant unions in these countries benefited from them and fought to preserve them (Cardoso, Bensusán and Cook, this volume). Chile also showed post-transition continuity, but in this case the legacy provisions had indeed been rewritten by the authoritarian regime to weaken unions (Frank, this volume). We thus see both continuity and change regarding provisions of union recognition in the democratic period. In terms of its impact, an important question for further research is to compare cases of continuity with cases of change. For example, continuity of monopoly of representation, often supported by the unions because of the benefits it bestowed, could be problematic in terms of union responsiveness to rank-and-file demands. However, provisions that replaced monopoly of representation could also be problematic. In reaction to these provisions, in some countries new regulations under democratic regimes often set extremely low thresholds for forming new unions. The resulting union fragmentation could increase employers’ leverage vis-à-vis organized labor. In Indonesia (Caraway) and Poland (Ost), for example, labor law reforms have set extremely low barriers to union formation, allowing unions to form with as few as ten workers. In these countries, the inevitable death of mono-unionism heralded the birth of union fragmentation. Other important provisions in labor law concern the distribution of power across different levels in the union structure, most importantly by regulating the right to bargain collectively. In this way they affect the balance of power between unions and employers. Generally, restricting bargaining to a lower level weakens unions, whereas more centralized bargaining is advantageous. The present chapters suggest substantial continuity across the democratic transition. In the four East Asian cases covered in this volume, collective bargaining has continued to take place at the firm level. In most of the Latin American cases there are also continuities between the authoritarian and democratic periods. In Brazil collective bargaining has continued to be carried out mostly at the municipal level. In Argentina, the military inherited a regulation that allowed sectoral collective bargaining at the national level, and that has remained in place in the democratic period. In Chile, starting with the first labor law in the 1920s, the right to bargain

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was limited to the plant level. The extralegal agreements that were reached subsequently were eliminated under the authoritarian regime that preceded the current democratic period. Since the democratic transition, legislation has allowed higher level bargaining if there is mutual agreement by two sides, but it does not mandate it. Collective bargaining per se did not exist in most Communist countries, so one cannot speak of continuities here. Perhaps the most important of the constraint provisions in labor law are those regarding restrictions on the right to strike. Outright bans on strikes, where they existed, did not survive the democratic transition. Nevertheless, the case studies of Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Russia describe how democratic governments seek to limit strikes by erecting numerous hurdles to workers exercising this right. Interestingly, in Russia the substantial Soviet strike restrictions were less the direct result of existing law than the total lack of one; as the chapter by Crowley points out, no Soviet-era law governing strikes existed, since one was made irrelevant by the absence of strikes to govern. This legal vacuum left the state with substantial leeway to write a new law with a highly circumscribed right to strike, particularly in the context of a weak union movement without the power to defend workers’ interests.

Legacy Unions Legacy unions are common phenomenon: in most of the cases examined in this volume, the unions dominant during the authoritarian period continued to be important political actors in the democratic period. That said, the degree to which these inherited unions continued to be dominant varied. In many cases they persisted as dominant confederations, while in others retaining their dominant positions required substantial internal reform. Finally, there are some exceptions in which they remained important but were no longer dominant in the face of the rise of new confederations. In Eastern Europe, Russia shows the strongest continuity, with the FNPR remaining the overwhelmingly dominant union—a trait it shares with most other post-Soviet states. Serbia is another prominent case, where the old labor confederation led by the old guard remained hegemonic. In Croatia and Slovenia they also remained dominant; however, the unions and their leadership underwent substantial internal reform. In East Asia countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan are cases where legacy unions are still the largest confederations, although in Indonesia SPSI shows signs of waning. Not only did these dominant unions tend to survive the democratic transition, but in all of these cases (as in Russia and Serbia) the authors argue that they continue to be close to state authorities and to have

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a conservative or noncombative orientation, traits that have both helped these unions to survive and negatively affected their ability to advocate for policies that might benefit workers. Continuity also generally characterizes the Latin American cases. Along with continuity in the union structure, there is relative continuity in union power and influence. Although unions have been weakened under the new economic model, their cross-national comparative strength has not been substantially altered. Although in Argentina and Chile workers suffered the consequences of neoliberalism and globalization, the still-dominant CGT confederation in Argentina was able to make a substantial recovery even in a new, downsized situation. In Chile, the historically weak union movement was led by the CUT, which remained dominant but weak vis-à-vis business, unable both to recover the brief moment of empowerment it experienced under Allende and to exert substantial power even during the unusual prosperity and growth Chile experienced in the democratic period. Mexico, unlike most of Latin America and perhaps more like countries in Asia or Eastern Europe, had a dominant-party regime with a dominant union supporting the authoritarian regime. Despite democratization, the legacy union, which was not an actor in the prodemocratic struggle, has remained dominant and demobilized vis-à-vis business and the state. Interestingly, in each region one country stands out as a case where new unions have challenged legacy unions. Dominant unions in South Korea, Brazil, and Poland have fared quite differently, a point to which we return below when we address the issue of party-union ties. Future research should further explore the role that legacy unions have on labor outcomes. Two questions seem particularly relevant. Under what conditions do these unions break away from the legacy of state dependence and become more assertive? Does the emergence of a competing, more militant union confederation transform the nature of legacy unions, making them more responsive to their members?

Party-Union Ties Continuity in party-union ties across the democratic transition varies substantially among the cases. Patterns of continuity reflect the different types of authoritarian regimes that ruled prior to the democratic transitions. Indeed, the authoritarian regimes examined in this volume varied dramatically in the extent to which ruling parties existed and crafted ties to unions. To a substantial extent, this variation corresponds to a regional pattern: the three regions under study in this volume had different types of authoritarian regimes, with

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different relationships between unions and parties. Eastern Europe had Communist regimes, characterized by the primacy of Communist parties over societal organizations, including, of course, unions; the Asian cases had authoritarian parties with an exclusionary strategy toward unions; and Latin America (with the notable exception of Mexico) had military, bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, characterized by the ban on or suspension of parties. Although further research should establish the causal link between types of authoritarian regimes and patterns of union-party ties in democratic settings, there is some preliminary evidence that supports the hypothesis that the type of authoritarian regime and its strategy toward the labor movement had a lasting effect on the type of party ties unions established in the democratic period. The Communist pattern, characteristic of the Eastern European countries, was to integrate unions closely into ruling Communist parties. In most cases, links between unions and the Communist Party or its successor have not continued as a legacy. Even in Russia and Serbia, where legacy unions remain dominant, they have broken their ties with the Communist or successor party. Russia’s legacy union has embraced “the party of power,” that is, the ruling party of the moment, while in Serbia the legacy union’s reluctance to disassociate from Miloševic´ ’s party led to significant legitimacy problems. In Croatia and Slovenia, labor confederations have eschewed party ties in the democratic period. It is only in Poland that the strong partisan links between the successor to the Communist Party and the once-official labor confederation (OPZZ) have remained strong. However, the Solidarity union, which formed in the late Communist period, was the most vibrant labor confederation and led the opposition, serving as the organizational platform of a new political party that won electoral office in the founding elections of the new democratic regime. Latin America shows perhaps the most continuity in partisan ties. However, in these cases of military rule, the ties were forged in periods prior to these authoritarian regimes. Hence, in Argentina the CGT has retained its links with the Peronist party, and in Chile the Communist Party has remained strong in the labor movement. One may also note that the same pattern exists in Uruguay, where the Frente Amplio, a coalition of Left parties, has retained its links with the dominant labor confederation, PIT-CNT (Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores–Convención Nacional de Trabajadores). In these cases, the pretransition authoritarian regimes banned parties and union activity, but did not attempt to create a new union movement loyal to the regime. This strategy allowed unions to reestablish links with their old party allies once democracy was restored. An interesting exception is Brazil, where the discontinuities between the party systems that existed before and after the authoritarian regime were accompanied by new links between the union movement and the new parties. In

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Mexico, the one case in Latin America where the authoritarian period was characterized by an inclusionary dominant-party regime rather than an exclusionary military regime, the links between the legacy union and the party, which were forged decades before under more open politics, survived the transition, even in periods when, in the democratic period, the PRI has not done well in national elections. However, these party-union ties may have weakened and become less institutionalized and more contingent. The Asian cases display wide variation in terms of authoritarian governments’ attempts to build links with unions through political parties. Regardless of this variation, union-party ties have shown substantial continuity between the authoritarian and democratic periods in most cases, although the structures that persisted varied across countries. In Taiwan the legacy union continues to have strong links with the KMT. In Indonesia and the Philippines the links between parties and unions, which were never strong, have continued to be weak. The weak ties in these countries are in part a legacy of the anticommunism of the authoritarian regimes, which adopted exclusionary corporatist laws that actively disorganized labor and its potential partisan allies on the left, but this argument cannot be generalized to all Asian cases. Last, as noted above, in each region there is a country in which new unions have displaced preexisting dominant unions and forged ties to new parties. These are the cases of Brazil, Poland, and South Korea. In Brazil and Poland, new unions formed in opposition to the dominant union and played an important role in the opposition to the authoritarian regime. In Brazil, a new militant union movement, the CUT, displaced the old union confederation as the hegemonic labor confederation. In Poland a similar process was led by Solidarity. However, whereas in Brazil the unions that eventually formed the CUT were central actors in creating the Workers’ Party, which remained organically tied to unions and advanced workers’ rights, in Poland Solidarity gave birth to a political movement that, once in power, was committed to market liberalization and opposed any social-democratic agenda (see Ost, this volume). The PT, once in power, also adopted market-friendly policies, but it was in a position to continue rather than initiate such a policy direction and had the leeway to advance a progressive social policy agenda. South Korea is the other case in which new unions have displaced preexisting dominant unions. As in Brazil, a militant labor movement with roots in shop-floor union organizations, the KCTU, emerged in direct opposition to authoritarian-backed unions and became the largest confederation. Furthermore, it also created a labor-based party. However, in contrast to Poland and Brazil, Korea’s labor-based party has been a minor actor in the party system, never attaining power and peaking at 13 percent of the national vote.

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Legacies and Regions The analytic setup of this volume and the foregoing comments on relative continuity of traits across the recent regime changes of democratization invites one to ask about general regional patterns. To what extent are there regional patterns of legacy traits, that is, patterns of similar authoritarian traits as well of their continuity within regions? Needless to say, the countries covered in this volume do not constitute a representative sample of the regions covered. Nor does Poland look like a “typical” Eastern European country, or Argentina and Mexico like “typical” Latin American countries. One might even speculate that to some degree these countries were selected because they bring quite a diverse group of cases to examine or even because they show some intrinsically interesting and peculiar quality—an opposition movement led by unions in Poland, a strong labor movement by Latin American standards in Argentina. Nevertheless, in a very preliminary way that may point to directions for further research, we review the foregoing discussion on labor law, legacy unions, and party-union ties to ask about regional patterns in continuities between the authoritarian and democratic periods and in the way that democratic regimes afford conditions for reshaping pretransition labor institutions. Eastern Europe presents the strongest region-wide pattern during the authoritarian period in that a common Communist and, except for Yugoslavia, Soviet-influenced institutional template transformed labor traits. Yet this is the region with the greatest rejection of those institutions and, many have argued, even the rejection of the ideological valorization of labor. Hence, although the rejection was common, the institutional continuity or legacy in the postauthoritarian period was the weakest. What ensued did not correspond to a regional pattern. In most cases unions broke their old ties with the Communist Party, but adopted a variety of relations to parties in the post-transition period. The extent to which legacy unions remain hegemonic varies considerably in Eastern Europe, though the main post-Soviet states have followed the Russian pattern of the legacy union allying with the party in power. Systematic comparative analysis of labor law remains to be done, but the one aspect emphasized in the current volume is the ongoing constraints on labor organization and mobilization, even though these constraints cannot compare with those under authoritarianism. The cases in East Asia seem to display considerable continuity, but without exhibiting any sort of regional pattern. The nature of the legacy seems to be robust in that most of the countries analyzed tend to exhibit the same traits they had under the authoritarian regime when it comes to ties with authoritarian parties, labor laws, or dominant labor confederations. However, there is no regional pattern, and countries vary considerably in terms of their traits. For example, the KCTU in Korea

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and the CFL in Taiwan have strong ties with parties, but in the other countries these ties were historically feeble, and continue to be weak in the democratic era. Last, Latin America is the one region in which we observe both continuities between the authoritarian and democratic periods and the presence of regional patterns. If we were to take two snapshots of the region, one during the most recent authoritarian period and one during the democratic era, we would observe that much has not changed: the same confederations remain dominant, preexisting links between parties and unions are still in place (though, with the exception of Mexico, these are not parties associated with the authoritarian regime), and labor laws have not been substantially changed. These continuities, moreover, add up to a regional pattern: most cases have one labor confederation that is dominant, labor laws that are relatively protective of collective labor rights (though individual provisions have been flexibilized in some cases), and unions that are still tied to Left or populist parties. In sum, in Eastern Europe we observe the greatest break with a common pattern during the authoritarian period, but there is no regional pattern in what subsequently emerged. The East Asian countries analyzed in this volume show considerable continuity between authoritarian and democratic periods, but the enduring labor traits do not constitute a regional pattern. Finally, Latin America seems to be the strongest case of a regional pattern, in the sense of a relatively common set of traits that were evident in the authoritarian period and endured into the democratic period. However, these considerable continuities that comprise a broad regional pattern do not necessarily entail authoritarian legacies inherited from the last authoritarian regime. In most cases, these traits date back to prior regimes, some democratic, others earlier authoritarian regimes.

