The Decline of Labor Unions in Mexico during the Neoliberal Period

The Decline of Labor Unions in Mexico during the Neoliberal Period
Author: Roberto Zepeda
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030657108

This book examines the most significant factors accounting for the decline of union density during the neoliberal period, focusing on the case of Mexico. Union density, which reflects the representation of labor unions in the employed labor force, is one of the main indicators of union strength. The relation of organized labor with the state and the political system are also considered. The analysis is framed within a structure concentrated on cyclical, structural and political-institutional factors linked to labor union performance. Over the last decades, the transformations brought about by neoliberalism and democratization reshaped many features of the domestic political and economic model in Mexico. Therefore, an examination of these developments regarding the repercussions of the factors linked to union density decline is crucial.

Border Killers

Border Killers
Author: Elizabeth Villalobos
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816553068

Border Killers delves into how recent Mexican creators have reported, analyzed, distended, and refracted the increasingly violent world of neoliberal Mexico, especially its versions of masculinity. By looking to the insights of artists, writers, and filmmakers, Elizabeth Villalobos offers a path for making sense and critiquing very real border violence in contemporary Mexico. Villalobos focuses on representations of "border killers" in literature, film, and theater. The author develops a metaphor of "maquilization" to describe the mass-production of masculine violence as a result of neoliberalism. The author demonstrates that the killer is an interchangeable cog in a societal factory of violence whose work is to produce dead bodies. By turning to cultural narratives, Villalobos seeks to counter the sensationalistic and stereotyped media depictions of border residents as criminals. The cultural works she examines instead indict the Mexican state and the global economic system for producing agents of violence. Focusing on both Mexico's northern and southern borders, Border Killers uses Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics and various theories of masculinity to argue that contemporary Mexico is home to a form of necropolitical masculinity that has flourished in the neoliberal era and made the exercise of death both profitable and necessary for the functioning of Mexico's state-cartel-corporate governance matrix.

The Economics of Global Turbulence

The Economics of Global Turbulence
Author: Robert Brenner
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2006-08-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781859847305

A commanding survey of the world economy from 1950 to the present, from the author of the acclaimed The Boom and the Bubble.

Deported

Deported
Author: Tanya Maria Golash-Boza
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2015-12-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1479843970

Winner, 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association Latino/a Section The intimate stories of 147 deportees that exposes the racialized and gendered dimensions of mass deportations in the U.S. The United States currently is deporting more people than ever before: 4 million people have been deported since 1997 –twice as many as all people deported prior to 1996. There is a disturbing pattern in the population deported: 97% of deportees are sent to Latin America or the Caribbean, and 88% are men, many of whom were originally detained through the U.S. criminal justice system. Weaving together hard-hitting critique and moving first-person testimonials, Deported tells the intimate stories of people caught in an immigration law enforcement dragnet that serves the aims of global capitalism. Tanya Golash-Boza uses the stories of 147 of these deportees to explore the racialized and gendered dimensions of mass deportation in the United States, showing how this crisis is embedded in economic restructuring, neoliberal reforms, and the disproportionate criminalization of black and Latino men. In the United States, outsourcing creates service sector jobs and more of a need for the unskilled jobs that attract immigrants looking for new opportunities, but it also leads to deindustrialization, decline in urban communities, and, consequently, heavy policing. Many immigrants are exposed to the same racial profiling and policing as native-born blacks and Latinos. Unlike the native-born, though, when immigrants enter the criminal justice system, deportation is often their only way out. Ultimately, Golash-Boza argues that deportation has become a state strategy of social control, both in the United States and in the many countries that receive deportees.

Working Through the Past

Working Through the Past
Author: Teri L. Caraway
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015-05-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0801455480

Democratization in the developing and postcommunist world has yielded limited gains for labor. Explanations for this phenomenon have focused on the effect of economic crisis and globalization on the capacities of unions to become influential political actors and to secure policies that benefit their members. In contrast, the contributors to Working through the Past highlight the critical role that authoritarian legacies play in shaping labor politics in new democracies, providing the first cross-regional analysis of the impact of authoritarianism on labor, focusing on East and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Legacies from the predemocratic era shape labor’s present in ways that both limit and enhance organized labor’s power in new democracies. Assessing the comparative impact on a variety of outcomes relevant to labor in widely divergent settings, this volume argues that political legacies provide new insights into why labor movements in some countries have confronted the challenges of neoliberal globalization better than others. Contributors: Graciela Bensusán, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Xochimilco, Mexico; Teri L. Caraway, University of Minnesota; Adalberto Cardoso, State University of Rio de Janeiro; Ruth Berins Collier, University of California, Berkeley; Maria Lorena Cook, Cornell University; Stephen Crowley, Oberlin College; Volker Frank, University of North Carolina, Asheville; Mary E. Gallagher, University of Michigan; Marko Grdesic, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Jane Hutchison, Murdoch University, Australia; Yoonkyung Lee, Binghamton University; David Ost, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Andrés Schipani, University of California, Berkeley

