Working Through The Past: Labor and Authoritorian Legacies in Comparative Perspective

[Excerpt] Democratization in the developing and post-communist 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

Translating Membership into Power at the Ballot Box? Trade Union Candidates and Worker Voting Patterns in Indonesia’s National Elections

This article analyses the effectiveness of trade unions’ electoral engagement in the union-dense electoral localities of Bekasi and Tangerang in Indonesia’s 2009 legislative elections. Our analysis reveals that legacies of authoritarianism, electoral rules, and union fragmentation pushed unions to pursue an ineffective electoral strategy of running union cadres on various party tickets. In Bekasi, local leaders within the Federation of Indonesian Metalworkers Unions (FSPMI) chose not to mobilize resources to support union candidates because the union’s national leadership had failed to convince them of the soundness of its strategy. In Tangerang, local leaders embraced the National Workers Union’s (SPN) national electoral strategy, but had inadequate membership data to conduct electoral mapping and did not provide candidates with financial and leadership support. Neither union, meanwhile, gave much consideration to the problem of translating membership to votes: survey data reveal that most members could not name union candidates, and many of those who could did not vote for them. The article argues that, despite its flaws, trade unions’ strategy of engagement in the electoral arena constitutes an important step forward in the consolidation of Indonesia’s democracy

International demands for austerity: examining the impact of the IMF on the public sector

What effects do International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans have on borrow-ing countries? Even after decades of research, no consensus exists. We offer a straight-forward explanation for the seemingly mixed effects of IMF loans. We argue thatdifferent loans have different effects because of the varied conditions attached to IMFfinancing. To demonstrate this point, we investigate IMF loans with and withoutconditions that require public sector reforms in exchange for financing. We find thatthe addition of a public sector reform condition to a country’s IMF program signifi-cantly reduces government spending on the public sector wage bill. This evidencesuggest that conditions are a key mechanism linking IMF lending to policy outcomes.Although IMF loans with public sector conditions prompt cuts to the wage bill in theshort-term, these cuts do not persist in the longer-term. Borrowers backslide oninternationally mandated spending cuts in response to domestic political pressures

Labor and Politics in Indonesia

Two decades after Indonesia's transition to democracy, its labor movement has emerged as a vibrant and influential political actor. Labor and Politics in Indonesia provides the first in-depth analysis of this development, investigating how a structurally weak labor movement carved out a strategic foothold in a country with no recent history of union engagement in politics. Caraway and Ford show how Indonesia's labor movement achieved many of its goals first through the disruptive power of contentious politics and later by combining street and electoral politics. Labor and Politics in Indonesia challenges the dominant theoretical approaches in the study of Indonesian politics, demonstrating how this movement became an active, and surprisingly effective, participant in Indonesia's democracy. Caraway and Ford break new theoretical ground in their analysis of how legacies of authoritarianism, the post-transition political opportunity structure, and the tactical creativity of Indonesia's unions combined to propel Indonesia's labor movement to success

International negotiations in the shadow of national elections

This study examines the role elections play in negotiations between states and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although loans made by the IMF often require countries to introduce painful austerity measures that provoke a backlash from angry citizens, some governments are able to negotiate more favorable terms than others. Original data on the substantive content of IMF loans show that governments leverage imminent elections to obtain more lenient loan terms. Conditions that require labor market reforms in exchange for IMF financing are relatively less stringent in loans negotiated within six months before a pending democratic election, all else equal. The further away elections are from loan negotiations, the more stringent the labor conditions included in countries’ loan programs. Elections give governments leverage in their international negotiations and this leverage is effective even when states negotiate with unelected bureaucrats during times of economic crisis