Labor-Management Relations in Autocratic Regimes

Labor-Management Relations in Autocratic Regimes

Introduction

• Labor-management relations are influenced by political systems and ideologies.
• It's important to distinguish between the state (power relations) and the regime (organization of the state apparatus) (Brown 2016, Slater and Fenner 2011).
• Authoritarian durability is based on the effectiveness of state agencies in promoting the rule of the former (Slater and Fenner 2011).
• Unions can act as a check on state and employer power; democracy and union power may expand on parallel tracks (Baccoro et al. 2019).
• Under state socialism, unions were subordinated; this legacy persists in parts of Central Asia.
• Unions can be co-opted or marginalized by right-wing populists.
• There's a resurgence of violence against trade unionists, especially in Latin America (Baccoro et al. 2019).
• Two fundamental aspects of unions in autocratic regimes:
  • Unions suppressed by governments as a countervailing power.
  • Unions used by governments to stabilize the regime.
• This chapter examines labor-management relations in autocratic regimes, focusing on:
  • Transitional peripheral economies in Central Asia (Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan).
  • Hierarchical market economies in Latin America (Colombia and Honduras).
• The chapter also considers the impact of large-scale migration on labor relations.
• Acknowledges limitations in understanding due to limited literature in English and unclear definition of autocratic regime.
• The chapter provides a cursory rather than comprehensive account.

Autocratic Regimes and Characteristics of Labor Relations

Characteristics of Autocratic Regimes

• Authoritarianism: Rule by illiberal regimes that lack a reliable base of followers to win free and fair elections (Yahkouchyk 2019).
• Autocracy: Measures to preserve an authoritarian regime (Yahkouchyk 2019).
• Authoritarian regimes construct ideologies to maintain power and fend off pressure towards democracy (Murphy 2019).
• Totalitarian societies: The state seeks to control all aspects of social life (Kamenka 2017).
• Predatory states: Ruling elites concentrate on using the state to enrich themselves by extra-legal means (Wood 2004).
• In autocratic regimes, power is often concentrated in one person and relies on clientelistic relationships (Gast 2020).
• Different types and degrees of state central control exist (Hess 2013, Howell and Pringle 2019).
• China is considered to have a 'higher quality' authoritarianism (Fukuyama 2011, Hess 2013), with trade unions receiving support from the government (Cooke 2020).
• Trade unions in China have been associated with better wages, productivity, and job satisfaction (Budd et al. 2014, Hu et al. 2018, Liu 2010, Li 2014, Lu et al. 2010, Yao and Zhong 2013).
• Labor institutions evolve differently even in countries with the same political regime (Pringle and Clarke 2011).
• Authoritarian regimes in Latin America may adopt different politico-economic policies with distinct implications for labor relations.
• The role of the state and societal traditions is critical in shaping labor-management relations (Hess 2013).
• Multi-level approach to understanding autocratic regimes is important, considering regional differences.
• Rotating bureaucratic elites across regions can prevent autocrats from accumulating too much power (Hess 2013).
• Emerging markets and developing countries are often defined by how they fall short compared to mature markets (Hall and Soskice 2001).
• Alternative capitalist typologies differentiate countries by institutions, stakeholder ties, and regulation of firms and labor.
• Latin America: Hierarchical Market Economies (HMEs) (Schneider 2009).
• Central Asia: Transitional Peripheral Economies (TPEs) (Demirbag and Wood 2018).

The Political Economy of Labor Under Autocracy

• Labor and social actors have limited room for maneuver outside government-controlled structures (Caraway 2012).
• Autocratic states may consider worker pressures to avoid political instability.
• Predatory tactics by security forces may reduce the masses to focusing on survival (Wood 2004), with risks around political succession.
• A focus on national development and improved living may secure political stability (O'Donnel 1978).
• Most authoritarian governments lie between developmental and predatory.
• Autocratic governments may engage in good governance but often default to a predatory mode (Murphy 2019).
• Relative positioning is linked to the structure of elites and their relationship with wider society.
• Dominance by wealthy families is common in Central American countries (Delgado 2018).
• Autocratic states often have comprehensive labor laws that may repress collective rights but afford substantive rights (Wang 2020), which the powerful can breach (Dukalskis and Gerschewski 2017).
• Workers may seek relief through ad hoc government measures, hollowing out formal political processes (Grigoriev and Dekalchuck 2017).

