Academic Articles
Journal Articles
“Left Behind: Labor Unions and Redistributive Policy under the Brazilian Workers’ Party”,
The Journal of Comparative Politics
Honorable Mention from REPAL’s 2021 Annual Meeting.
How do leftist governments negotiate the trade-off between courting union support and maintaining the business sector’s trust? Scholars have argued that leftist parties will remain accountable to their labor base when powerful unions have strong ties to centralized leftist parties. However, I argue that strong party-union ties and party leadership centralization may, in fact, insulate leftist presidents against redistributive pressures from below. When party-union ties allow labor leaders to develop careers as professional politicians, these leaders become more responsive to the party’s goals than to their union base. Further, a centralized party organization can exclude unions and leftist factions from the design of redistributive policies. To test my argument, I use a case study of Brazil under the administration of the Worker’s Party (PT).
“Despertando al gigante invertebrado: la estrategia sindical de los gobiernos kirchneristas (2003-2015)”
Magazine of the Argentine Society for Political Analysis,Vol. 15, No. 2, November 2021, Buenos Aires.
This article explains the political determinants of Kirchnerism's strategy towards unions. I argue that this strategy exhibited three fundamental features: (1) a marked redistribution of income and power towards the working class in industrial relations, (2) an attempt to reconfigure the map of union power from the state, and (3) the lack of inclusion of unions in the political arena. This strategy is explained by the pre-existent political resources of workers' organizations. While their high mobilization capacity and autonomy vis-à-vis the ruling party forced the Kirchners administrations to forge coalitions with unions to reduce protest levels, the underrepresentation of unionists in the state is explained by the weak pre-existing ties between unionists and the Partido Justicialista. Further, both factors led the Kirchners to reconfigure the map of union power ‘from above’ with the objective of creating a union support base of their own, which they lacked.
“Organizando el descontento: movilizaciones de desocupados en la Argentina y Chile durante las reformas de mercado”
Economic development,vol. 48, No. 189, April-June 2008, Buenos Aires.
In the context of market reforms and high unemployment rates, Argentina and Chile witnessed significant mobilizations of the unemployed. The fate of these protests was uneven: while in Argentina the mobilizations were frequent and more or less continuous during the period under study (1990-2005), in Chile (1974-1990) protests were less numerous and more limited in time. Against this background, the aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, to underline the catalytic role that political activists played in staging these protests. Thus, I will highlight how their incentives and organizational resources allowed them to overcome the obstacles that usually inhibit the collective action of the unemployed. On the other hand, I explain the contrast between Argentina and Chile in terms of protest levels and duration based on the different roles played by activists in the mobilization of the unemployed. Indeed, their effectiveness in mobilizing the unemployed was uneven, and it is explained by two factors: 1) the previous development of neighborhood self-organization (and thus, the existence or absence of neighborhood or community leaders in a position to compete with political activists for the loyalties of the unemployed), and 2) the place occupied by political activists’ political allegiances within the political system. In relation to the first element, I will argue that the prior development of a network of community organizations made it more difficult for political activists to organize massive organizations of the unemployed in poor neighborhoods, thus limiting the frequency of protests. Second, the more marginal were political activists’ groups of political reference within the existing political system, the greater were their incentives to push for continued mobilization.
Book chapters (peer-reviewed)
“Conclusion: The Comparative Analysis of Regime Change and Labor Legacies”
(with Ruth Berins Collier), by Teri Caraway, Maria Lorena Cook y Stephen Crowley, Working Through the Past: Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective, Cornell University Press, 2015.
This chapter focuses on how the constraints and resources inherited from the authoritarian period shaped unions and labor law in the period that begins with the third wave of democratization. In turn, it analyzes how these processes shaped the ability of unions to respond to the challenge of market reforms and globalization. In this chapter we analyze, in a comparative way between regions, the effects of the authoritarian legacies. In particular, we place the analytical focus on how these legacies interact with power resources to enable the reproduction (or, conversely, the change) of the existing labor institutions. In this sense, we argue that in order to understand the future of unions and labor institutions, it is essential the study of the way in which the defining political and economic changes of the last two decades of the 20th century (democratization and market reforms) redistribute resources and affect the incentives of political and social actors who intervene in the labor world. Ultimately, these legacies have a significant effect on the ability of union organizations to expand workers´ rights and benefits.
Working Papers
“The Left and the Labor Movement in Latin America”
Winner of the “Dorothy Day” Award for the best paper on labor politics presented at the 2020 APSA (American Political Science Association) Annual Meeting.
In the context of globalization, left-wing governments need to balance two conflicting objectives: wooing the support of labor unions and maintaining the confidence of the business sector. This paper studies how governments resolved this trade-off during the left turn in Latin America in the 2000s. To attract union support, presidents can (1) empower unions vis-à-vis employers in industrial relations (economic empowerment) and (2) empower unions in the state (political empowerment). This article highlights the causal importance of two characteristics of the organizational structures of leftist parties: (1) the type of professional ties between union leaders and the party, and (2) the degree of fragmentation of power within the party. The main hypothesis is that unions gain more benefits when power is fragmented within the leftist party and unionists have dual careers (simultaneously holding leadership positions in the party and in the unions). This article makes two theoretical contributions: it advances a novel concept of union power that distinguishes between economic and political power, and it presents a new theory of labor politics based on unionists' career incentives. I demonstrate my argument by comparing three "most similar" cases of labor policies under leftist governments in Argentina (2003-2015), Brazil (2003-2016), and Uruguay (2005-2020).