Regime, Transitions, and the Stickiness of Labor Institutions The perspective of this volume is to emphasize the importance of labor legacies in new democratic regimes. In this section we expand the analysis of labor legacies, arguing that authoritarian as well as democratic regimes may be the inheritors of labor institutions. In authoritarian regimes, leaders might be expected to have greater power and discretion to discard institutions and structures and to found new ones. However, many authoritarian leaders also inherited labor traits from prior regimes, and, despite the lack of constitutional provisions and electoral competition that normally constrain rulers in democratic polities, they were unable to alter labor institutions in a substantial way. Thus, it is worth pointing to a broader pattern of stickiness of labor structures.

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In thinking about this broader pattern, it is important to keep in mind the distinction between pretransition authoritarian regimes, on the one hand, and founding moments of labor institutions, on the other. Founding moments refer to the period in which labor relations are first and extensively regulated by the state. These moments are the ones that Collier and Collier (1991), analyzing Latin America, identify as “critical junctures,” and that have set the path for labor outcomes in Latin America during most of the twentieth century. These moments when institutions are first adopted are important because they create a set of actors that develop vested interests in their preservation, and can readily mobilize resources against any governmental attempt to overhaul these institutions. In ways that have been analyzed in general, institutions are sticky, and first movers shape the constraints for those that follow (Pierson 1996). Among the pretransition authoritarian regimes analyzed in this volume, not all were founders of labor institutions, as the editors point out in the introduction. In many Asian cases, the pretransition authoritarian regimes did indeed found the countries’ labor institutions. The “totalitarian” nature of Communist regimes afforded them the capacity to refound these institutions, and in many cases the rapid industrialization of the Communist period created large working classes that previously did not exist. But in many of the Latin American cases as well as the Philippines, these two analytical periods are historically separate. In these cases, even authoritarian rulers that came to power after the founding moment of labor institutions were often unable to overhaul existing labor institutions, or were perhaps even inhibited from embarking on these attempts. They were on the “receiving” side of labor legacies and unable to reshape labor relations in a fundamental way despite their coercive power. These cases shared an interesting similarity with many of the democratic regimes covered in this volume: they had to deal with labor institutions that were not of their own making and that allocated resources among competing actors in ways that sometimes were detrimental to the implementation of authoritarian regimes’ policy agendas. The institutional stickiness faced by authoritarian regimes is similar to what may be faced under the democratic regimes analyzed in this volume. Despite the coercive resources of authoritarian regimes, they were unable to make substantial alterations to inherited labor structures that were the product of earlier regimes. This inability was often particularly dramatic in light of the fact that an important raison d’être of these regimes was sometimes precisely to demobilize the labor movement. Latin America, particularly its exclusionary bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, provides many examples of the stickiness of labor institutions. These were regimes that were not founding regimes, but rather inherited labor structures founded by earlier governments, which were often

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democratic or prolabor, or both. Further, they were regimes born with a mission to demobilize labor movements and to restructure the inherited institutions, which had facilitated that labor mobilization. For instance, Argentina and Uruguay had labor institutions that were instituted in the first half of the twentieth century and went unchanged even in the face of subsequent repressive authoritarian regimes. Examples in Argentina are not only the 1966–73 military government but also the 1976–83 dictatorship, arguably the most repressive dictatorship in South America, assassinating up to thirty thousand citizens and driving more into prison or exile. Uruguay also experienced a long period of harsh authoritarian rule between 1973 and 1985, which suppressed political opposition and imprisoned and forced into exile more people per capita than other contemporaneous regimes in the region. Despite the coercive resources of these regimes and their willingness to adopt harsh repressive tactics when dealing with political adversaries, among which the labor movement was primary, neither proved capable of overthrowing the existing labor system. Indeed, institutionalized systems of industrial relations and labor structures were so deeply rooted in Argentina and Uruguay that the main strategy authoritarian governments adopted toward labor was clearly temporary: rather than attempt to institute a new system, they simply suspended collective bargaining and “intervened” existing unions. Neither radical change of the labor law nor the construction of a new, state-dependent union structure was feasible in the context of an institutionalized system of labor relations that created a powerful set of interest groups anchored around it. In sum, the stickiness of labor structures is a widespread phenomenon that affects all regime types, and this important topic posed in this volume merits further research that analyzes to what extent their effects vary across different regimes.

Conclusion This volume has focused on the way constraints and resources inherited from the authoritarian period have shaped unions in the post-transition, democratic period, and hence their capacity to respond to the challenge of market reform and globalization. The question of institutional stickiness and authoritarian legacies is an important one, as is the inquiry into the role of labor unions, an issue that has received relatively little attention in the current context in which unions have been weakened and put on the defensive. A number of interesting issues should be explored by further research. First, further analysis should systematically examine the way particular preexisting labor institutions distribute resources and power that enable actors to

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reproduce the labor institutions that advantage them in the new democracies. That is, we have examples of labor traits that changed along with some that did not, and some traits seem stickier than others. The microfoundations of these differences would be interesting to explore further in terms of the way labor institutions distribute resources and provide incentives for actors to preserve or change them. At the same time, of course, in accounting for institutional legacy or change, it is important to analyze the way basic political and economic changes (democratization and globalization) redistribute resources and affect incentives. It may also be interesting to analyze more systematically the degree to which there may be a pattern in which some traits are more resistant or “stickier” than others. Second, while the chapters examine the continuity or change in labor legacies inherited from authoritarian periods, this volume was also motivated by an inquiry into labor’s capabilities in an era of democracy and globalization, assuming that these legacies have a significant effect on unions’ capacity to expand workers’ rights and benefits. These labor outcomes might be further developed analytically and explored systematically in comparative analysis. Such an analysis would face challenges. Good data is one. Data on union density, wage levels, mobilizational capacity, coverage of collective bargaining agreements, and disaggregated membership is spotty at best, making both comparison and longitudinal analysis difficult. A further analytic challenge, of course, is to establish the causal impact of the labor legacies on these outcomes, given that they may be the result of a wide variety of factors. Third, as was mentioned above, the question of regional patterns deserves further exploration. From the analyses presented in the chapters in this volume, it would seem that the Eastern European cases, having generally rejected pretransition traits, have established new structures in remarkably diverse ways, so that the Communist past does not seem to have led to a common pattern of change. The Asian cases display greater continuity but of, perhaps, different traits. The Latin American cases seem to have more extensive legacies as well as more of a regional pattern; however, many of these surviving traits predate the authoritarian regime and are thus part of a longer tradition or legacy and do not necessarily have their origin in authoritarianism. In light of these empirical patterns, there are key analytical questions that deserve further analysis: To what extent are there regional patterns? What does region stand for analytically? That is, regardless of the presence of regional patterns, what are the larger comparative factors in both the explanations and outcomes of legacies? The case of China, also discussed in this volume but where a dual transition did not occur, raises the question of authoritarian legacies through a period of dramatic market reform but without a transition from authoritarian rule. Where

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dual transitions occurred, the nature of authoritarian legacies show considerable variation, in cases of postauthoritarian regimes and also in the subset of postcommunist regimes. Given this variability, one can’t easily draw conclusions from a comparison between China, with only a single transition, and the cases of dual transitions. However, continuity of party rule in China has some important consequences. A distinctive trait of the single transition in China seems to be that party-union ties remain stickier and more rigid. As a result, on the one hand, the union hierarchy maintains whatever access it previously had to higher levels at the same time that its representational capacity for workers remains very weak. Further, perhaps as an ongoing legacy of its ideology and quest for legitimacy, and certainly as an issue of order and governance, Chinese officials remain concerned with the negative economic and egalitarian consequences of the transition to capitalism. As a result, the party is experimenting with cautious, incremental, and top-down changes to labor law and social policies in ways intended to benefit workers. Finally, in pursing research on the topic of labor legacies, we end on one analytical point concerning at least a couple of the cases. In these cases the labor movement managed to undergo significant changes and renovation even under the authoritarian regime. That is, under the authoritarian regime, these labor movements underwent changes that might be expected after the opening of the regime transition. Further, the new labor movement was even part of the politics of transition, mobilizing in opposition to authoritarian rule. The emblematic examples are the CUT in Brazil and Solidarity in Poland, militant labor confederations that were created under authoritarianism and played a key role in the transitions to democracy in these two countries. Korea shows striking similarities to Brazil, in that rank-and-file organizations that would later constitute the organizational basis of the KCTU, the rival democratic labor confederation, were formed in the 1980s and also engaged in labor protest before the transition to democracy. Are these dissident movements a legacy of authoritarianism or are they better conceptualized as part of the dynamics (and contradictions) of authoritarianism itself? It is not always so much that the transitions facilitated changes in the labor movement, but rather, in these cases at least, that these mobilizations may be part of the cause of the regime transition. These developments, and the loosening—or loss—of authoritarian control they represent, signal the complex causal relationship between political regimes and labor institutions: whereas the present volume proceeds from a question about the impact of regime on labor traits (and examines when a change in the former does or does not correspond to a change in the latter), causality sometimes is reciprocal. This issue opens up a stimulating line of research for case studies focused on these types of processes.

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This book has placed the labor movement as a central actor and drawn attention to the traits that affect its capacity to defend itself and meet the challenges of changes in the global economy. This line of analysis has been unduly neglected in recent studies, often in favor of a focus on civil society and social movements. However, even in the present context of postauthoritarian inheritances and economic challenges, labor movements remain among the most “scaled,” institutionalized, and active lower-class organizations in many societies. Understanding their constraints and resources merits ongoing research.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. In some countries, however, labor is a contingent democrat, supporting democracy only when it is perceived to benefit them, as Bellin (2000) and Levitsky and Mainwaring (2006) have observed. 2. We thus agree with the “varieties of capitalism” literature that the pressures of global capitalism do not lead to a convergence of institutional arrangements (Hall and Soskice 2001). We disagree, however, that such arrangements reflect an “efficiency equilibrium.” As Douglass North argued, “institutions are not . . . usually created to be socially efficient; rather they . . . are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to devise new rules” (North 1990, 16). 3. Most studies that draw on authoritarian legacies are single-country studies or compare countries within a single region (Encarnación 1997; Koo 2000; Crowley and Ost 2001; Crowley 2002, 2004; Bensusán and Cook 2003; Avdagic 2004; Caraway 2004, 2008; Kubicek 2004; Ost 2005; Feldmann 2006; M. Cook 2007; Buchanan 2008; Grdešic´ 2008; Burgess 2010; Crowley and Stanojevic´ 2011; Y. Lee 2011; Robertson 2011). 4. Several cross-regional studies invoke legacies, but these studies compare the effect of historical legacies (rather than authoritarian legacies, which is our focus) on labor in multiple regions, and they either compare across regime types or between two authoritarian countries. See Chen and Sil (2006), Etchemendy (2011), Paczyn´ska (2009), and Solinger (2009). 5. The Middle East, for example, has experienced little democratization. Africa, by contrast, has many cases of democratization, but the comparative work on labor is scant and focuses overwhelmingly on one country, South Africa. We expect, however, that our study’s findings have implications for understanding the challenges that African unions confront in new democracies and that labor in the Middle East would face should countries there democratize. 6. A number of studies have also argued for the importance of preauthoritarian as well as authoritarian legacies in explaining contemporary outcomes (Rona-Tas and Borocz 2000; Darden and Grzymala-Busse 2006; Wittenberg 2006; Buchanan 2008). 7. Here we borrow Tarrow’s (1994) metaphor, originally applied to social movement entrepreneurs. 8. We recognize that while path dependence and the critical juncture framework go hand in hand, path dependent arguments can arise in other analytic frameworks as well. 9. Capoccia and Kelemen (2007) argue that much of the causal lifting during critical junctures is done by antecedent conditions. Slater and Simmons (2010) call such antecedent conditions critical antecedents. 10. For example, due to the postcommunist legacies that Ost (this volume) describes, Polish and other East European unionists pushed for rather than resisted the privatization of their firms to multinational corporations. However, the resulting multinational ownership had a “dual effect” unique to Eastern Europe: while weakening unions in predictable ways, it also forced postcommunist unions to confront their legacies and “adjust or perish,” thus both constraining and enabling them (Lee and Trappmann 2014).

