IAS A6090 Labor Strategies in the Americas
Labor movements across the Americas are revising strategies, deepening cooperation across borders and drawing inspiration from each other's struggles in difficult times for workers everywhere. While closer economic integration across the hemisphere may call for more internationalist union perspectives, it remains the case that labor politics is focused on the nation state, and the relations between unions and their allies in social movements and community organizations are most rooted at the local level. 'Neoliberalism' - free-market, bro-business policies enforced through the IMF, the World Bank and written into free trade agreements - presents a common challenge to labor. And yet labor's response to neoliberalism has been uneven between Latin-, Anglo- and Franco-American nations. Asymmetries in power and wealth between the North and South remain highly relevant to attempts at closer, more effective labor cooperation. The course is a survey of emergent labor strategies across the hemisphere, encompassing labor organizing, collective bargaining and political strategies. We will take a multi-scale approach, examining how strategies play out at the local, national and regional scales. The class will cover major debates, including the rise of new forms of worker representation, labor migration, labor-party and labor-state relations, free trade and alternative regional integration projects, and how to confront the power of multinational corporations. Case studies will include: coordinated cross-border bargaining and organizing in the steel and auto industries; comparative anti-privatization and anti-austerity strategies in the public sector; the relationship between labor and labor-backed parties in power in Southern Cone and Andean nations; North American labor's response to NAFTA and mobilization against the defeated Free Trade Agreement of the Americas; labor's 'green jobs' agenda and perspectives on climate change and ecological crises; organizing immigrant workers and migrant workers' rights in the US and Canada; the labor rights/trade agreement nexus. The class will be taught in seminar format and rely on extensive student participation.
Contact Hours
3 hr./wk.