Join us in our next session of the Janey Annual Workshop. Alberto J. Fernandez will be presenting his paper entitled “The Struggle for Union Freedom and Autonomy in Mexico and Argentina. A Critical Review of Literature towards a ‘Viewpoint of the defeated'”

Abstract
The analysis of labor politics in Latin America has been dominated by two main theoretical approaches. Historical institutional analyses have focused on the processes of incorporation/co-optation of labor by the state as a condition for the implementation of Imports Substitution Industrialization policies in the 1940-50s, as well as on the institutional constraints to the political options available to labor. On the other hand, recent analyses of labor responses to market reforms reflect a rationalist perspective that focuses on incentives, costs, and benefits that determine the strategic interactions between labor organizations and governments. My paper is a critical review of literature on labor politics in Latin America from the institutionalist and rationalist perspectives. I argue that, while each perspective offers valuable insights, respectively, into the institutional determinants of labor’s political action and into the micro-dynamics of the leaders’ strategic thinking, a different, more dynamic, and interpretative perspective is needed to incorporate a renewed emphasis on the interplay between the state’s intervention in the internal power dynamics of the labor movement and labor’s self-construction of an identity as a political actor. A study of the emergence and evolution of dissident union federations in Mexico and Argentina in the last two decades, mobilized around, among other things, the demand for “Libertad y Autonom√≠a Sindical”, can show a new layer of political activity, with its distinctive discourse framing and processes of workers’ identity formation, that has been overlooked in the analyses centered on the instrumental rationality of the labor leaders in pursuing their organization’s -and their own- economic interests.