[Marxism] La Botz: The Role of Labor in Latin America’s ‘Left Turn’

["Fred Fuentes" <fred.fuentes@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Role of Labor in Latin America's 'Left Turn'
11 Sep 2007by Dan La Botz
http://news.nacla.org/2007/09/11/the-role-of-labor-in-latin-america%E2%80%99s-left-turn/

After almost twenty years of living with the Washington Consensus of
free-trade policies, a broad opposition to the political economy of
neoliberal globalization has developed throughout Latin America. As
the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (of the ICFTU)
meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, last December noted, "The victories of
Evo Morales [in Bolivia], Lula [in Brazil], Chávez [in Venezuela] and
Rafael Correa in Ecuador, create an opportunity for the establishment
of an integration process different from the neoliberal model… and an
opportunity to confront the free-trade agreements that are being
negotiated in the region."

The political change in Latin America has been driven by massive
protests involving general strikes, sometimes-violent uprisings, and a
left-wing military coup. By 2006, these protest movements had brought
to power new left-of-center governments in several countries. The
presidents elected in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua,
Venezuela, and Uruguay in this period came to power by opposing, at
least nominally, the free market policies pushed upon them by the
United States and the world financial institutions—the IMF, World
Bank, and WTO. While the visions, programs and actions of these
governments vary significantly, taken together this development
represents an important shift in the politics of Latin America
vis-à-vis the United States and its free-trade agenda. More important,
this block of nations and of peoples represents a search for an
alternative to the destructive and dehumanizing regime of savage
capitalism masked by the term "globalization."

Globalization has brought drastic changes to Latin American economies
and societies and particularly to industry-labor relations. Markets
have been opened, even to foreign investors with up to 100% ownership,
state-owned firms have been privatized, industries deregulated, social
budgets and government subsidies cut, labor unions attacked,
industry-wide pattern agreements dismantled, contractual working
conditions have been made flexible, and subcontracting increased. At
the same time, old machines have been scrapped and new technologies
introduced together with new forms of organization of production,
eliminating or disrupting preexisting informal workplace relations and
union structures on the shop floor. The worker, if she did not lose
her job, often lost her workmates and found her routine broken and her
life altered.

All this has had profound consequences: noncompetitive firms closed,
and in some places entire industries perished, new export processing
zones (maquiladoras) were established, though still the number of
industrial jobs declined, and unemployment rose. As male industrial
workers were losing jobs, 33 million women entered the Latin American
labor market between 1990 and 2004, coming to make up 40% of the
economically active population in Latin America. Wage differentials
grew between the better-educated skilled workers and the uneducated
and unskilled. Millions of workers, men and women, found employment
only in the informal sector, an illegal and underground economy
without labor unions or any form of social insurance (health care and
pensions). In much of Latin America the informal economy came to make
up between 25 and 40% of all employment.

By 1997, 45% of all Latin Americans lived in poverty, and, in some
countries, extreme poverty—characterized by malnutrition and the
deterioration of one's health—affected 20% of the population. Faced
with such conditions, millions of workers began to migrate first to
the cities of their own nation, then from one Latin American nation to
another—in South America to Argentina or Venezuela and in Central
America to Mexico—or, leaving Latin America, to the United States or
Europe. By 2000, more than 35 million Latin Americans—two-thirds
Mexican—had reached the United States where they made up 13% of the
population. Ten percent of all Mexicans left their country—about 10
million people went to live in the United States between 1965 and
2005, the greatest emigration in the nation's history.

The region's labor movements have also been transformed. In much of
Latin America since the 1930s or 1940s a corporatist political-labor
system, that is, a system where political parties controlled the labor
unions, had existed. Powerful nationalist-populist political
parties—the Peronists (Partido Justicalista) in Argentina, Democratic
Action (AD) in Venezuela, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
in Mexico—had dominated the official labor federations: respectively,
the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), the Confederation of
Venezuelan Workers (CTV), and the Confederation of Mexican Workers
(CTM). During those years, loyal union bureaucracies had privileged
positions, and unionized workers enjoyed job security and relatively
higher wages as well as access to subsidized food and housing. Workers
in heavy industry or public employment often had lifetime job security
even if in their bureaucratic and corrupt unions they did not enjoy
democratic rights. Independent, democratic, leftist, and militant
unions and workers, however, were punished for their impudence by
being marginalized in this system.