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11. In making the distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary corporatism, we draw on Stepan (1978). We stress, however, that these categories are illustrative, not exhaustive. Important subregional differences exist, as do differences of degree within categories. Collier and Collier (1991), for example, distinguish between party and state incorporation; in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia’s model gave unions far more autonomy than the ideal-typical state paternalist model (Grdešic´ 2008). Taiwan is also a somewhat anomalous case, since the Kuomintang integrated the Chinese Federation of Labor more firmly into party structures than in other noncommunist countries in Asia (Yoonkyung Lee 2011). Chile also departs from the Latin American regional model. Many Chilean unions were affiliated with Left parties and retained greater autonomy from the state. 12. As with Yugoslavia, China deviates from the East European cases somewhat, in that the Chinese Communist Party’s relationship to labor activists was first forged during the revolution and then remade during the 1950s along the transmission belt model. But there has always been some resistance within the official union federation, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), to its transmission belt role, and it faced periodic crackdowns as a result. This history may have given Chinese labor more political space for mobilization than most East European unions experienced during the communist period. 13. The distinction between unions allied with the previous authoritarian regime and unions allowed to exist under the previous authoritarian regime is important. Only the former are legacy unions. 14. As Anner (2009) notes, the presence of conservative unions allows employers to outflank and block leftist unions. The presence of legacy unions, which are often conservative, likewise gives employers a useful means of defusing worker activism. 15. Little wonder, then, that unions with strong links to dominant parties under authoritarian rule often are reluctant to support democratization (Bellin 2000; Levitsky and Mainwaring 2006). 16. Although Chile lacked legacy unions, Chilean unions also suffered at the hands of the military regime. In contrast, Mexico’s legacy unions maintained their alliance with the ruling party throughout decades of authoritarian rule, which was civilian, not military, in nature. 17. For example, a deep recession and austerity policies led to tumultuous protests in Greece but produced a rather tepid reaction in Latvia, where the social costs were at least as great (Meardi 2012, chap. 9). Whereas leftist ideologies and organizations, including trade unions, were central to bringing about democratization in Greece, in Latvia those same orientations and organizations remained tainted by the communist past two decades later. 1. STRENGTH AMID WEAKNESS

1. Even though the precise extent to which short-term contracts and outsourcing have spread is unknown, most observers concur that they have become more prevalent since democratization. Union leaders identify nonpermanent contracts as a major concern. In surveys conducted in forty-eight firms in East Java and ninety-one firms in West Java, researchers found widespread use of short-term contract labor in the manufacturing industry (Aliansi Serikat Buruh and Forum Pendamping Buruh Nasional 2004; Forum Pendamping Buruh Nasional 2004). See also Juliawan (2010). 2. Data on union membership must be taken with a grain of salt. Membership is self-reported, and the last verification of membership took place in 2005. The ministry reported a “verified” membership of 3.4 million workers. Some unions did not participate in the membership verification process, and unaffiliated unions were probably undercounted. The authorities undoubtedly reported a larger membership for the legacy union, SPSI, than it had in reality. The small increase in membership reported by the ministry

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from 2005 to 2010—from 3,388,597 members to 3,414,455—does not ring true, given that many large unions have reported significant declines in membership since 2005. The workforce data used to calculate unionization rates is from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database. Sixty to 70 percent of the workforce is employed in the informal sector (Nazara 2010), so only 30 to 40 percent of the total workforce is organizable into traditional unions. 3. If the Indonesian Teachers’ Association (Persatuan Guru Indonesia, PGRI) were included in KSPI’s membership numbers, it would be the largest confederation in Indonesia. Although PGRI has registered nationally, few of its chapters have registered at local manpower offices and none have concluded a collective bargaining agreement. It still functions primarily as a professional association. 4. The low membership threshold for union formation—ten workers—facilitates worker efforts to form unions, but it also facilitates the formation of yellow unions by management. To register a union, an employer need only assemble a group of ten workers and submit the required paperwork (a list of officers, bylaws, and a constitution). 5. Although Indonesian labor law did not explicitly grant SPSI a representational monopoly, registration requirements were set so high that independent unions could not gain legal recognition (Bourchier 1994; Hadiz 1997; Ford 1999). 6. Heads of personnel and other management figures were commonly leaders of plant-level SPSI units. 7. During the Suharto years, SPSI seesawed from decentralized to centralized to decentralized structures. At the behest of Minister of Manpower Sudomo, the union was centralized in 1985. Leaders of SPSI’s industrial unions never accepted this action. After Sudomo’s departure, succeeding ministers returned considerable autonomy to the industrial unions, in part as a means of deflecting international criticism of mono-unionism but also because the strike wave of the early 1990s demonstrated that centralization had not succeeded in its mission of labor control (Hadiz 1997; Lambert 1997). 8. The defections were a top-down affair about which most members remained oblivious. Plant-level leaders that supported SPSI-Reformasi’s leaders usually reregistered the union without consulting members first. A decade later, many workers who belong to one of the breakaway unions still thought that they were members of SPSI. 9. Much of the material in the following paragraphs is adapted from Caraway (2008). 10. The discussion of PGRI, KORPRI, and state enterprise unions is based on interviews conducted in Jakarta in 2007–09 with PGRI, the Independent Federation of Indonesian Teachers (Federasi Guru Independent Indonesia), and staff from the international trade union confederations that organize in these sectors, Education International and Public Service International. 11. Data are from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database. 12. See Biro Pusat Statistik, Statistik Industri Sedang dan Besar (Jakarta, Biro Pusat Statistik), various years. 13. The 2010 survey of union members in Jakarta conducted by the All-Indonesian Workers Organization (Organisasi Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia) also found that many union leaders remain wary of working closely with political parties. 14. In my discussions with union officers from major federations over the last decade, all reported that many of their members were not covered by collective bargaining agreements. Many also affirmed that collective bargaining agreements contained minimal provisions that provided stronger guarantees than required by law. 15. Strikes could be called after failed negotiations with seven days’ notice. 16. This assessment is based on the review of about two thousand decisions by the central labor dispute resolution body and over a thousand decisions by the four busiest labor courts in Indonesia (Bandung, Jakarta, Medan, and Surabaya).

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17. Tjandra, Soraya, and Jamaludin (2007) and Banwell (2000a, 2000b) present case studies of minimum wage campaigns in East Java, Jakarta, and East Kalimantan. 2. LABOR’S POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

1. The party changed its name to the United Progressive Party in 2011. 2. Korea was under authoritarian rule in Korea under Park Chung Hee (1961–79) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980–87) and in Taiwan under the Kuomintang regimes of Chiang Kai-shek (1949–77) and Chiang Ching-kuo (1978–88). 3. The FKTU was established in 1946 under the auspices of the American occupation forces in South Korea as a right-wing instrument against the leftist unions that were powerful and militant at the time. This union center had little grassroots support and no genuine interest in promoting workers’ welfare for nearly four decades before the political democratization in 1987 (Koo 2001, 26–27). The KCTU was legally recognized in 2000. 4. The CFL was first founded in Nanjing in 1948 as a counterforce to the Communistdominated national union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. It was transplanted in Taiwan when the Kuomintang government retreated to the island in 1949 after its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland. The TCTU was formally recognized in 2000. 5. Labor statistics are from the Korea Ministry of Labor, http://laborstat.molab.go.kr, and the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs, http://www.cla.gov.tw. The official government statistics for Taiwan overestimate membership since they include “occupational unions” that do not function as unions but as insurance gatekeepers (Huang 2002). The union density I present here comes from calculating the ratio of workers unionized under “industrial enterprise unions” among paid employees. 6. The Korea Ministry of Labor, http://laborstat.molab.go.kr. 7. The percentage numbers do not add up to 100 because there are independent unions that do not belong to either of these national confederations. The CFL maintains it membership edge because most of the occupational unions with a large membership are affiliated with it, while the TCTU’s base is in enterprise unions in the industrial sector. Data are from the CFL (http://www.cfl.org.tw) and TCTU (http://www.tctu.org.tw) websites. 8. Unions affiliated with the KCTU have increasingly reorganized into industrial federations with collective bargaining authorities since the mid-2000s. 9. People’s names in this paper follow the Korean and Chinese convention of listing the surnames first, followed by the first names. 10. Data available at the DLP’s website: http://www.kdlp.org. 11. The DLP had two factions. One held a traditional class perspective while the other stressed the interconnectedness of class and national issues. These two factions conflicted over the party’s policy toward North Korea and methods of Korean unification. 12. The party changed its name to the Saenuri Party in 2013. 13. Hankyoreh Shinmun, May 4, 2007. 14. The GNP “claims” to have one million members with 120,000 of them paying dues (Hankyoreh Shinmun, May 4, 2007). 15. Luo ran in the 1991 legislative election but finished sixth of nine candidates who competed for four seats in the Hsinchu district and failed to get elected (Schafferer 2005, 126). 16. Lipset and Rokkan (1967, 6) define social cleavages as “conflicts and controversies that can arise out of . . . relationships in the social structure.” 17. Voters tend to “strategically” vote for a candidate with a high likelihood of winning the district race that picks one single winner because voters do not want to waste their votes. Under this electoral system, two parties are expected to dominate the electoral market (Duverger 1954).

NOTES TO PAGES 51–64     239

18. Voters are more likely to vote “sincerely” following their “true” political preferences. 19. This rule allocates more seats from the proportional list to parties that gain more seats from the single-member districts. 20. Author interview with the director of political strategy of the KCTU (Seoul, Korea, 2008). 21. Labor incorporation was a higher priority for the KMT than for the Park Chung Hee regime due to the former’s status as a minority political force on the island and its declining international position vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China beginning in the 1970s. Following the “ping-pong diplomacy” with the PRC in 1971, the U.S. government officially abandoned its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan (or, more precisely, the Republic of China) in 1979. 22. The Central Standing Committee consists of thirty-one members selected from the 150-member Central Committee. For instance, Shen-shan Hsieh, the president of the CFL, served in the Central Standing Committee in the 1980s. Later he was appointed to chair the Council of Labor Affairs, the government-level labor ministry (Tien 1989, 79–80). 23. Author interview with the general secretary of the CFL (Taipei, Taiwan, 2003). 24. One faction in the dangwai, the New Tide Faction, was especially concerned about social issues, including organizing labor. This faction advocated for the “politicization of social movements” based on the judgment that oppositional movements against the KMT should be led by the mobilization of farmers, workers, and college students. 25. Union membership figures are from the Korea Ministry of Labor: http://laborstat. molab.go.kr. 26. Author interview with the director of international affairs of the KCTU (Seoul, Korea, 2003). 27. Author interview with the director of political strategy of the KCTU (Seoul, Korea, 2008). 28. Union membership figures are from the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs: http:// www.cla.gov.tw. 29. The number of occupational unions rose from 1,286 in 1986 (with 1.4 million members) to 1,883 (1.7 million members) in 1989, and to 2,413 (with 2.5 million members) in 1995 when the national health insurance policy went into effect. Membership figures are from the Taiwan Council of Labor Affairs: http://www.cla.gov.tw. 30. Author interview with the chairperson of the Taiwan Power Labor Union (Taipei, Taiwan, 2004). 31. Proportional representation without voting for party lists was against the direct vote principle, since the votes for individual candidates in district constituencies were regarded as identical to those for parties (Lee and Lim 2006). 3. AUTHORITARIAN LEGACIES AND LABOR WEAKNESS IN THE PHILIPPINES

