Labor Under Strain: The Latin American Right and the Politics of Market Reform

Abstract

What explains differences in labor market reforms among conservative governments in Latin America during the 2010s–20s? Analyzing the 2000s “pink tide” as a critical juncture, we argue that two policy legacies account for this cross-national variation. First, the degree of labor movement empowerment under leftist governments conditioned whether subsequent conservative administrations pursued radical or more moderate reforms. Second, labor movement cohesion—shaped by the encompassment of confederations, partisan alignments, and bargaining institutions—determined whether governments pursued inequitable (targeting specific segments of the workforce) or equitable reforms. We analyze the administrations of Temer and Bolsonaro in Brazil, Macri and Milei in Argentina, and Lacalle Pou in Uruguay. Our main contributions are to examine the seldom-explored distributional equity of austerity reforms in Latin America, demonstrating that under conditions of acute fiscal stress the public–private divide becomes a central dimension of labor market reform, and to introduce labor movement cohesion as a new explanatory variable in labor policy analysis.