Yet, within ten years of the introduction of neoliberalism, the power
of the old Latin American labor federations had been devastated.
During the period from 1985 to 2000, in most countries of Latin
America, the old nationalist-populist parties turned to the right, and
as they did so they lost control of the labor movement. The official
confederations then broke up into rival federations, with politics
left, right, and center. The working people at the bottom of these
societies struggled against the neoliberal policies adopted by
virtually all parties and governments. But they did not always do so
through the old labor unions; in fact, often they created or adhered
to other vehicles of struggle. The cases of Brazil, Venezuela,
Argentina, and Bolivia show some of the different ways that unions and
the new left governments interact.

Brazil

The pioneers of the new left political movement in Latin America have
been the Brazilians. Lula and the Workers' Party (PT) came to power in
Brazil out of a decades-long struggle against military dictatorship.
Lula himself was a metal worker, the leader of the Metal Workers Union
and of the new Brazilian labor federation, the United Confederation of
Workers (CUT), founded in 1983. To many, Lula appeared as a kind of
tropical Eugene V. Debs, a workingman with a worker's vision of
democracy and social justice.

During his first term, his government gave more than 500 million
dollars to the poorest Brazilians through his family basket plan
(Bolsa Familia). The PT government in Porto Alegre created a
"participatory budget," a process by which community representatives
worked with the city council to develop the budget. In other areas,
the PT has promoted People's Assemblies as a form of participatory
democracy, a people's government. At the same time, however, Lula has
disappointed another arm of the labor movement, the Landless Rural
Workers' Movement (MST), which wanted him to support a more radical
agrarian reform. While Lula's government was supposed to benefit
workers and the poor, ironically, it was the Brazilian banks which did
best during his first government and became his biggest supporters
during his second campaign.

Yet, in the end, confident that Lula was making necessary concessions
to international capital, and feeling that "never in the history of
Brazil has so much been done for the poor," the CUT, the MST, and the
PT all supported Lula's second campaign, giving him a solid victory.

Argentina

In the 2003 election, Argentina's unions broke with their history and
instead of voting as a block for the Peronists as they usually did,
they divided their votes among the presidential candidates of the
different Peronist factions. Néstor Kirchner, a little-known
provincial governor, won the election without the backing of the
unions. Nevertheless, once in power, he began to recreate the former
corporatist relationship between the Peronist party and the CGT. In
particular, he gave strong support to Hugo Moyano, who in July 2005
became the leader of the federation.

Kirchner and Moyano worked together from above to reconstruct the
corporatist structure, a process aided by the bureaucratic and corrupt
practices of many unions. Nevertheless, union stewards' councils and
activists organized and carried out strikes and won important
victories. The telephone workers' union, FOETRA Buenos Aires, forced
Telecom and Telefónica to incorporate hundreds of temporary and
part-time workers into the regular workforce. Workers in the Buenos
Aires Metrovías subway system won a shorter workday, higher wages, and
the incorporation into the union of maintenance workers.
Others—namely, railroad workers, teachers, commercial workers and
government employees—created new forms of discussion and coordination.

A report from the Labor Education Workshop (TEL) in Buenos Aires
notes, "Most of these union struggles have been led by the workers
themselves organized in stewards councils with little participation
from the official union structure." In Argentina, an independent labor
movement appears to be in the process of rebuilding from the ground
up. Whether it will become strong enough to challenge the
neo-corporatist structures and become a force independent of the
government remains to be seen.

Venezuela

In Venezuela, the change in society came from radicals in the
military. In 1989, populist president Carlos Andrés Perez of AD
announced the "Great Turnaround," a shock liberalization program. The
AD's own CTV federation called the country's first general strike and
won some concessions. Nevertheless, economic nationalism had been
superseded by neoliberalism and things began to unravel. The elite's
economic program exacerbated conditions and eventually led to food
riots and popular protests in every city in the country in the country
in 1989. A labor-based radical movement, Causa R, and a socialist
party, the Movement to Socialism (MAS), both put forward socialist
programs in this period. However, it was a military coup led by Col.
Hugo Chávez in 1992 that, though it failed, captured the imagination
of the country's working classes and poor people. Chávez became a
hero. Freed from prison by President Caldera in 1994, Chávez organized
the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MBR), and in December 1998 was
elected president, and subsequently reelected in 2000 and 2006.