Implications for Labor Relations

• Autocratic regimes are characterized by strong military rule that represses alternative political organizations.
• Labor movement/unionism relies on association power, drawing on external NGOs for support (Fox-Hodess 2019).
• Industrialization depends on being part of the global economy, resulting in a large informal sector with limited worker organization.
• Even in export-oriented economic zones, authoritarian rule exists (Arnold and Campbell 2017).
• Self-organizing strikes are often the main means for workers to express discontent (Chan 2010, Godard 1992, Lee 2007).
• The role of trade unions varies:
  • Serving as a transmission belt for the ruling party (Cook 2018).
  • Emerging and challenging the status quo.
• Unions may emerge and challenge managerial authority, combine this with political campaigning.
• Anti-'color revolution' tactics may weaken civil society actors (Finkel and Brudny 2012).
• Historical experience impacts union structures and choices (Bishara 2020).
• Four authoritarian states are introduced for illustration: Columbia, Honduras, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.
• These countries are selected based on their positioning on the authoritarian scale and how autocratic they are.
• In Central Asian countries, unions are closely incorporated into state structures.
• In Latin American countries, unions have nominal freedom but face threats of violence.
• Autocratic systems are relatively fluid and have been remade according to internal and external events.

Hierarchical Market Economies in Latin America

• Latin American economies can be described as hierarchical market economies (Schneider 2009).
• Defining features:
  • Prominent role of multinational enterprises (MNEs).
  • Atomistic industrial relations.
  • Diversified groups of firms.
  • Weak skills bases.
• Limited complementarities yield benefits to powerful insiders (Schneider 2009).
• Lack of attention to developing industrial relations structures and skills (Diamond 2008).
• Training is at the whim of firms, workers lack security, and labor regulations are top-down (Schneider 2009).
• Low unionization makes it hard for workers to enforce rights (Schneider 2009).
• Local business groups are centralized but diverse in terms of sector.
• Indigenous businesses confine their attentions to Latin America.
• Limited diffusion of new HR practices reinforces established paradigms.
• Elite class formation:
  • Compradors: Local intermediaries for foreign interests (Chang 2017).
  • Militarists: Protecting countries from the wrong type of democracy (Davies and Loveman 1997).
  • Neo-latifundistas: Large land owners (Frank 1963, Griffen 1983).
• Zero-sum politics: Right-wing parties refuse to accept the legitimacy of centrist or left-wing parties (Davies and Loveman 1997, Hesketh 2019).
• Paramilitary death squads target unions and worker representatives (Civico 2016).
• Honduras and Columbia did not undergo experiments in authoritarian corporatism (Bensusán 2016).
• Almost all countries in Latin America share the French-style civil law legal origin.
• Weak stakeholder rights and the ability of elites to enforce their interests (Lakhani 2020, Rivera and Duncan 2018).
• Unions challenge autocrats and contribute to their downfall (Siedlecki 2005).

Columbia

Political economy

• Colombia's social policy was ahead of its economic development (Thoene 2019).
• Pro-labor ideologies and social policies provided a foundation for workers' demands for better social protection (Thoene 2019).

Work and labor relations

• Organized business groups play a key role in providing stability and influence economic policy (Cardenas and Juarez 1994).
• Colombia has adopted a neoliberal policy since the mid-1990s (Mathers and Novelli 2007).
• Right-wing dominance has made for overwhelming employer power.
• The Colombian state was 'penetrable by private sector groups' (Cardenas and Juarez 1994).
• Neoliberal structural reforms led to the erosion of working conditions (Torres-Tovar and Luna-García 2019).
• Political factors have a strong influence in shaping Colombia's economic reform (Cardenas and Juarez 1994).
• Labor market deregulation has negatively impacted medical professionals (Ardila-Sierra and Abadia-Barrero 2020).
• These changes have triggered Colombian workers' mobilization (Torres-Tovar and Luna-García 2019).
• Associations of workers and former workers suffering from work-related illnesses have been active since the mid-2000s (Torres-Tovar and Luna-García 2019).
• Workers join these associations to obtain rights and receive support.
• Fighting for health and safety has been a key part of labor organizing.
• Colombia's labor movement started to emerge in the mid-1910s (Thoene 2019).
• The country has one of the lowest union membership levels (4 percent) (Gill 2014).
• Privatization and downsizing have led to the reduction of union membership and deterioration of workers' income (Cardenas and Juarez 1994).
• Over four thousand union activists have been assassinated between 1986-2000 (Mathers and Novelli 2007).
• Anti-union violence persists due to the strategy to prevent people from exercising their labor rights (Gill 2014).
• Colombian dockworkers have relied on a human rights unionism strategy (Fox-Hodess 2019).
• Working with international NGOs has been important for Colombian unions.
• International support has taken the form of financial support, training, and international tours (Gill 2014).
• Corporate social responsibility movement helps improve labor standards.
• Fairtrade certification provides a useful influence on improving labor standards in the banana industry (Brown 2013).
• Globalization and violence have shaped Colombian banana workers' organizations (Chomsky 2007).
• Employers have a strong prerogative in determining employment terms and conditions (Korovkin and Sanmiguel-Valderrama 2007).
• Influx of migrant workers reduces bargaining power (Agudelo-Suárez et al. 2020).
• Companies employ time-and-motion studies but provide minimal training (Pipkin 2011).
• Resistance to neoliberal globalization has been robust (Mathers and Novelli 2007).
• In the informal sector, millions of informal workers have been mobilizing for labor rights (Rosaldo 2019).

