Old Friends in New Times: Progressive Parties and Union Movements in the Southern Cone

• Author: Carmen Midaglia,Guillermo Fuentes,Fabricio Carneiro
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20924368
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20924368

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 233, Vol. 47 No. 4, July 2020, 112–130

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20924368

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

112

Old Friends in New Times

Progressive Parties and Union Movements

in the Southern Cone

by

Fabricio Carneiro, Guillermo Fuentes, and Carmen Midaglia

Translated by

Victoria J. Furio

An analysis of the course of relations between union movements and left parties in four

Southern Cone countries shows that, while in Uruguay and Argentina the progressive

parties were able to maintain alliances with union actors and empower them, in Brazil and

Chile left parties and unions experienced conflicts that hindered the formation of alliances.

In the four countries studied, two variables had a strong influence on the possibilities for

forming and maintaining a coalition among unions and parties: the electoral strategy of

the leftist party and union fragmentation.

Un análisis del curso de las relaciones entre los movimientos sindicales y los partidos

de izquierda en cuatro países del Cono Sur muestra que, mientras que en Uruguay y

Argentina los partidos progresistas pudieron mantener alianzas con los actores sindicales

y empoderarlos, en Brasil y Chile los partidos y sindicatos izquierdistas experimentaron

conflictos que obstaculizaron la formación de alianzas. En los casos de los cuatro países

analizados, dos variables influyeron fuertemente las posibilidades de formar y mantener

una coalición entre sindicatos y partidos: la estrategia electoral de los partidos de izquierda

y la fragmentación sindical.

Keywords: Unions, Progressive parties, Southern Cone, Coalitions, Power resources

The various progressive governments in Latin America have been grouped

together into two categories in most of the literature: the moderate left,1 which

has generally continued with the market reforms promoted during the previ-

ous decades, and the radical or populist left, which has sought to dismantle

neoliberal policies, granting a greater role to the state. The moderate left

includes the parties that came into power in countries such as Brazil, Chile, and

Uruguay, while the more radical left includes the governments of countries

such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and, in some cases, Argentina. However,

a more careful analysis of their histories allows us to note important differences

within these two analytical categories at both the economic and the social level

Fabricio Carneiro is a researcher and professor in Facultad de Derecho and Facultad de Ciencias

Sociales at the Universidad de la República. Guillermo Fuentes and Carmen Midaglia are both

researchers and professors in Facultad de Ciencias Sociales at Universidad de la República,

Uruguay. Victoria J. Furio is a translator and conference interpreter living in Yonkers, NY.

924368LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20924368LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESCarneiro et al. / PROGRESSIVE PARTIES AND UNION MOVEMENTS IN THE SOUTHERN CONE

research-article2020

Carneiro et al. / PROGRESSIVE PARTIES AND UNION MOVEMENTS IN THE SOUTHERN CONE 113

and in their connection with the classic electoral bases, the unions. This rela-

tionship of union actors with progressive parties has been absent from the most

influential studies on the “left turn” in the region. This article draws on the

theory of power resources to analyze and interpret the relation between politi-

cal parties and union movements in Latin America in the first 15 years of the

twenty-first century.

The union movement is a classic social agent supportive of the redistribution

of wealth in Western societies. This movement had a significant impact in

European countries during the twentieth century, largely after World War II,

under a protectionist development model. The combination of political democ-

racy, organized collective actors, and leftist political parties (Labor or Social

Democrat) favoring redistribution but maintaining the capitalist accumulation

pattern created “moderate” levels of socioeconomic inequality and expanded

social protection for formal workers and their dependents (Esping-Andersen,

1993: 57; Marshall and Bottomore, 1998: 53). Despite having promoted a pattern

of growth favoring state intervention—variants of the import-substitution

industrialization model—since the 1950s, Latin America lacked the economic

and political context of the developed nations. Nevertheless, liberal democracy

was far from being consolidated on the continent. Repression of popular

demands, including those of the unions, became a regular strategy of both the

successive dictatorships and the new “emerging democracies” of the 1980s,

tutored or limited by electoral restrictions and the establishment of a neoliberal

pattern of development that conspired against the organization of the popular

sectors (Patroni and Poitras, 2002: 211–214; O’Donnell, 1996: 37–38).

The undermining suffered by the union movement under this global accu-

mulation regime, which prioritized the flexibility of labor deregulation as a

criterion for economic competitiveness, reinforces the analytical importance of

studying this popular actor within a political and economic framework inclined

to process some of its demands. The twenty-first century created the possibility

of analyzing the relationship between the state and the collective actors, unions

in particular, in a context unprecedented for the region—at least for the first

decade one of economic growth (a result of the commodities boom) and stabil-

ity of liberal democracy in which the ascent to power of progressive political

forces tended to preserve the existing forms of production2 and deliver eco-

nomic distribution through labor and social policies to combat poverty (Prevost,

Oliva Campos, and Vanden, 2012: 21).

In Latin America the relationship between popular actors and the state was

always strained, with patterns of co-optation, represented in a conservative

inclusion of social groups, and opposing ones that converged in genuine col-

laborations to satisfy a set of demands (Dangl, 2010: 5; Filgueira, 2013: 24).This

type of linkage, built historically through contradictory political guidelines,

became evident to the degree that the leftist governments confronted pressure

related to preserving the backing of broad sectors of the electorate with the

support of coalitions representing diverse ideological positions. At the same

time, they sought to maintain the support of social movements, among them

unions (Riethof, 2018: 7).

Prioritizing a union analysis in this essay does not mean theoretically and

empirically ignoring other forms of collective action that have been significant