1. Conservatives “accept the social status quo” (Anner 2009, 549). Among labor leaders in the Philippines, conservatism is not always a matter of ideological conviction but often encompasses organizational interests in preserving current arrangements, especially in the face of their political opponents’ efforts to transform them. 2. In the Philippine context, “leftists” adhere to the platform of the proscribed Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its aligned National Democratic movement— which includes the “thousands of open, legal ND [National Democratic] organizations grouped under a coalition, the Bagong Alysansang Makabayan (Bayan) or New Patriotic Alliance” (Quimpo 2008, 58). The leftist labor center is the Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement, KMU), formed in 1980. The “broad left” includes CPP defectors, selfdescribed progressives, and social democrats, but not as a united bloc. This includes the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (Solidarity of Filipino Workers) labor center, which

240    NOTES TO PAGES 66–80

split from the KMU in 1993, and the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) formed in 1996. The APL belongs to the Sentro ng mga Nagkakaisa at Progresibong Manggagawa labor center, founded in 2013, which is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation, along with the TUCP and Federation of Free Workers (FFW). The FFW can be classed as social democratic. Founded in 1950 in line with Catholic social teaching, the FFW stayed outside the TUCP under Marcos but is avowedly anticommunist. 3. Author interview with a union researcher with Labor Education and Research Network (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). Interviews in this chapter are anonymous when the identity of the interviewee is not relevant or when anonymity was requested. 4. I am quoting a labor observer. 5. This list is on the TUCP website, http://www.tucp.org.ph/about-us. The TUCP offers no breakdown of its actual membership. 6. The party-list system first was used in the 1998 congressional election. In it votes are cast for a party and those parties winning more than 2 percent of the vote win a seat; however, no one party can win more than three party-list seats. In the 2013 elections, fiftyeight seats were available for party-list parties. 7. In the 16th Congress (2013–16), the Bayan group has seven seats across five parties, out of 274 total legislators. 8. Blas Ople was Marcos’s influential labor minister. Sicat (2004) argues that his influence over labor policy in the Philippines was considerable. 9. Author interview with Zoilo Dela Cruz Jr., national president, National Congress of Unions in the Sugar Industry of the Philippines, a TUCP-aligned federation (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). 10. Ibid. 11. Author interview with Ernesto Herrera (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). 12. Author interview with Federation of Free Workers official (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). The FFW’s founding slogan is “Free from racketeers, free from communist influence, free from company domination, free from politics and politicians, free from government control.” 13. Author interview with Ernesto Herrera (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Author interview with Federation of Free Workers official (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). 17. Ibid. 18. Author interview with Alliance of Progressive Labor official (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). 19. Author interview with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung researcher (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). 20. The legislation also narrowed significantly the grounds for union deregistration to ones of “evident misrepresentation or fraud.” 21. Author interview with Alliance of Progressive Labor official (Manila, the Philippines, 2010). 22. Ibid. 23. Another complicating factor is the development of deeper schisms among leftists. After Aquino left office in 1992, the KMU split over “reaffirming” or “rejecting” the CPP’s renewed commitment to the strategy of revolutionary state-seizure. “Rejectionist” groupings accused the “reaffirmists” of remaining “bound to an ideology, strategy and state practice that reduced unions to the role of transmission belts of outside political forces” (Rocamora 1994, 207). Although the KMU subsequently remained aligned with the reaffirmist camp, the rejectionists formed a rival left labor center, Bukluran ng Manggagawang

NOTES TO PAGES 84–116     241

Pilipino (Solidarity of Filipino Workers). Later, in 1996, the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) was established as a “multiform” labor center, which includes all forms of workers’ organizations, including trade unions, under the banner of social movement unionism. 4. THE PECULIARITIES OF COMMUNISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF WEAK UNIONS IN POLAND

1. The terms “state socialist” and “communist” are used interchangeably in this chapter. 2. See Elizabeth Dunn’s (2004) superb discussion of workers being dispossessed by the pervasive new business discourse that privileged management expertise. 3. There was more than a little irony in this distrust of unions, given that the prosperity enjoyed in western Europe, so coveted by all in eastern Europe, was in large part dependent on a strong labor movement, which in many cases had been accepted, and sometimes promoted, by leading capitalists, as well as by the post–World War II state. (See Swenson 2002.) But the Cold War had presented stark contrasts, and the oppressed of any dictatorship often gravitate to the ideological plank offered by its putative other. 4. On the Baltics, see Paas and Eamets 2007; for the best overall account of contemporary differences in eastern Europe, see Bohle and Greskovits 2012. 5. Comments of Lityn´ ski in 1999 during a conference marking the tenth anniversary of the Round Table negotiations, as transcribed for Negotiating Revolution in Poland: Conversion and Opportunity in 1989, a research project coordinated by Michael Kennedy, Brian Porter, and Andrzej Paczkowski. 5. EXCEPTIONALISM AND ITS LIMITS

1. Due to his “monstrous memory” Tempo was able to reproduce in his memoirs numerous statements, even entire conversations. He recalled how one unionist said: “When comrade Tempo was president of the union he would go on television, on the radio. The working class, that is the workers in the work organization, had incredible support for his positions. We were truly thrilled. Twenty workers would come to me in the factory and ask me: ‘Did you hear comrade Tempo? Why do you not work like that? Why isn’t it like that in reality?’ ” (Vukmanovic´-Tempo 1985, 235). 2. According to Nezavisnost’s self-reported numbers, the union has organized up to 10 percent of the employed in Serbia, but this is very likely a gross overstatement. Furthermore, many members are simultaneously members of SSS. Even so, as Nezavisnost is the only union that has tried to follow a more active unionization strategy, this figure puts an upper boundary to what unionizing new members has achieved in the region. 3. The most famous case is Jugoremedija, a pharmaceutical company in which workers took over the ownership and management of the firm after a lot of struggle (see Music´ 2013, 50–69). 4. Circulation of information is usually mentioned as the key virtue of the German system of co-determination in industrial relations (see Eichengreen 2007, 32–33). 5. According to a report on SSS's website: http://www.sindikat.rs/TEMPO/aktuelnsti. htm. 6. A further note of caution is that the Employment Protection Legislation index considers only formal employment with no definite point of termination. Yet in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia fixed-term contracts have become common, leading to a segmented labor market of insiders and outsiders. Slovenia is not exempt from this trend. In fact, in Slovenia the percentage of employees with a fixed-term contract is around 17 percent, while in Croatia it is around 12 percent. The leader in Europe is Poland at about 27 percent (data from Eurostat).

242    NOTES TO PAGES 122–147

6. RUSSIA’S LABOR LEGACY

1. The research for this chapter was helped significantly by grant from the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC. In addition to those of the two coeditors, the chapter has benefited greatly from the comments of Irina Olimpieva and Rudra Sil. The usual caveats apply. 2. See, for example, the contentious union meeting at a Ukrainian coal mine captured in the documentary film Perestroika from Below (Icarus Films 1990). 3. That these strikes were also a form of political bargaining with Moscow also helps explain why a high proportion of strikes took place in the “budget” sector, since the low wages and wage arrears of these workers were largely a function of the central state budget. From 1992 to 1999, more than half of all strikes in Russia (whether measured by days not worked or workers involved) took place in the education sector (International Labour Office 2000), and even when paid promptly, Russia’s teachers received astonishingly low compensation (L. Cook 2007, 137, 187). 4. One additional avenue for workers to see redress for grievances has been through the court system, where workers can sue employers for illegal dismissals, the failure to pay back wages and benefits, and so on. Although in the past such court orders, even when won by workers, were rarely enforced, that has changed in recent years, and the number of such cases brought by workers, with the help of local unions, has grown. I am grateful to Irina Olimpieva for this point. 5. Another of Greene and Robertson’s three cases is the curiously named Red Riding Hood bauxite mine in Severouralsk. According to one account, the miners “have one overriding fear: that the company will quit the struggling bauxite mines, on which more than 5,000 miners depend for their livelihoods.” According to a blaster, referring to the mine’s owner, the conglomerate RusAl, “We are RusAl’s hostages. There is no [other] place to work around here. If RusAl leaves, Severouralsk will die” (Popova 2008). 7. STATE-CORPORATIST LEGACIES AND DIVERGENT PATHS

1. This earlier originating point also holds for Brazil (see Cardoso, this volume). In Chile, the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90) generated its own set of authoritarian legacies that persisted into the democratic period (see Frank, this volume). 2. Juan Domingo Perón was a member of the military cabinet that ruled Argentina from 1943 to 1946, and was later elected president from 1946 to 1955 (and again in 1973–74). 3. The size of the wage-earning working class during labor’s political incorporation was also considerably larger than Mexico’s, giving Argentine labor a structural power that Mexico lacked. In 1947 approximately 70 percent of the economically active population consisted of urban wage earners, while in Mexico the proportion hardly reached 20 percent (Palomino 1986, 90). 4. The economic and political crisis of 2001–02 entailed the devastating loss of middle-class savings as a result of the devaluation of the Argentine peso and widespread protests, including the death of a protestor, which forced President Fernando de la Rúa to resign in December 2001. 5. The Law of Professional Associations was first passed under the 1943–46 military regime and modeled after part of the Italian fascist labor code under Benito Mussolini. 6. Unions that do not meet the requirements of the legal category of personería gremial may enjoy personería jurídica, or “legal personality,” by becoming registered, but only the former condition gives unions a broad array of rights and obligations. 7. The union is not required to prove it holds a majority unless and until the employer refuses to sign the contract and the workforce goes on strike. The employer can petition

NOTES TO PAGES 147–164     243

the labor board to have the strike declared “nonexistent.” This determination depends on a narrow set of criteria, including lack of majority support or lack of legal grounds for launching the strike. Only then would an election be held to determine majority support for a strike. 8. The exclusion clause is a provision commonly inserted into collective bargaining agreements in Mexico. The exclusion clause regarding “entry” calls for a union shop; the employer agrees to hire only union members. Employers often use the clause to “select” their bargaining counterpart and extract favorable terms. Until the law changed in November 2012, an exclusion clause concerning “separation” obligated the employer to fire any workers who had been expelled by the union. Union officials used the clause to control internal dissent since workers could be fired for disloyalty to the union. Regardless, the elimination of this provision is potentially disadvantageous to independent unions, since employers can more easily pressure workers to disaffiliate from the union (Bensusán 2013). 9. Nonunion members pay an agency fee for services they receive through bargaining coverage. 10. In Mexico there have been relatively few cases where the challenging union has won the recount election against an incumbent union to gain title to an existing bargaining agreement. Typically, independent unions that have gained the ability to bargain sign new contracts, or previously controlled unions evolve toward more autonomous positions through a change in leadership. 11. An important exception was the powerful teachers’ union (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación), whose leader broke with the PRI and created a new political party, the New Alliance Party, in 2005. The party wielded significant influence in national and local elections by throwing its support behind select candidates, often in brokered deals with the other main parties (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2012, 47). In 2013 the union leader, Elba Esther Gordillo, was arrested for embezzlement and other charges. 12. This lack of renewal is made more evident by developments in 2011–12, in which the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, faced with an economic downturn marked by high inflation, sought to intervene in a leadership dispute within the CGT to promote a more compliant leadership that would restrain wage demands (Gutiérrez 2011). President Fernández later threatened to push a labor reform that would expand union democracy. The maneuver led the factions in the labor movement to smooth over their differences. 13. In November 2012 the Mexican Congress passed a labor law reform that addressed greater “flexibility” in hiring and dismissals, including regulation of probationary and apprentice contracts and changes affecting subcontracting, part-time employment, and hourly pay. The new law allows for secret ballot elections for union leadership either directly by rank-and-file workers or indirectly via elected delegates, who would then select the union leadership. Legislators’ efforts to require that workers vote on collective agreements, an attempt to prevent the widespread practice of protection contracts, failed in the face of PRI opposition (Bensusán 2013). 14. Although the ILO recognizes that unions with majority representation are entitled to bargain on behalf of workers, ILO expert committees have questioned the excessive advantages that the Argentine system grants to a union with personería gremial, one that can demonstrate that it represents at least 20 percent of workers in the economic branch. 8. “YOUR DEFENSIVE FORTRESS”

