Work and Demand Making: Productionist and Consumptionist Politics in Latin America

• Author: Brian Palmer-Rubin,Ruth Berins Collier
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211060282
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(10) 1631–1662

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211060282

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Work and Demand

Making: Productionist

and Consumptionist

Politics in Latin America

Brian Palmer-Rubin

1

and Ruth Berins Collier

2

Abstract

How does the world of work in Latin America affect the way workers act to

defend their interests? To what extent have “productionist”demands, those

concerning jobs, work conditions, and wages, which are highly salient across

the region, been “displaced”by consumptionist or political demands? While

the literature has distinguished formal and informal work grosso modo,we

explore individual traits of work, which cross-cut the formal-informal dis-

tinction. Analyzing survey data from four Latin American capital cities, we f‌ind,

not surprisingly, that both work-based atomization and insecurity depress

demand making in the work arena. But these traits of work also affect demand

making on the state, albeit in somewhat different ways. Insecurity is associated

with a shift from productionist to consumptionist and political demands, while

atomization is associated with a more generalized demobilization across is-

sues. These f‌indings have implications for the representation of worker in-

terests in light of current labor market restructuring and raise the question if

labor can reclaim an important voice in that restructuring process.

Keywords

demand making, labor politics, Latin American politics

1

Department of Political Science, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

2

Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Brian Palmer-Rubin, Department of Political Science, Marquette University, 1420 W. Clybourn

Street Milwaukee, WI 53233, USA.

Email: brian.palmer-rubin@marquette.edu

Introduction

Economic crisis and market reforms in the 1980s and 90s produced turmoil in

the lives of Latin American workers. Real wages declined, formal employ-

ment stagnated, and job dislocation escalated as markets were reconf‌igured

through privatization and opening to international competition (Inter-

American Development Bank, 2004, chap. 4; Rodrik, 2001,13–15). As a

result of these hardships, work issues were politically salient at the turn of the

21st century. In surveys from 1995 to 2007, citizens across the region

overwhelming reported that the most important issues facing their countries

were job-related—having to do especially with unemployment and low wages

(Collier & Chambers-Ju, 2012, 574; Inter-American Development Bank,

2004, 12). The urgency of these issues has persisted; in region-wide surveys

from the past few years, job-related issues continue to classify as among of the

top three problems, surpassed only in some countries and years by insecurity

or corruption (Gabriel, 2018;Latinobarómetro, 2018, 6).

Partly in response to these accumulating grievances and partly as a re-

f‌lection of new organizing and civil society vibrancy that came with re-

democratization, Latin America experienced a wave of redistributive policies.

These policies were part of what more broadly has been conceptualized as “the

new inclusion”(Kapiszewski, Levitsky, and Yashar 2021)and“the second

incorporation”(Rossi & Silva, 2018), invoking an “older”or “initial”incor-

poration of the early-20

th

century (Collier & Collier, 1991). The vast majorityof

these policies, unlike the f‌irst incorporation, but in keeping with the approach

from the 1980s and 1990s,were primarily consumptionist,i n that they had to do

with non-job-based income and benef‌its, especially social programs for the

poor. What went neglected were productionist policies, that is, those that af-

fected jobs per se—job creation or work conditions either in terms of em-

ployment relations or in terms of modif‌ied development models.

1

Indeed, in

many countries, labor market f‌lexibilization polic ies reversed pro-w orker

productionist policies (Cook, 2007;Etchemendy, 2011;Murillo, 2005).

While some of these consumptionist programs began before the advent of Left

government in the 2000s, this orientation was continued by Left-turn ad-

ministrations, many of which were led by labor leaders such as Lula in Brazil

and Morales in Bolivia. Why was even the Left timid in responding to pro-

ductionist grievances with productionist policies?

Much attention has been paid to the inf‌luence of factors working against

productionist intervention: globalization with its incentives for producing

competitive exports and attracting foreign investment (Milner & Rudra, 2015);

the power of capital in policy making (Fairf‌ield, 2015); conditionality from

multi-lateralinstitutions (Pop-Eleches, 2008,chap. 7); and the decline of labor-

based political parties, which, when in power duringthe debt crisis, relented to

these capital-friendly pressures (Levitsky, 2003;Roberts, 2015). Also, while

1632 Comparative Political Studies 55(10)

the productionist policies under ISI were blamed for inf‌lating public debt,

consumptionist policies are cheap. The median cash transfer program in Latin

America costs 0.24percent of GDP (Holland & Schneider,2017, 993). Further,

the period corresponded with an international boom in civil society organizing

that has been oriented toward consumptionist demand making, such as public

services and social programs (Collier & Handlin, 2009b;Palmer-Rubin, 2019;

Silva, 2009).

Rather than focus on opponents of productionistpolicies and the proponents

of consumptionistpolicies, we draw attentionto another component: the would-

be proponentsof productionist policies.We suggest that an importantpart of the

explanationfor the lack of job-promoting measures hasto do with the weakness

of demand making. Our analysis offers evidence that a lack of productionist

demands may be related to the presence of certain work traits that demobilize

worker collective action around shared productionist goals. These work traits

push workers to instead make demands of consumption, asking the state to

provide benef‌its to compensate for poor work condiitions.

Analysts have long pointed to the political weakness of the informal sector.

In this analysis, however, we go beyond the typical formal and informal

categories for three reasons. First, as many analysts have stated, informality is

a multifaceted, inconsistent, fuzzy concept. (Indeed, the ILO has several times

changed its def‌initions).

2

Def‌initions refer to a bundle of different traits; it is

important to understand which of these may affect demand making. Second,

many of these traits cross the formal-informal divide, belying any justif‌ication

for employing the formal/informal dichotomy on the basis that these cohere

into distinct “classes”or categories of work. As we demonstrate using survey

data below, there is in fact very little statistical correlation between various

work traits typically associated with informality. Third, with the introduction

of platform labor and other recent modes of labor market restructuring, some

of these particular traits may be on the rise. While the concept of the “informal

sector”has primarily been analyzed in the Global South, a secondary labor

market has grown over the past several decades in the world’s most advanced

economies (see, for instance, Standing (2012);Kalleberg (2009)), and re-

focusing attention to more specif‌ic traits that is common to all these segmented

labor markets usefully expands the scope of analysis. Understanding the effect

of these traits on the political engagement of workers merits attention.

We interrogate two specif‌ic categories of work traits: (1) work-based

resources for collective action, including the size of work-based social net-

works and the presence of a union and (2) work-based insecurity, including

instability of income and of employment. We also consider workers’indi-

vidual resources for demand-making, including level of education and past

union experience.

We ask the following questions. How do these work traits affect workers’

overall level of demand making? Are they associated with a shift in type of

Palmer-Rubin and Collier 1633