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
“Segmented Retrenchment: The Politics of Welfare Cuts in Developing Countries”
Presented at the 2020 APSA (American Political Science Association) Annual Meeting.
Focusing on Latin America’s ‘Right Turn’ after long years of left-wing governments, I analyse the political dilemmas faced by Conservative politicians that undertake welfare retrenchment in developing countries with dualized labor makers (i.e., with a high percentage of informal workers). Conservative politicians adopted a strategy of segmented retrenchment. This strategy combines deep welfare cuts for formal workers with the expansion of welfare programs for informal workers. I argue that Conservative governments have electoral and fiscal incentives to adopt this strategy: they cannot adopt full-fledged retrenchment because, unlike their counterparts in developed countries, Conservative parties in Latin America cannot forge winning electoral coalitions by simply appealing to the middle-class. They need to court large segments of the popular sectors to forge winning electoral coalitions. Furthermore, Conservatives interested in deficit reduction have to choose their battles in terms of where to cut, and cutting programs for insiders is the more efficient strategy both fiscally and electorally.
I also examine why Conservative parties vary in terms of their success in implementing this strategy. I argue that this variation is explained by two factors: the electoral strength of the Left and the type of redistributive policies adopted during Latin America’s ‘Left turn’. In this paper, I focus on the cases of Argentina under the administration of Mauricio Macri (2016-2019) and Brazil under the administrations of Michel Temer (2016-2018) and Jair Bolsonaro (2018-).
“The Micro-dynamics of Labor Unions: Elites, Grassroots Activism and the Decentralization of Collective Bargaining”
with Federico Fuchs
The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of market reforms on the internal structure and strategies of trade union organizations, as well as their effects on the patterns of industrial relations in contemporary Argentina. In particular, we will analyze the collective action dilemmas faced by trade unions in the industrial sector in the face of the increase in the heterogeneity of the productive network and labor force that has taken place within the industrial branches. These dilemmas, we will argue, have become more acute for union leaders since 2003, in a context of accelerated economic reactivation that has revitalized grassroots mobilization. Based on a comparative study of unions in the automotive and food industries, we show that even though this new productive configuration tends to conspire against the internal unity of unions, unions´ability to overcome this problem was uneven. The article proposes an explanation centered on historical factors: in particular, we will argue that the organizational legacies of the period of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), as well as the way in which the union elites dealt with their bases during market reforms, determined the type of leadership resources they would have at their disposal to manage the revitalization of grassroots mobilization that commenced in 2003.
Other publications
“Left Behind: Labor Unions and Redistributive Policy under the Brazilian Workers’ Party”,
The Journal of Comparative Politics
Buenos Aires: CIAS + Fundar.
How do leftist governments negotiate the trade-off between courting union support and maintaining the business sector’s trust? Scholars have argued that leftist parties will remain accountable to their labor base when powerful unions have strong ties to centralized leftist parties. However, I argue that strong party-union ties and party leadership centralization may, in fact, insulate leftist presidents against redistributive pressures from below. When party-union ties allow labor leaders to develop careers as professional politicians, these leaders become more responsive to the party’s goals than to their union base. Further, a centralized party organization can exclude unions and leftist factions from the design of redistributive policies. To test my argument, I use a case study of Brazil under the administration of the Worker’s Party (PT).
¿Cuánto (y cómo) invierte el Estado argentino en la lucha contra la pobreza?” con Lara Forlino, en Democracia 40 años, Ministerio de Cultura, 2023.
(with Lara Forlino), Democracia 40 años , Ministerio de Cultura, 2023.
“Mapa de las Políticas Sociales en la Argentina. Aportes para un sistema de protección social más justo y eficiente”,
With Rodrigo Zarazaga y Lara Forlino.
Buenos Aires: CIAS + Fundar.
During the last decade, the Argentine State has failed to reduce poverty rates. This performance goes against what is happening in the region: practically all Latin American countries managed to do so in a sustained manner. The difficulties in combating poverty in our country do not originate from insufficient public spending: Argentina is the second country in Latin America that invests the most in social protection.
In view of this situation, where high levels of social spending are combined with high levels of poverty, we understand that it is necessary to modify the usual approach on the subject: instead of studying the size of social spending in relation to the budget or GDP, it is necessary to analyze with greater fine tuning its composition and its evolution. Under this premise, this study carries out an analysis of the composition and evolution of social spending between 2002 and 2020, which allows us to identify strengths and problems of the social safety net in Argentina, while suggesting changes to improve the fairness and efficiency of public policies in the fight against poverty.