1. On the new unionism in Brazil, see Antunes (1988), Seidman (1994), Rodrigues (1999), and Sluyter-Beltrão (2010).

244    NOTES TO PAGES 164–174

2. Seidman (1994) labeled this pattern “militant unionism.” Sluyter-Beltrão (2010) calls it “social movement unionism.” Both point to its novelty. 3. Prominent and influential arguments include those of Weffort (1970), Rodrigues (1968), Martins Rodrigues (1966), Schmitter (1971), Erickson (1970), and Collier and Collier (1991). Strong critiques are Paoli, Sader, and Telles (1983), Paoli (1988), and Gomes (1988). Santana (1998) and French (2004) call this the “corporatist consensus.” Rodrigues (1999) presents a multidimensional revisionist view. Ferreira (2001) criticizes the literature on populism. 4. This tax (equivalent to one day’s salary per year) was (and still is) obligatory and charged to all workers of a given jurisdiction represented by a particular union (by profession or economic sector), irrespective of whether the workers are affiliated or not. It finances the union structure. Official local unions, province-level federations, national confederations of professional or economic sectors, and the Ministry of Labor all share different proportions of the tax. 5. The 1937 Constitution outlawed strikes and lockouts, while the 1946 one provided that strikes were free “in accordance with the law.” In June 1946 the Gaspar Dutra government enacted Decree 9.070, which regulated strikes, in practice criminalizing them much along the lines of the 1937 version. 6. The Brazilian Communist Party was founded in 1922 and declared illegal in 1927. In 1945 it was again legalized and then proscribed in 1947, not to return to legality until 1985. The 1947 proscription followed the suspension of Brazil-USSR diplomatic relations as a result of the Cold War. 7. The prolabor governments included Vargas (from 1951 to 1954) and João Goulart (from 1961 to1964); the governments of Juscelino Kubitschek (1955–60) and Janio Quadros in 1961 were relatively neutral vis-à-vis labor. A good measure of anti- and prolabor practices of governments is the number of state interventions in official unions. According to Erickson (1970), the Dutra government (1946–51) perpetrated 219 interventions. In Vargas’s second term there were seven interventions, and thirty-five under Kubitschek (1955–60). There is no information on interventions for the 1961 to 1963 period, but in 1964 and 1965 the military intervened in 761 unions, or 37 percent of the 2,049 existing workers’ unions (Martins 1989, 75, 100; see also Figueiredo 1978, 137). 8. Shortly after his election in 1951, Vargas welcomed a group of representatives of the Union of Journalists of the Federal District (Rio de Janeiro), who demanded the end of the “ideology statement.” Vargas was surprised: “What statement is that? In my government there has never existed something like it” (Buonicore 2000, 31, quoting the newspaper Voz Operária). Vargas was being evasive. The statement was created in 1939 and was part of the CLT in 1943, and had kept the Communists out of the union structure ever since. To be entitled to participate in union elections, the leader was required to get a document from the Department of the Political and Social Order stating that he or she did not profess “foreign ideologies” and had a “clear” political past. 9. The Amnesty Act was enacted in August 1979, after which banned figures such as Leonel Brizola and Miguel Arraes, two top PTB leaders, and Luis Carlos Prestes, Giocondo Dias, and other top Communist figures would return to Brazil. 10. Pelego is a term used in the Brazilian labor movement to refer to a particular kind of union leadership. After 1945 it meant union incumbents named by the Ministry of Labor (the ministerialistas) or linked to the conservative factions of the PTB. In the 1970s and 1980s it referred to union incumbents imposed by the military government after the interventions of 1964 onward. After democratization it denotes all union leaders opposed to the reform of the union structure. 11. The union structure designed in 1939 by the Vargas regime and still in effect is composed of local, municipal unions; federations congregating at least five unions of the

NOTES TO PAGES 174–186     245

same category of workers in a federated state; and confederations of at least three federations. The legal federations and confederations have little if any bargaining power today, but they are still entitled to a percentage share of the union tax. This has created an incentive for the reproduction of a federation-confederation system that is completely isolated from the labor movement but which has access to funds that finance the pelego leaders. This stimulated the creation of CUT’s parallel system. 12. The Communists succeeded in negotiating similar new rights before 1964, and it is an open question whether the larger number of workers benefiting from these rights after 1978 (a quantitative criterion) resulted from important qualitative differences in unions’ actions. The revisionist literature states that this is not the case, and I tend to agree with the argument that this is not the main factor that defines the novelty of the new unionism. 13. Collor was elected president in 1989 against Lula. He also had a radical anti-Vargasera neoliberal project but could not implement it because he was impeached in mid-1992. 14. After 1998, during the Cardoso administration, Congress approved many flexibilization measures. But the overarching protective rationale of the CLT persists. 15. Brazil’s National Bank of Economic and Social Development, created by the military in the 1960s, was the main instrument of the government’s rapid response to the 2008 subprime crisis. The bank finances employment policies and private investments with subsidized interest rates. Its main resources come from the Workers Aid Fund (Fundo de Amparo ao Trabalhador), which is a fund based on contributions from private companies that finances unemployment insurance and the wage bonus (every worker earning two minimum wages or less is entitled to one Christmas minimum-wage bonus per year) (see Cardoso Jr. et al. 2006). 9. LIVING IN THE PAST OR LIVING WITH THE PAST?

1. At the time, the CUT was the only national union organization in Chile. Members included plant-level unions and sector unions. The latter were also organized in federations and confederations in such sectors as copper or textiles. Approximately 60 percent of workers were unionized members of CUT. 2. This included a number of Chilean academics who had studied economics at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. 3. The freedom to create parallel unions and negotiating groups has had a particular weakening effect on workers in construction, agriculture, fishing, forestry, and garment manufacturing (Frank 2004; Díaz 1996). 4. A more detailed discussion of these labor laws and their historic development can be found in Valenzuela (1979), Angell (1972), Barrera and Valenzuela (1986), Campero (1989), Collier and Collier (1991), M. Cook (2007), Drake (1996), Frank (1995), Winn (2004), and Zapata (1976). 5. These commissions should not be confused with the sector-wide agreements that existed between a few union confederations and their respective employers during the late sixties and early seventies (Angell 1972). 6. Under Allende, a divided Congress hindered the passage of a new labor code. The government nonetheless used decrees and prolabor policies to make union gains possible. 7. Most of the discussion here relates to collective rather than individual contracts. 8. Because construction workers frequently change job sites, unions in the construction sector belong to the transitory category and thus are also excluded from collective bargaining. 9. Since most collective bargaining takes place at the plant level, the right to companywide or industry-wide multiworkplace bargaining was not a top priority, though many unions in Chile wanted that issue included in the Aylwin reforms.

246    NOTES TO PAGES 188–209

10. The Dirección del Trabajo (Work Directorate or Office of Work), a separate unit under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labor, was significantly reshaped after 1990. Through the Dirección del Trabajo, the Chilean state began to enforce existing labor laws to a degree unthinkable under the Pinochet dictatorship (Rosado Marzán 2010). 11. “Growth with equity” was an essential goal of the Aylwin government, who said that without it there could be no real democracy (Concertación 1989). 12. Ministerial positions were carefully allocated and only partly reflected electoral strength. The top two positions went to members of different parties. 13. The Acuerdo Marco (Framework Agreement) was signed by the Aylwin government, the CUT, and the CPC. It confirmed property rights and the central role of free enterprise, the market, and the open economy, and stated that an accord on labor reform would be sought. The agreement produced few gains for unionized workers, but it did lead to an increase in the minimum wage. 14. The Chilean electoral system is “binomial majoritarian.” Several lists are permitted, but each cannot have more than two candidates. To elect both of the candidates on a list, a winning list must have at least double the vote total of the second-place list. This ensures that a second-place candidate of the winning list will not be elected even though he or she has more votes than a top candidate of the second list. Typically, the top candidate from each of the first two lists is elected. The result of this system is the overrepresentation of the second list, which has benefited the Right in Chile. 10. TRANSFORMATION WITHOUT TRANSITION

1. In early 2003, the Shanghai Municipal Trade Union collaborated with a university legal aid center to offer legal aid to migrant workers. The central ACFTU criticized this attempt, which led to the center’s temporary closure until later in the year when it reopened as a general legal aid center for workers (Gallagher 2007). 2. See “China’s New Urbanization Plan, 2014–2020.” Available at http://news.xinhuanet. com/politics/2014–03/16/c_119791251.htm. 3. The important exception is, of course, during the 1989 Tiananmen student movement when the ACFTU publicly declared its support for the students. However, this brief period of autonomy resulted in much greater CCP oversight and control in the postTiananmen period. During the most recent period of heightened labor unrest in 2010, the ACFTU was relatively marginalized. 4. Qi (2010) measures union density as the number of all union members/all workers eligible for membership. The denominator seems to be workers employed in urban units. This figure would include rural migrant workers in cities but not workers employed in agriculture or workers employed in rural enterprises.

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Contributors

Graciela Bensusán holds degrees in law and political science from Argentina and Mexico. She is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Xochimilco and also teaches at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Mexico City. Dr. Bensusán’s research focuses on labor policies, institutions, and organizations in comparative perspective. She is the author of El modelo mexicano de regulación laboral (The Mexican Model of Labor Regulation; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Plaza y Valdés, 2000), and Organized Labour and Politics in Mexico: Changes, Continuities and Contradictions (with Kevin Middlebrook; Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2012), also published in Spanish as Sindicatos y política en México: Cambios, continuidades y contradicciones (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales /Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2013). She is also coeditor of Trabajo y trabajadores en el México contemporáneo (Work and Workers in Contemporary Mexico; Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2000), which received the Latin American Studies Association Labor Section award in 2001, and editor of Diseño legal y desempeño real: Instituciones laborales en América Latina (Legal Design and Real Performance: Labor Institutions in Latin America; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2006). Professor Bensusán has published over 130 book chapters and articles in specialized journals in Mexico and abroad. Teri L. Caraway is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research concentrates on labor rights, the comparative political economy of labor, and gender and politics. She is the author of Assembling Women (Cornell-ILR Press, 2007) and articles in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, International Organization, Journal of East Asian Studies, Politics & Society, Politics & Gender, Review of International Political Economy, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Politics. Adalberto Cardoso is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Social and Political Studies, State University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include sociology of work, sociology of social structure, social mobility and poverty, and urban sociology. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on 273

274    LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

labor unions, labor market institutions, and the automobile industry in Brazil and Latin America. His books include The Neoliberal Decade and the Crisis of Unions in Brazil (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2003); The Automobile Industry in the Americas, edited with Alejandro Covarrubias (Belo Horizonte: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2006); The Design and Effectiveness of Labor Market Regulation, with Telma Lage (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2007); Building the Work Society in Brazil: An Inquiry on the Secular Reproduction of Inequalities in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2010); and Essays on the Sociology of the Labor Market (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2013). Ruth Berins Collier is Heller Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has focused on the interplay of regime change and forms of popular participation and has included comparative analyses of Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Her books are Regimes in Tropical Africa: Changing Forms of Supremacy, 1945–1975 (University of California, 1982); Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics (Princeton University, 1991); The Contradictory Alliance: State-Labor Relations and Regime Change in Mexico (University of California, Institute of International Studies, 1992); Paths toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America (Cambridge, 1999); and Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America (Penn State Press, 2009). Maria Lorena Cook is Professor of International and Comparative Labor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. She is the author of The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility and Rights (Penn State Press, 2007) and Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State, and the Democratic Teachers’ Movement in Mexico (Penn State Press, 1996); coeditor of The Politics of Economic Restructuring: State-Society Relations and Regime Change in Mexico (Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1994) and Regional Integration and Industrial Relations in North America (Cornell University Press, 1994); and author of numerous articles and chapters on Latin American labor politics. Stephen Crowley is Professor of Politics and Chair of Russian and Eastern European Studies at Oberlin College. Crowley’s research has focused primarily on the sources and consequences of the relative weakness of postcommunist labor movements. His publications include Workers after Workers’ States: Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), coedited with David Ost; Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian and Ukrainian Workers from the End of the Soviet Union to the Post-Communist Transformations (University

