Labor Justice across the Americas

Labor history has devoted little attention to the law and legal institutions mediating labor-capital relations. The volume edited by Leon Fink and Juan Manuel Palacio, Labor Justice across the Americas, aims to correct that oversight at least for the countries of the Western Hemisphere with a comparative approach that highlights commonalities as well as significant national differences. Palacio's two introductory essays are insightful in explaining the specific historical context and broad transnational influences that prompted interest among state actors in undertaking labor reforms. The so-called “social question,” in reality a wave of labor militancy with revolutionary overtones that swept the world in the first two decades of the twentieth century, sufficiently alarmed both the ruling oligarchies and the elite bureaucrats to contemplate and then promote new legal instruments to contain worker unrest. Transnationally, diverse social reformers, academics, and intellectuals contributed additional, elaborated arguments favoring such reforms in order to address social inequality and to advance workers' rights. A decisive event in that sense was the establishment of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1919, which provided a forum to discuss issues and initiatives on labor legislation from an international perspective. Particularly with the onset of the Great Depression, the ILO served as a forum for the circulation of ideas on the “labor question” in the Americas and the creation of what Palacio calls a “transnational legal consciousness.” The interwar global economic crisis increased the sense of urgency and witnessed, among other changes, the establishment of labor courts to enforce labor legislation already passed and new reforms about to become law.What most stands out from the various cases examined is the extent to which Latin America went further in establishing a body of labor law and labor courts compared to the United States and Canada, whose reforms in the law, and labor rights generally, appear much more cautious than those in Spanish and Portuguese America. This can partly be attributed to the precise political situations and to the dominant liberal political culture suspicious of state intervention in the former British colonies, but it may also have something to do with the difficulty in undertaking such reforms in the common law systems of both countries (Quebec's civil law jurisdiction excepted) absent a body of case law precedents versus the codified law of the civil law systems in Latin America. The established tradition of fueros and a corporatist understanding of legal rights inherited from the colonial period in Latin America may also be part of the explanation. In both the Anglo-American and Latin American cases, besides the hostility of employers, the opposition of the judicial system and the legal profession to creating a special jurisdiction and new court system to handle labor disputes posed challenges and erected obstacles to a full, effective carrying out of labor justice. The Canadian case was particularly revealing, not least because Canada is often left out of histories of the Americas. Canada was, surprisingly, even more cautious on labor reforms than the United States, finding it difficult to pass something comparable to the modest Wagner Act. In general, Latin America moved more purposefully, at least in the realm of the law and the labor courts, to address worker grievances and the imbalance in power relations between capital and labor.The book's one shortcoming is its sole focus on the establishment of the institutions of labor justice rather than their practical consequences. For the Colombian case, Victor Uribe-Uran and Germán Palacio state, “the actual operation of labor justice is beyond the essay's scope and would require further studies” (p. 143). Such a statement characterizes the other national cases in the volume as well. At most, some, like the Brazilian chapter, are suggestive of the implementation and effectiveness of labor law and labor courts but little more. Ultimately, the actual operation of labor justice is what most matters. The distance between the law and its actual implementation, in labor law and elsewhere, can often be great. In the essay on Chile, Diego Ortúzar and Angela Vergara state that there is a large archive of cases still unexplored by historians on labor law's implementation in that country. My sense is that this characterizes the situation in Latin America generally, Brazil being perhaps the exception, where some detailed statistical studies do exist. I have encountered some such studies in my own current research on the mining sector in Brazil. Labor Justice across the Americas thus is an important and necessary first step in assessing the role of the law in twentieth-century capital-labor relations, a valuable contribution greatly enhanced by its comparative focus. The practical realities of labor justice remain a question to be studied

Context (archaeology) · Labor history · Labor relations · Legislation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Unrest · History · International Labor and Employment Law · Labor Movements and Unions · Law