In his ambitious book, José Alemán seeks to assess what the third wave of democratization has meant for labor unions and workers. Its primary focus is the effect of democratization on labor market institutions, on regulation, on wages, and on industrial conflict, and the scope of the analysis is global. This is an extremely bold agenda, and the task of teasing out lessons from countries in different regions, with different histories and different trajectories, is extremely challenging. Moreover, the author also seeks to make claims that cover both countries emerging from right-wing dictatorships and those coming from the very different institutional and political context of communism. To address the challenge, he sensibly adopts a number of different methodologies, ranging from pooled time-series statistical models, through qualitative-comparative analysis (QCA), to in-depth case studies. The result is a rich mixture of findings and suggestions that represent a real contribution to the study of labor politics in the post–Cold War era.
Alemán's principal argument is that we cannot simply assume that all of the different elements typically thought of as making up corporatism in the long-standing democracies will go together equally well in new democracies. In particular, he argues that the relationship between the political inclusion of labor and the nature of regulation of the labor market is likely to be different in new democracies. While in parts of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development the inclusion of labor in politics and government at the national level has tended to go together with a protective framework of labor regulation, there are good reasons to believe that this relationship does not hold in new democracies. The third wave of democratization, Alemán argues, was accompanied by an intensive period of economic globalization and the hegemony of neoliberal ideas about labor market flexibility. Hence, in many places we have seen the decoupling of political access for labor from a protective regulatory framework.
Much of the story is inspired by fascinating case studies of Korea and Chile, which, though presented after the cross-national analysis in the book, are really the intellectual heart of the project. In Korea, relaxation of labor repression was a key part of the process of democratization and was accompanied by massive waves of increasingly politicized industrial strife. However, the new era of greater labor inclusion did not herald a period of cooperative regulation of wages and labor markets. Instead, Koreans witnessed declining coordination of wage negotiations and increasing deregulation of labor markets in the name of maintaining competitiveness. In Chile, the trajectory was very different, but the outcome was not dissimilar. Under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, labor was completely excluded from politics and deregulation of labor markets was aggressively pursued. After democratization and the coming to power of a Concertación government of the left, many in the labor movement had high hopes that Chile's previous course would be reversed. However, although the government did free labor unions from the repressive measures taken against them under Pinochet, and did introduce some degree of labor market regulation, progress from the perspective of labor has been disappointing. In fact, in August 2003, Chilean unions launched the first general strike since the Pinochet era, and in 2005 the 640,000-member Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) split with the Socialist Party.
Beyond the case studies, Alemán draws on a range of quantitative and qualitative techniques to demonstrate the relationships among political inclusion, labor market regulation, unit labor costs, and industrial conflict across the globe. The results are highly suggestive. As in the Korean and Chilean cases, in new democracies at large there does seem to be little relationship between labor representation and employment security or other variables like inequality. There is also some evidence presented here that the relationship among political inclusion, left-wing political parties, and labor costs or protest are different from those we have found in the long-standing democracies. Nevertheless, these are extremely complicated relationships to tease out empirically, with problems of reverse causation and endogeneity everywhere you look, not to mention myriad measurement issues. Like other authors, Alemán is unable to resolve all of these issues definitively, and so the cross-national findings are suggestive rather than conclusive, but certainly interesting and provocative.
In addition to the positive analysis of labor relations and regulation, Alemán is interested in the policy and normative implications of what he finds. However, the central tension in the book between institutional gains for unions and economic losses for workers is a very ambiguous result that, understandably, makes the author quite uncomfortable. He wants to find reasons to be happy about the improvements in the political inclusion of labor in new democracies over the last 20 years, and talks optimistically about the introduction of tripartite negotiations, concluding that “if the purpose of including labor in policymaking may have been initially to co-opt unions or demobilize workers during periods of economic retrenchment, this no longer seems to be the primary objective” (p. 137). However, his findings on the inability of these tripartite institutions to protect frameworks of labor regulation, raise wages, or moderate industrial conflict suggest that such optimistic conclusions might be misplaced. As Alemán recognizes, labor in many new democracies is simply not strong enough to use tripartite institutions in the way they have been used in social democracies. Why this is the case is not explored in detail in the book, but it is nevertheless an important question to ask.
Coming to grips with labor's weakness and understanding the effects of institutions would have been easier if the study had also included material from Eastern Europe, which, as Alemán acknowledges, is the region where tripartite arrangements have grown the most and have proven the weakest. Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that with some notable exceptions, tripartism in many new democracies did not come from irresistible pressure from below. Nor was it a response of employers and government to strong labor unions. Instead, tripartism was conceived mostly as a political fig leaf to protect communist-era labor unions, to discourage the emergence of new, more representative unions, and to manage the dismantling of the state socialist economy. In that light, the fact that tripartism has coincided with deregulation is not so surprising.
As with all good books, Labor Relations in New Democracies answers some important questions and raises many more. Labor politics has not been a fashionable area in political science in recent decades, but by problematizing the relationship between labor institutions and economic outcomes in the developing world, Aleman has set out a key element of an important agenda for students of the political economy in the twenty-first century. With luck many more will be inspired to follow.