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS     275

of Michigan Press, 1997). His articles have appeared in World Politics, Politics & Society, Eastern European Politics and Societies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and Demokratizatsiya, as well as a number of collected volumes. Volker Frank is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. His research interests are in the areas of comparative labor movements and democratization in Latin America, and, more recently, German history. His publications include “Politics without Policy: The Failure of Social Concertation in Democratic Chile, 1990–2000,” in Victims of the Chilean Miracle? Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era 1973–2002, edited by Peter Winn (Duke University Press, 2004). Mary E. Gallagher is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where she is also the director of the Center for Chinese Studies. She is also a faculty associate at the Center for Comparative Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. In 2012–13, she was a visiting scholar at the Koguan Law School at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Her book Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China was published by Princeton University Press in 2005. She is the coeditor of several volumes on Chinese law and politics, including Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (Cambridge, 2011); From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China (Cornell, 2011); and  Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (Cambridge, 2010). Marko Grdešic´ is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research interests are in labor unions, social movements, and collective action in Eastern Europe. He has published his research on the impact of the Yugoslav model of labor relations on contemporary unions in Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia in the European Journal of Industrial Relations and on the role of television in East Germany’s revolution in Communist and Post-Communist Studies. He has studied at Central European University in Budapest and at the University of Zagreb in Croatia. Jane Hutchison is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. She has worked on labor, gender, and globalization issues in the Philippines for a number of years and is the editor, with Andrew Brown, of Organising Labour in Globalising Asia (Routledge, 2001). Her latest, coauthored book is Political Economy and the Aid Industry in Asia (Palgrave 2014). She sat on the Oxfam

276    LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Australia Board from 2004 to 2014 and was its Chair and a member of the Oxfam International Board of Supervisors from 2012 to 2014. Yoonkyung Lee is Associate Professor in Sociology and Asian and Asian-American Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press, 2011) and her research has appeared in Studies in Comparative International Development, Critical Asian Studies, Globalizations, Asian Survey, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Korea Observer, and Taiwanese Sociology. David Ost is the Joseph DiGangi Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and frequent visiting professor in Poland. He is the author of many publications on postcommunist transformation, including The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Cornell, 2005), which won the Ed Hewett Prize for the best book in the political economy of postsocialism, and has come to figure prominently in Polish political debates. He has published in a wide variety of academic and popular journals, and is on the editorial boards of several journals, including Politics and Society, East European Politics and Societies, Polish Sociological Review, and the Warsaw Forum of Economic Sociology. Andrés Schipani is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative political economy, labor movements, and linkages between Left parties and popular sector associations. He is currently working on a dissertation on Left governments and policies of social protection toward formal sector workers in Latin America. His work on unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina and Chile under neoliberal reform was published in Desarrollo Económico.

Index

AFL-CIO, 75 Akbayan Party (Philippines), 67 Alessandri, Arturo, 185 All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), 198, 200, 204 – 11, 215 Allende, Salvador, 180, 182 – 83, 191, 194 – 95, 225 Alliance of Indonesian Labor Unions Confederation (KASBI), 26 – 27 All-Indonesia Center of Labor Organizations (SOBSI), 27 All-Indonesia Labor Federation, 28 All-Indonesia Workers’ Union Confederation, 26 All-Indonesia Workers’ Union (SPSI), 26, 28 – 31, 35 – 36, 40 – 42, 224 All-Russian Confederation of Labor, 126 American Center for International Labor Solidarity, 31 Aquino, Benigno, 72 Aquino, Corazon, 8, 11, 64 – 65, 73 – 76, 78 – 79. See also Philippines Argentina bargaining agent determination, 147 – 48 Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos, 157, 160 Chamber of Deputies, 154 – 55 collective bargaining, 16, 146 – 48, 150 – 52, 155, 157, 162, 223 Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), 146, 152 – 55, 157, 160, 225 – 26 Federal Mediation and Arbitration Service, 150 government/union relations, 145 – 47, 149 – 56 import-substitution industrialization (ISI), 143 – 44, 152 inclusionary corporatist incorporation, 14, 22, 142 – 45, 160 – 63 initial labor incorporation, 8, 142, 146 Justicialist Party, 145 labor demonstrations, 146 – 47, 149 – 50, 153, 157 – 58, 162 labor laws, 16, 145 – 56, 161 – 62, 220, 223 Labor Party, 145

Law of Professional Associations, 146, 153 legacy unions, 16, 22, 225 Ministry of Labor, 150 Peronist Party, 145 – 46, 152, 154 – 57, 162, 226 union leadership, 147, 149, 151, 153, 160 union membership levels, 147 – 49, 155, 157 wage levels, 157 – 58 Arroyo, Gloria Macapagal, 77 Ashwin, Sarah, 132 Asian-American Free Labor Institute, 75 Association of Free Trade Unions of Slovenia, 106, 110 Austria, 91 Aylwin, Patricio, 179 – 82, 184 – 91, 193 – 95 Bachelet, Michelle, 180, 188, 194 Bagong Alysansang Makabayan (Philippines), 67 Batam, 25 Bekasi, 25 Belgium, 113 Bhoka, Wilhemus, 35 Bitar, Jacó, 173 Bizyukov, Petr, 137 – 38 Bolkestein Directive, 102 Braudel, Fernand, 6 Brazil capitalism role, 165, 170 – 72, 174, 178 Catholic Church, 171 – 72 Central Única do Trabalhadores (CUT), 169, 173 – 77, 220, 227, 233 collective bargaining, 165 – 68, 175 – 76, 223 Communist Party, 168 – 71, 173, 177 Consolidation of the Labor Laws (CLT), 165 – 69, 175, 178 Constitutions, 167, 170, 174, 176 – 77 Estado Novo, 167 Força Sindical, 175 – 77 General Workers’ Command (CGT), 169 – 70, 173 ideological legacies, 23, 165 – 78 inclusionary corporatist incorporation, 14, 165 – 66, 168 – 70, 174 initial labor incorporation, 8 Institutional Act No. 5, 171 – 72

277

278    INDEX

Brazil (continued) labor demonstrations, 164, 171 labor laws, 23, 165 – 78, 220, 223 legacy unions, 16, 22 – 23, 225 Liberal Alliance (Aliança Liberal), 167 military rule, 22, 166, 171 – 73, 176 Ministry of Labor, 166 – 67, 169 – 70, 174, 176 – 77 new unionism, 22, 164 – 166, 169, 171 – 176 Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), 164, 177 – 78 Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB), 170 São Bernardo Metal Workers Union, 171 union leadership, 166, 168, 171, 177 union tax, 165, 167, 173, 175 – 76 wage levels, 166, 172, 175 Brezhnev, Leonid, 128 Burszt, László, 87 Calderón, Felipe, 158 Calle, Plutarco Elías, 144 Caraway, Teri, 14 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 142, 144 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 175, 177 Carneiro, Gilmar, 173 Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos, 157, 160 Central Unica de Trabajadores (Chile), 183 Central Única do Trabalhadores (Brazil), 169, 173 – 77, 220, 227, 233 Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (Chile), 180 – 83, 186, 188, 190 – 94, 225 Cesarini, Paola, 6 Chamber of Deputies (Argentina), 154 – 55 Chen Shui-ban, 49, 60 Cheng, Tun-Jen, 56 Chile Central Unica de Trabajadores, 183 Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), 180 – 83, 186, 188, 190 – 94, 225 Christian Democratic Party, 179, 186, 191, 195 Coalition of the Parties for Democracy, 179 Colegio de Profesores, 194 collective bargaining, 23, 182 – 84, 186 – 89, 223 – 24 Communist Party, 186, 190, 226 Concertación government, 18, 179 – 80, 182, 186, 189 – 94 Confederación de la Producción y del Comercio (CPC), 188, 193 Constitution, 185 Dirección del Trabajo, 188 ideological legacies, 18, 180 – 81, 184 – 85, 189 – 96

initial labor incorporation, 8 labor demonstrations, 180, 182 – 83, 186 – 88, 193 – 95, 224 labor laws, 180 – 89, 195, 223 legacy unions, 23, 181, 225 military coup, 182 – 83 Ministry of Labor, 183, 191 neoliberal market reform, 85, 180 – 89 Nueva Mayoría, 180 Plan Laboral, 182 – 85, 189, 194 Renovación Nacional, 186 Socialist Party, 179, 186, 191 Unidad Popular government, 182, 195 Unión Democrática Independiente, 186 union leadership, 180, 193 union membership levels, 193 – 94 wage levels, 182, 186 – 89, 192, 196 China All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), 198, 200, 204 – 11, 215 China Urban Labor Force Survey, 203 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 44, 198 – 200, 204 – 8 collective bargaining, 207, 210 – 11, 215 – 16 Communist Youth League, 208 dualistic labor market, 200 – 204, 208, 213, 232 – 33 Great Leap Forward, 202 household registration (hukou) system, 201 – 4 ideological legacies, 199 – 201, 205 – 8, 211 – 15 initial labor incorporation, 205, 207 – 8 iron rice bowl, 203, 206, 208, 212 – 13 Labor Contract Law, 204, 209 labor demonstrations, 198, 206, 210 – 11, 214 – 16 labor laws, 198, 203 – 4, 207 – 11, 214 – 16 labor subcontracting, 201, 204, 212 Mexico, competition with, 158 Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, 209 Property Law, 209 rural-to-urban migration, 201 – 4, 208 social programs, 202 – 5, 212 – 14 state paternalist incorporation, 197, 205, 207 – 8, 213 Trade Union Law, 211 transmission belt model, 13, 200, 205 – 8 union leadership, 208 union membership levels, 209 – 10 vertical authority relations, 211 – 15 wage levels, 205, 213, 215 Women’s Federation, 208 World Trade Organization accession, 203

INDEX     279

Chinese Federation of Labor (CFL), 46, 49, 56 – 57, 59 – 60, 62 – 63, 229. See also Taiwan Christian Democratic Party (Chile), 179, 186, 191, 195 Civil Servants Corps of the Republic of Indonesia (KORPRI), 31 – 32, 42 Coalition of the Parties for Democracy (Chile), 179 Cold War, 89 Colegio de Profesores (Chile), 194 Collier, David, 4 – 6, 8, 12, 94, 141, 205, 207 – 8, 230 Collier, Ruth Berins, 4 – 6, 8, 12, 94, 141, 205, 207 – 8, 230 Communist Party. See individual countries Communist Youth League (China), 208 Concertación government (Chile), 18, 179 – 80, 182, 186, 189 – 94 Confederación de la Producción y del Comercio (Chile), 188, 193 Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), 144, 153, 155 Confederación General del Trabajo (­Argentina), 146, 152 – 55, 157, 160, 225 – 26 Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, 144 Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Croatia, 110 Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Slovenia (Independence KNSS), 110 Confederation of Indonesian Workers (KSPI), 26, 29 Confederation of Labor of Russia, 126 Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia (SSS), 107, 110 – 11 Consolidation of the Labor Laws (Brazil), 165 – 69, 175, 178 Cook, Linda, 2 Cortázar, René, 190 Costa Rica, 3 Croatia collective bargaining, 117 Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Croatia, 110 critical juncture framework, 10 Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), 106 – 8, 110, 118 government/union interactions, 107 – 8 ideological legacies, 21, 103 – 4, 118 – 21 independence, 109 – 10 labor demonstrations, 111, 114, 117 – 20 labor incorporation, 106 – 8 labor privatization, 106, 111, 114, 117 – 19, 121 legacy unions, 109 – 11, 119, 224

multiparty elections, 106 nationalism detours, 106 – 8, 116 – 21 OECD Employment Projection Legislation index, 116 Office for Social Partnership, 114 Social Democratic Party of Croatia, 114 – 15 social ownership, 108, 114, 118 – 20 trade union confederation reforms, 106, 109 – 11 union membership levels, 111 Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia (SSSH), 106, 110 workers’ councils, 108, 119 – 20 Crowley, Stephen, 103 Cuba, 208 Czechoslovakia, 91, 112 Dahl, Robert, 111 Democratic Labor Party (South Korea), 44 – 45, 47 – 49, 52, 54, 61 – 62 Democratic Left Alliance (Poland), 96 Democratic Party (Serbia), 114 Democratic Progressive Party (Taiwan), 49, 55, 57, 59 – 63 Denmark, 113 Deripaska, Oleg, 122 Dirección del Trabajo (Chile), 188 Dutra, Eurico Gaspar, 168 Dutra, Olivio, 173 Edinaya Rossia (United Russia) party, 130, 133 Elster, Jon, 6 Employee Welfare Fund Act (Taiwan), 56 Employers Confederation of the Philippines, 71 Estado Novo (Brazil), 167 European Union (EU), 83, 97, 102 Federal Labor Law (Mexico), 145 Federal Mediation and Arbitration Service (Argentina), 150 Federasi Serikat Pekerja Metal Indonesia, 31 Federation of Free Workers (Philippines), 71 Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), 123, 126 – 34, 136 – 37, 139 – 40, 224 Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), 46, 54 – 55, 57 – 58, 62 Feng, Chen, 206 Finland, 113 Força Sindical (Brazil), 175 – 77 Ford, Michele, 36 Fox, Vicente, 158 Frei, Eduardo, 180, 182, 188 – 90, 194 Frente Amplio (Uruguay), 226