Social Welfare Responses in a Neoliberal Era

Social Welfare Responses in a Neoliberal Era
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9004384111

Listen to the podcast about Cory Blad's chapter in this book 'Searching for Saviors: Economic Adversities and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era'. This book seeks to explore welfare responses by questioning and going beyond the assumptions found in Esping-Andersen’s (1990) broad typologies of welfare capitalism. Specifically, the project seeks to reflect how the state engages, and creates general institutionalized responses to, market mechanisms and how such responses have created path dependencies in how states approach problems of inequality. Moreover, if the neoliberal era is defined as the dissemination and extension of market values to all forms of state institutions and social action, the need arises to critically investigate not only the embeddedness of such values and modes of thought in different contexts and institutional forms, but responses and modes of resistance arising from practice that might point to new forms of resilience.

A World of Regions

A World of Regions
Author: Peter J. Katzenstein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501700383

Observing the dramatic shift in world politics since the end of the Cold War, Peter J. Katzenstein argues that regions have become critical to contemporary world politics. This view is in stark contrast to those who focus on the purportedly stubborn persistence of the nation-state or the inevitable march of globalization. In detailed studies of technology and foreign investment, domestic and international security, and cultural diplomacy and popular culture, Katzenstein examines the changing regional dynamics of Europe and Asia, which are linked to the United States through Germany and Japan. Regions, Katzenstein contends, are interacting closely with an American imperium that combines territorial and non-territorial powers. Katzenstein argues that globalization and internationalization create open or porous regions. Regions may provide solutions to the contradictions between states and markets, security and insecurity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Embedded in the American imperium, regions are now central to world politics.

The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy

The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy
Author: Angela B. Cornell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2022-01-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108879632

We are currently witnessing some of the greatest challenges to democratic regimes since the 1930s, with democratic institutions losing ground in numerous countries throughout the world. At the same time organized labor has been under assault worldwide, with steep declines in union density rates. In this timely handbook, scholars in law, political science, history, and sociology explore the role of organized labor and the working class in the historical construction of democracy. They analyze recent patterns of democratic erosion, examining its relationship to the political weakening of organized labor and, in several cases, the political alliances forged by workers in contexts of nationalist or populist political mobilization. The volume breaks new ground in providing cross-regional perspectives on labor and democracy in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond academia, this volume is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners concerned with the relationship between labor and democracy.

The Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics
Author: Roderic Ai Camp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 839
Release: 2012-02-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0195377389

A comprehensive view of the remarkable transformation of Mexico's political system to a democratic model. The contributors to this volume assess the most influential institutions, actors, policies and issues in the country's current evolution toward democratic consolidation.

Poverty of Democracy

Poverty of Democracy
Author: Claudio A. Holzner
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2010-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822973804

Political participation rates have declined steadily in Mexico since the 1990s. The decline has been most severe among the poor, producing a stratified pattern that more and more mirrors Mexico's severe socioeconomic inequalities. Poverty of Democracy examines the political marginalization of Mexico's poor despite their key role in the struggle for democracy. Claudio A. Holzner uses case study evidence drawn from eight years of fieldwork in Oaxaca, and from national surveys to show how the institutionalization of a free-market democracy created a political system that discourages the political participation of Mexico's poor by limiting their access to politicians at the local and national level. Though clean elections bolster political activity, Holzner shows that at the local level, and particularly in Mexico's poorest regions, deeply rooted enclaves of authoritarianism and clientelism still constrict people's political opportunities. To explain this phenomenon, Holzner develops an institutional theory in which party systems, state-society linkages, and public policies are the key determinants of citizen political activity. These institutions shape patterns of political participation by conferring and distributing resources, motivating or discouraging an interest in politics, and by affecting the incentives citizens from different income groups have for targeting the state with political activity. Holzner's study sheds light on a disturbing trend in Latin America (and globally), in which neoliberal systems exacerbate political and economic disparities and create institutions that translate economic inequalities into political ones.