Chávez became the leader and inspirer of a working-class socialist
movement in Venezuela. Yet, Venezuela's labor unions, most of which
remain affiliated with the opposition CTV, have not been central to
his populist government. "The Chávez government has given greater
freedom for union organization and it has conceded some political,
social and economic gains," says independent labor leader, Pérez
Burgos of the breakaway National Workers' Union (UNT). "Nevertheless,
the base of the government is made up of the poorest groups and it has
made the greatest concessions to them."

For Pérez Burgos and many union activists in Venezuela, the key issue
is workers' control, by which they mean workers actually running firms
and factories. Chávez has rejected a joint government-union management
of the state oil company, which remains under state control. In the
aluminum industry, Chávez has permitted a German Social
Democracy-style company-union co-management. Some 1,200 business have
been abandoned by their owners in recent years, but only a small
fraction have been occupied by workers, only 20 have been
nationalized, and only a handful are under workers' administration or
co-administration. The situation remains dynamic, however, as workers
pressure the government to take control of the plants.

Bolivia

President Evo Morales of Bolivia came to power on the shoulders of
movements of indigenous people, coca farmers, and new radical unions,
though they are not labor unions in the traditional sense. The
historic Bolivian labor unions, particularly the Bolivian Mine Workers
(FSTMB) and the Bolivian Workers' Central (COB) played an important
role in the revolution of 1952, and thereafter in every struggle for
democracy and social justice in Bolivia. Beginning in the 1980s,
however, the tin industry began to decline and together with it the
power of the mineworkers. In 1985, president Víctor Paz Estenssoro
introduced the New Economic Policy, a shock therapy application of
liberalization. A series of strikes against privatizations between
1989 and 1993 were violently suppressed, weakening the power of the
old union movement.

As the old union movement based in the mining district of Oruro and
the capital city of La Paz declined, other areas became more
important. El Alto, originally a shantytown suburb of La Paz, grew to
a population of 800,000, about 80% of them indigenous Aymara. In El
Alto, the Regional Workers Central (COR-El Alto), and the Federation
of Neighborhood Councils of El Alto (FEJUVE), gave leadership to a
broad popular and radical movement of working people and communities.
These are not, however, traditional workers; 70% of working people in
El Alto are self-employed. At the same time, the coca producing areas
in the Chapare region grew in importance and the coca farmers created
a federated union system, which elected Evo Morales to be its
president.

Since his election to Bolivia's presidency, Morales has carried out a
kind of quasi-nationalization of Bolivia's gas and oil industry on May
1, 2006, and pushed an agrarian reform program through parliament in
November 2006 that will lead to the distribution of 77,000 square
miles of land to impoverished peasants. While union support played
some role in his election, Morales does not give expression to the
union movement, nor do the unions give him uncritical support. A
populist leader with a vague program of indigenous socialism, he is
sometimes supported and sometimes challenged by the old and new unions
that helped to bring him to power. Morales's government has, for
example, sometimes supported small workers' cooperatives that are
allied with multinational investors against the Bolivian Miners'
Union, which demands that all minerals be nationalized under the
government mining company.

At the moment, Latin America represents a test of the ability of
workers, through traditional labor movements, indigenous
organizations, and organizations of the urban poor to build a mass
social movement and a political party that will carry out a program
that speaks to their interests. So far, the movements have succeeded
in driving out conservative presidents and governments and bringing
others to power.

Still, the various governments continue to operate within the
neoliberal rules that govern the global economy. Some, like Evo
Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela struggle to gain time
and political space, others like Kirchner and Lula appear to be
following the path of least resistance. Workers in Latin America,
especially in Bolivia and Venezuela, feel optimistic about their
chances of bringing about meaningful social change, which to many of
them means putting working people and the oppressed in power. Since
the 1950s, attempts by Latin Americans to democratically change their
governments have inevitably led to U.S. intervention. Their ability to
build a better future, then, will ultimately depend not only upon
themselves, but also upon solidarity from abroad, most important, from
workers and unions in the United States.


Dan La Botz teaches history and Latin American studies at Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio. This is an abbreviated and adapted version
of the article, "Latin America Leans Left: Labor and the Politics of
Anti-Imperialism," published in the May 2007 issue of New Labor Forum.
For the full article with complete citations and notes please consult
the New Labor Forum Web site.

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