280    INDEX

Gani, Andi, 42 General Workers’ Command (Brazil), 169 – 70, 173 Germany, 94, 107 – 8, 113, 118 – 19, 221 Golkar Party (Indonesia), 35 Gontmakher, Yevgenii, 138 – 39 Grand National Party (South Korea), 48 – 49 Great Leap Forward (China), 202 Greene, Samuel, 130, 135 – 36, 138 Hankyoreh Party (South Korea), 47 Havel, Václav, 210 – 11 Herrera, Ernesto, 71, 73, 75 – 76, 78 Hite, Katherine, 6 House of Representatives (Philippines), 67 Howell, Judi, 207 Hungary, 116 ideological legacies Brazil, 23, 165 – 78 Chile, 18, 180 – 81, 184 – 85, 189 – 96 China, 199 – 201, 205 – 8, 211 – 15 Croatia, 21, 103 – 4, 118 – 21 Indonesia, 18, 26 – 35, 41 – 42 Philippines, 18, 64 – 65, 69 – 73, 80 Poland, 17 – 18, 21, 83 – 85, 89 – 90, 96 – 97 Russia, 18, 123, 128 – 41 Serbia, 21, 103 – 4, 118 – 21 Slovenia, 21, 103 – 4, 118 – 21 South Korea, 18, 45, 53 – 54, 61–63, 220 – 21 Taiwan, 18 – 19, 45, 53 – 54, 57, 62 – 63 Yugoslavia, 18, 21, 103 – 4, 111 – 13 Independence KNSS (Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Slovenia), 110 Independent Federation of Indonesian Teachers, 32 Independent Miners’ Union (Russia), 130 India, 3 Indonesia Alliance of Indonesian Labor Unions Confederation (KASBI), 26 – 27 All-Indonesia Center of Labor Organizations (SOBSI), 27 All-Indonesia Labor Federation, 28 All-Indonesia Workers’ Union Confederation, 26 All-Indonesia Workers’ Union (SPSI), 26, 28 – 31, 35 – 36, 40 – 42, 224 civil servants’ associations, 31 – 32, 42 collective bargaining, 11, 19 – 20, 26, 32, 37 – 41 Communist Party (PKI), 27, 36

Confederation of Indonesian Workers (KSPI), 26, 29 economic unionism, 19, 35 – 38, 41 – 42 exclusionary corporatist incorporation, 19 – 20, 26 – 27, 34, 41 Federasi Serikat Pekerja Metal Indonesia, 31 Golkar Party, 35 ideological legacies, 18, 26 – 35, 41 – 42 Independent Federation of Indonesian Teachers, 32 Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), 27, 36 Indonesian Democratic Party, 35 Indonesian Metalworkers Federation (FSPMI), 42 Indonesian Prosperous Labor Union Confederation (KSBSI), 26 – 27, 35 – 36 Indonesian Teachers’ Association (PGRI), 32, 42 Indonesian Workers’ Party, 35 initial labor incorporation, 8 internal reforms, 15, 29 – 31 labor demonstrations, 19 – 20, 25 – 26, 37 – 41, 43, 224 labor laws, 25, 32 – 34, 37 – 43, 223 Left eradication, 19, 27, 35 – 37, 41 – 42 legacy unions, 14 – 15, 41 – 42, 224 local labor offices (Disnaker), 33 – 34 Manpower Act, 37, 39, 41 minimum wage negotiations, 11, 25 – 26, 37, 40 – 41, 43 Ministry of Manpower, 36, 38 – 40 National Labor Party, 35 National Workers Union, 42 organizational weakness, 25 – 34 Pancasila Industrial Relations (HIP), 35 – 36, 38 People’s Democratic Party, 36 political party/union links, 34 – 37, 41 – 43 Prosperous Justice Party, 42 Social Democratic Labor Party, 35 Social Security Law, 37 state enterprise associations, 32 – 33 strike restrictions, 11 – 12, 37 – 39, 41, 43 teachers’ associations, 26, 32, 42 Trade Union Act, 33 tripartism, 11, 20, 29, 38 – 41 union leadership, 15, 28 – 32, 40 – 42 union membership levels, 19, 25 – 26, 28, 34, 41 United Development Party, 35 Industrial Democracy in Europe, 113 Institute of Regional Policy (Russia), 134 Institutional Act No. 5 (Brazil), 171 – 72

INDEX     281

International Labour Organization (ILO), 66 – 67, 76 – 77, 129 – 30, 161, 173 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 83, 128 Isayev, Andrei, 130 Israel, 113 Italy, 91 Jakarta, 25 Japan, 45, 113 Justicialist Party (Argentina), 145 Kasyanov, Mikhail, 131 Kilusang Mayo Uno (Philippines), 65, 68, 72 – 76, 80 Kim Dae Jung, 47, 62 – 63 Kim Young Sam, 47 Kirchner, Néstor, 150, 157 Kitschelt, Herbert, 6 Korea. See South Korea Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), 18, 20, 46 – 47, 53, 58, 60 – 61, 63, 227 – 29, 233 Kozina, Irina, 136 – 37 Kubik, Jan, 84 Kuomintang party (KMT), 49, 51 – 52, 55 – 56, 59 – 60, 62 – 63, 227 Kwon Young-kil, 47 – 48 Labor Advisory and Coordinating Council (Philippines), 74 – 75 Labor Code (Philippines), 64 – 65, 70 – 71, 74, 78 – 80 Labor Congress (Mexico), 155 Labor Contract Law (China), 204, 209 Labor Insurance Act (Taiwan), 56 Labor Party (Argentina), 145 Labor Party (Taiwan), 49, 52 Labor Union Law (Taiwan), 56 Lagos, Ricardo, 180, 182, 185, 188, 190, 194 Law of Professional Associations (Argentina), 146, 153 Law on Associated Labor (Yugoslavia), 115 – 16 Law on Enterprises (Yugoslavia), 116 Lee, Ching Kwan, 213 Lee Myung Bak, 63 legacy unions Argentina, 16, 22, 225 Brazil, 16, 22 – 23, 225 Chile, 23, 181, 225 Croatia, 109 – 111, 119, 224 Indonesia, 14 – 15, 41 – 42, 224 Mexico, 14, 15, 22, 145, 155, 181, 225 Philippines, 14, 75, 224

Poland, 14, 16, 21, 97 – 101, 181, 225 Russia, 15, 21 – 22, 98, 109, 127, 130, 132, 134, 140, 221, 224 Serbia, 109 – 11, 119, 224 Slovenia, 109 – 11, 119, 221, 224 South Korea, 14, 225 Taiwan, 14, 18, 224 Yugoslavia, 16, 108 – 11 legal legacies Argentina, 22, 142 – 143, 146 – 151, 156, 159 – 163 Brazil, 22 – 23, 165 – 170, 177 Chile, 18, 23, 180 – 184, 193 – 196 China, 198, 200 – 202, 205 – 207, 213 – 216 Croatia, 120 Indonesia, 26, 35, 38 – 39 Mexico, 16, 22, 142 – 143, 146 – 151, 156, 159 – 163 Philippines, 67 – 71, 73 – 74 Poland, 88, 99 – 101 Russia, 15, 136 – 141 South Korea, 54 – 55 Yugoslavia, 116 Lenin, Vladimir, 200, 205 Li Qi, 206 Liberal Alliance (Brazil), 167 Liberal Democracy of Slovenia (LDS), 106 – 7, 120 Lityn´ski, Jan, 100 Lula da Silva, Luis Inácio, 166, 171, 173 – 74, 177 – 78 Luo Mei-wen, 49, 52 Magadia, Jose, 78 Man of Marble, 95 Manpower Act (Indonesia), 37, 39, 41 Mao Zedong, 23, 198, 201, 211 – 15. See also China Marcos, Ferdinand, 8, 11, 20, 64 – 65, 68 – 73, 76, 80 – 81. See also Philippines Marković, Ante, 116 Marx, Karl, 36, 102, 105, 170, 172 Menegheli, Jair, 174 Menem, Carlos, 153, 155 Mexico bargaining agent determination, 147 – 48 China, competition with, 158 collective bargaining, 145, 147, 150 – 51, 153, 162 Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), 144, 153, 155 Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, 144

282    INDEX

Mexico (continued) Federal Labor Law, 145 government/union relations, 143 – 51, 153 – 56 import-substitution industrialization (ISI), 143 – 44, 152 inclusionary corporatist incorporation, 14, 22, 142 – 45, 159 – 63 independent unions, 145, 153, 156 initial labor incorporation, 142, 146 Labor Congress, 155 labor demonstrations, 145, 149 – 50, 158 – 59, 162 labor laws, 16, 144 – 51, 153 – 56, 161 – 62, 220, 223 legacy unions, 14, 16, 22, 145, 155, 181, 225 Mexican Revolution, 144 Ministry of Labor, 162 National Action Party (PAN), 158 – 59 National Minimum Wage Commission, 144 new unionism, 156, 161 National Worker Housing Institute, 144 Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, 144 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 144, 148, 153 – 55, 157 – 59, 227 Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), 155 – 56, 159 Social Security Institute, 144 union leadership, 148 – 49, 151, 153 – 54, 158 – 59, 162 union membership levels, 149, 155, 158 Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, 153 wage levels, 149 – 50, 152 – 54, 158 – 59 Workers’ Bank, 144 Zapatistas, 153 Miloševic´, Slobodan, 107 – 8, 118 – 20 Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (China), 209 Ministry of Labor (Argentina), 150 Ministry of Labor (Brazil), 166 – 67, 169 – 70, 174, 176 – 77 Ministry of Labor (Chile), 183, 191 Ministry of Labor (Mexico), 162 Ministry of Manpower (Indonesia), 36, 38 – 40 National Action Party (Mexico), 158 – 59 National Assembly (South Korea), 47 – 48, 61 National Association of Trade Unions (Poland), 21, 82 – 83, 88 – 89, 96, 99 – 102, 226 National Labor Party (Indonesia), 35 National Labor Relations Commission (Philippines), 79 National Minimum Wage Commission (Mexico), 144

National Movement for Free Elections (Philippines), 73 National Worker Housing Institute (Mexico), 144 National Workers Union (Indonesia), 42 Netherlands, 113 New Party (Taiwan), 61 New Patriotic Alliance (Philippines), 67 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 27, 39, 211 Noronha, Eduardo, 167 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 153, 158 North Korea, 44 Norway, 113 Novocherlassk, 125 – 26 Nueva Mayoría (Chile), 180 OECD, 115 – 16, 136 Offe, Claus, 6 Office for Social Partnership (Croatia), 114 Olimpieva, Irina, 132 Ople, Blas, 70 Ost, David, 103 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), 66 Pakpahan, Muchtar, 35 Pancasila Industrial Relations (Indonesia), 35 – 36, 38 Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, 144 Partido dos Trabalhadores (Brazil), 164, 177 – 78 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Mexico), 144, 148, 153 – 55, 157 – 59, 227 Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB), 170 Party for Peace and Democracy (South Korea), 47 Party of Democratic Revolution (Mexico), 155 – 56, 159 Pasaribu, Bomer, 31 Pateman, Carole, 111 People First Party (Taiwan), 61 People’s Democratic Party (Indonesia), 36 People’s Party (South Korea), 47 Perón, Juan Domingo, 11, 142, 145. See also Argentina Peronist Party (Argentina), 145 – 46, 152, 154 – 57, 162, 226 Philippines Akbayan Party, 67 Aquino, Corazon, 79 Bagong Alysansang Makabayan, 67 collective bargaining, 11, 66 – 70, 72, 79

