Labor Movements and Dictatorships

Why have labor movements, from Europe to Latin America, successfully outlasted authoritarian regimes? How did they survive often brutal repression, and how did they change as a result of the experience? In Labor Movements and Dictatorships, Paul Drake provides a comprehensive comparative study of the experience of working-class movements under capitalist authoritarian regimes from the 1920s to the 1990s.Drake offers a series of extended country studies -- on Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina -- set against a larger comparative context that includes Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Brazil, all of which experienced similar transitions into and out of authoritarianism. In all of these countries, Drake explains, labor movements advocating far-reaching political, economic, and social reforms were met by authoritarian governments determined to preserve capitalism and erase any hope of socialism. The autocrats imposed antiworker economic structures, institutional rules, and political prohibitions. They succeeded in breaking labor in the short run, Drake concludes, but their efforts ultimately failed. A valuable work of historical perspective and synthesis, Labor Movements and Dictatorships tells the compelling story of how workers' organizations around the world suffered, subverted, and survived the tyrants.

Paul W. Drake is Institute of the Americas Professor of Inter-American Affairs in the Department of Political Science and dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.