INDEX     283

Communist Party (CPP), 68, 72, 74 – 75, 230 Employers Confederation of the Philippines, 71 enterprise unionism, 65 – 66, 69 – 70, 72 Federation of Free Workers (FFW), 71 House of Representatives, 67 ideological legacies, 18, 64 – 65, 69 – 73, 80 initial labor incorporation, 8 Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), 65, 68, 72 – 76, 80 Labor Advisory and Coordinating Council (LACC), 74 – 75 Labor Code, 64 – 65, 70 – 71, 74, 78 – 80 labor demonstrations, 68 – 71, 75, 78 – 79, 224 legacy unions, 14, 75, 224 martial law, 68 – 70 minimum wage negotiations, 68, 72, 75, 79 National Labor Relations Commission, 79 National Movement for Free Elections, 73 New Patriotic Alliance, 67 organizational weakness, 64, 77 – 80 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), 66 political violence, 64, 68, 71, 74, 77 Strengthening Workers’ Constitutional Right to Self-Organization Act, 79 strike restrictions, 11, 68, 70 – 71, 78 – 79 Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), 65 – 67, 71 – 73, 75 – 78, 81 tripartism, 11, 64 – 68, 71 – 72, 74, 76 – 81 Tripartite Industrial Peace Council (TIPC), 67, 76 – 78 union leadership, 65 – 66, 69 – 72, 78 union membership levels, 64, 66 – 67, 76 Piñera, José, 182 – 84, 186 Piñera, Sebastián, 180 Pinochet, Augusto, 8, 23, 179 – 87, 191 – 92, 194 – 96. See also Chile Plan Laboral (Chile), 182 – 85, 189, 194 Pochinok, Alexander, 128 Poland Democratic Left Alliance, 96 ideological legacies, 17 – 18, 21, 83 – 85, 89 – 90, 96 – 97 labor demonstrations, 85, 99 labor incorporation periods, 93 – 95 labor privatization, 87 – 88, 92 – 93, 96 – 100 legacy unions, 14, 16, 21, 97 – 101, 181, 225 martial law, 82, 91, 96, 98 – 99, 101 National Association of Trade Unions (OPZZ), 21, 82 – 83, 88 – 89, 96, 99 – 102, 226 OECD Employment Projection Legislation index, 116

organizational legacies, 88 – 89 Round Table negotiations, 82, 99 Solidarity union, 16, 18, 21, 82 – 83, 87 – 89, 91 – 94, 96, 98 – 102, 226 – 27, 233 strategic legacies, 86 – 87 structural legacies, 90 – 91 Trade Union Act, 96 – 97 Trade Union Forum, 89 tripartism, 91 union leadership, 82, 85, 91 – 93, 97 union membership levels, 85, 88 – 89 Preuss, Ulrich, 6 Progressive New Party (South Korea), 47 Property Law (China), 209 Prosperous Justice Party (Indonesia), 42 Putin, Vladimir, 15, 22, 122, 128, 130, 133, 135 – 37, 139 – 41. See also Russia Putnam, Robert, 6 Red Army, 95 Renovación Nacional (Chile), 186 Reunification Democratic Party (South Korea), 47 Robertson, Graeme, 130, 135 – 38 Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 131 Russia All-Russian Confederation of Labor, 126 alternative unions, 126, 129 – 33, 140 automobile industry, 133 – 34, 138 collective bargaining, 129 Confederation of Labor of Russia, 126 distributive union model, 131 – 33 Edinaya Rossia (United Russia) party, 130, 133 Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), 123, 126 – 34, 136 – 37, 139 – 40, 224 ideological legacies, 18, 123, 128 – 41 Independent Miners’ Union, 130 Institute of Regional Policy, 134 labor demonstrations, 22, 114 – 15, 123, 132, 135 – 41, 224 labor laws, 128 – 31, 133 – 41, 221 legacy unions, 15, 21 – 22, 98, 109, 127, 130, 132, 134, 140, 221, 224 monogorods, 22, 122, 134, 138 – 39, 141 oil industry, 135 – 36, 138 – 39 Russian Independent Miners Union, 89 Russian Revolution, 124 social parternships, 130 – 31, 140 Sotsprof, 126, 133 union leadership, 132 – 33 union membership levels, 126 – 27, 133, 140

284    INDEX

Russia (continued) wage levels, 122, 125, 129, 131, 133 – 36, 138 – 39, 141 See also Soviet Union São Bernardo Metal Workers Union (Brazil), 171 Serbia Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia (SSS), 107, 110 – 11 critical juncture framework, 10 Democratic Party, 114 government/union interactions, 107 – 8 ideological legacies, 21, 103 – 4, 118 – 21 independence, 109 – 11 labor demonstrations, 111, 114 – 15, 117 – 19 labor incorporation, 106 – 8 labor privatization, 106, 111, 114, 117, 119, 121 legacy unions, 109 – 11, 119, 224 multiparty elections, 106 – 7 nationalism detours, 107 – 8, 116 – 17, 119 – 21 OECD Employment Projection Legislation index, 116 social ownership, 108, 114, 118 – 20 Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), 107 trade union confederation reforms, 107, 109 – 11 UGS Nezavisnost (Independence), 111 union membership levels, 111 workers’ councils, 108, 119 – 20 Sergeev, Aleksandr, 89 Serikat Pekerja Nasional (Indonesia), 31 Shaping the Political Arena, 4 – 6, 205 Shmakov, Mikhail, 126, 128, 130 – 31, 136 Silver, Beverly, 3 Slovakia, 116 Slovenia Association of Free Trade Unions of Slovenia, 106, 110 collective bargaining, 107 critical juncture framework, 10 government/union interactions, 107 – 8, 118 ideological legacies, 21, 103 – 4, 118 – 21 independence, 109 – 10 Independence KNSS (Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Slovenia), 110 insider coalitions, 105, 117 labor demonstrations, 109, 114 – 15, 117, 119 labor incorporation, 106 – 8 labor privatization, 21, 106, 108, 114, 117, 119 – 21 legacy unions, 109 – 11, 119, 221, 224

Liberal Democracy of Slovenia (LDS), 106 – 7, 120 multiparty elections, 106 – 7, 110 nationalism detours, 91, 106 – 8, 116 – 17, 119 – 21 OECD Employment Projection Legislation index, 116 Slovenian Christian Democrats, 106 Slovenian Democratic Party, 117 social ownership, 107 – 8, 114, 118 – 19 trade union confederation reforms, 106, 109 – 11 union membership levels, 111, 117 workers’ councils, 107, 118 – 19 Social Democratic Labor Party (Indonesia), 35 Social Democratic Party of Croatia, 114 – 15 Social Security Institute (Mexico), 144 Social Security Law (Indonesia), 37 Socialist Party (Chile), 179, 186, 191 Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), 107 Solidarity union, 16, 18, 21, 82 – 83, 87 – 89, 91 – 94, 96, 98 – 102, 226 – 27, 233. See also Poland Sotsprof (Russia), 126, 133 South Korea collective bargaining, 45 – 46, 58 Communist Party obstacles, 44, 50, 58 Democratic Labor Party (DLP), 44 – 45, 47 – 49, 52, 54, 61 – 62 electoral institutional opportunities, 51 – 54, 60 – 61 exclusionary corporatist incorporation, 45 Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), 46, 54 – 55, 57 – 58, 62 Grand National Party (GNP), 48 – 49 Hankyoreh Party, 47 ideological legacies, 18, 45, 53 – 54, 61 – 63, 220 – 21 Japanese colonialism, 45 Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), 18, 20, 46 – 47, 53, 58, 60 – 61, 63, 227 – 29, 233 labor laws, 54 – 55, 58, 222 – 23 legacy unions, 14, 225 National Assembly, 47 – 48, 61 Party for Peace and Democracy, 47 People’s Party, 47 political cleavages, 50 – 54, 57 – 59 political democratization, 44 – 48, 57 – 59 Progressive New Party, 47 regionalism, 50 – 51, 54, 58 Reunification Democratic Party, 47 Trade Union Act, 54 – 55

INDEX     285

union independence, 20, 46 – 47, 53 – 55, 57 – 59, 61 – 62 union leadership, 47, 54, 58 union membership levels, 46 – 48, 57 United Democratic Party, 63 Soviet Union, 94 – 95, 105, 122 – 26, 131, 135 – 40, 198, 208, 212, 219. See also Russia SPSI-Reformasi, 29, 31. See also All-Indonesia Workers’ Union (SPSI) Stalin, Joseph, 105, 109, 124, 134 Stark, David, 87 Strengthening Workers’ Constitutional Right to Self-Organization Act (Philippines), 79 Sudomo, 38 – 39 Suharto, 8, 11, 18 – 20, 26 – 29, 32 – 40. See also Indonesia Sukarno, 35, 38 Sukarnoputri, Megawati, 31, 36 Sweden, 113 Swidler, Ann, 17 Syria, 210 Taiwan Chinese Federation of Labor (CFL), 46, 49, 56 – 57, 59 – 60, 62 – 63, 229 collective bargaining, 45 – 46 Communist Party obstacles, 44 dangwai activists, 57 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), 49, 55, 57, 59 – 63 electoral institutional opportunities, 51 – 54, 61 – 62 Employee Welfare Fund Act, 56 enterprise unionism, 46 ethnic identity, 50 – 51, 54, 57, 60 exclusionary corporatist incorporation, 45 ideological legacies, 18 – 19, 45, 53 – 54, 57, 62 – 63 Japanese colonialism, 45 Kuomintang party (KMT), 49, 51 – 52, 55 – 57, 59 – 60, 62 – 63, 227 Labor Insurance Act, 56 Labor Party, 49, 52 Labor Union Law, 56 legacy unions, 14, 18, 224 Legislative Yuan, 49, 56, 61 martial law, 52, 57, 59 New Party, 61 People First Party, 61 political cleavages, 50 – 54, 57, 60 – 63 political democratization, 44 – 48, 59 – 62 political party/union links, 20, 44 – 45, 49, 52 – 57, 59 – 63, 220 – 21

single non-transferable voting (SNTV) system, 52, 54, 61 – 62 Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU), 46, 49, 57, 59 – 60, 62 – 63 Taiwan Labor Front, 57 union leadership, 56, 59 – 60 union membership levels, 46 Workers’ Party, 49, 52 Tangerang, 25 Taylor, Bill, 206 Tempo, Svetozar Vukmanović, 108 – 9 Tito, Josip Broz, 105, 109 Trade Union Act (Indonesia), 33 Trade Union Act (Poland), 96 – 97 Trade Union Act (South Korea), 54 – 55 Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), 65 – 67, 71 – 73, 75 – 78, 81 Trade Union Forum (Poland), 89 Trade Union Law (China), 211 Trans-Siberian railroad, 135 Tripartite Industrial Peace Council (Philippines), 67, 76 – 78 Tuđman, Franjo, 106 – 7, 120 UGS Nezavisnost (Serbia), 111 Unidad Popular government (Chile), 182, 195 Unión Democrática Independiente (Chile), 186 Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (Mexico), 153 Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia (SSSH), 106, 110 United Democratic Party (South Korea), 63 United Development Party (Indonesia), 35 United Kingdom, 113 United States, 39, 158 Uruguay, 226, 231 Valenzuela, Samuel, 74 Vargas, Getúlio, 22, 164 – 78. See also Brazil Vedomosti, 127, 134, 139 Vietnam, 44, 197 Wahid, Abdurahman, 31, 36 Wajda, Andrzej, 95 Walder, Andrew, 211 – 12 Wałęsa, Lech, 100 Wang Yi-hsiung, 49 Wea, Jakob Nuwa, 31, 42 Wedeen, Lisa, 210 – 11 Weir, Margaret, 9 – 10 Women’s Federation (China), 208 Workers’ Bank (Mexico), 144 Workers’ Party (Taiwan), 49, 52

286    INDEX

World Bank, 128 World Trade Organization (WTO), 203 World War I, 94 World War II, 94, 112, 217 Wright, Erik, 92, 123, 126, 139 Wurfel, David, 70 Xi Jinping, 204 Yan, Yunxiang, 214 Yeltsin, Boris, 21, 127 – 28, 130, 135, 140. See also Russia Yugoslavia BOALs (basic organization of associated labor), 115 – 16 breakup, 91, 106, 121 critical juncture framework, 10, 121

ideological legacies, 18, 21, 103 – 4, 111 – 13 insider coalitions, 105 labor demonstrations, 105 – 6, 108 – 9 labor incorporation, 104 – 8 labor laws, 115 – 18 Law on Associated Labor, 115 – 16 Law on Enterprises, 116 legacy unions, 16, 108 – 11 self-management role, 103 – 5, 111 – 13, 116, 121 social ownership, 104 – 5, 113 – 14, 116 trade union confederation reforms, 108 – 11 union membership levels, 104 workers’ councils, 104 – 5, 107 – 8, 112 – 13 Zapatistas, 153 Zaslavsky, Victor, 127