Honduras

Political economy

• Hondura's economy was developed more slowly.
• The large urban informal sector undermines the development of labor organizations (Roberts 1996, Thoene 2019).
• Competitive outsourcing undermines workers' bargaining power (Anner 2011).
• Honduras experienced economic, political, and social crises since the late 2000s (Moisá et al. 2019).
• Following a US-supported coup in 2009, Honduras has regressed to a period of violent autocracy.
• Symbiotic relationships between wealthy individuals and criminal gangs make the country dangerous for union activists (Spring 2020).
• The new government faces the task of reigning in criminalized security forces.

Work and labor relations

• Honduras has had one of the relatively strongest labor movements in Central America (Anner 2015).
• The country has a vibrant tradition of independent unionism.
• Since the 2000s, anti-union violence escalated (Anner 2015).
• Union members and leaders were often 'targets of repression and political violence' (Eade 2004).
• Repression was exerted by employers under a permissive environment created by the state (Anner 2015).
• Resource constraints prevent union leaders from developing strategic alliances (Eade 2004).
• Activities related to the labor movement have often been funded by international NGOs (Eade 2014).
• This donor-recipient relationship is not conducive to fostering sustainable unionism.
• Anner (2015) observed that transnational corporate campaigns have emerged as a result of the repressive labor control regime.
• Local activists used the threat of bodily harm to frame their concerns through international campaigns.

Transitional Peripheral Economies in Central Asia

• Transitional Peripheral Economies (TPEs): Peripheral post-state socialist economies in the former Soviet Union (Demirbag et al. 2015).
• Defined by weak but fluid institutions, with pre-Soviet era features re-manifesting (Demirbag et al. 2015).
• Decolonization was rapid and unplanned.
• Fluid institutions: Undergoing changes with regulations subject to redefinition.
• Initial disorderly liberalizations have led to clan networks being strengthened.
• Clans: Informal, vertical, kinship-based organizations (Croucher 2015).
• Political elites maintain strong economic and social connections to powerful local clans.
• Firms seek to forge ad hoc solutions with regulators.
• Contextual unpredictability leads to reluctance to reinvest (Demirbag et al. 2015, Serafini and Szamosi 2015).
• The Central Asian transitional peripheral economies share features salient to understanding the position of labor.
• Clans inter-penetrated state structures, heightened in the post-Soviet era (Demirbag et al. 2015, Wood and Demirbag 2015).
• Reliance on informal networks of support.
• Access is often accorded in terms of what individuals can offer.
• The clan-based economies were not associated with occupational segregation on the lines of indigenous clans.
• Access to work is bound up with clan status, the relative power of clans is not directly related to the provision of jobs.
• Long periods of power provide opportunities for ideologies to embed, underpinning the dominant narratives of the regime (Horak 2005).
• The emphasis is on national stories and traditions, broad secularism, and paternalism (Wood and Demirbag 2015).
• The legitimacy of the regimes relies on not just the rights of those in power, but also their obligations.
• Official trade unions played a prominent role in the Soviet era, surviving into the independence era (Fedorowycz et al. 2020).
• Such unions were designed as a means of control and building consent (Robertson 2007).
• The distinction is drawn between the ruling personalities and the mechanisms of the state.
• Ruling elites are expected to provide a basic degree of security in access to employment, social protection, and retirement.
• Both regimes rest on their ability to preserve large areas of industry and employment (Edgar 2004, Lombardozzi 2019, Pelese et al. 2017).
• They draw ready favorable comparisons with other post-Soviet states that experimented with radical liberalization.
• Both countries embarked on large-scale programs of infrastructural improvement (Wood and Demirbag 2015).
• The latter was aimed at providing jobs, visible improvements in standards of living, and tangible symbols of national pride.
• Such efforts also have the Keynesian effects of spreading income and wealth around the economy.
• Construction-led growth has proven more effective in providing jobs and national infrastructure than the neo-liberal alternative.
• Pre-Soviet and Soviet legacies:
  • Uzbekistan has a long history of past imperial glory (Demirbag and Wood 2018).
  • Turkmenistan has linked national identity to the Seljuk Turkish kingdom (Horak 2005, Peyrouse 2015).
• Soviet legacy has left significant populations of Russian settlers.
• Soviet variation of German type civil law, and long continuities in managerial practices (Demirbag and Wood 2018, Serafini and Szamosi 2015).

Uzbekistan

Political economy

• The majority of settled peoples in Central Asia were labeled as Uzbeks or Tajiks (Edgar 2004).
• Uzbekistan was the geographical center of the empire of Timur the Great (Tamburlaine) (Demirbag and Wood 2018).
• The ruling elite has staked its legitimacy on the ability to provide material evidence of progress and avoid large-scale job losses.
• A strong focus has been on the maintenance of industry and the creation of new jobs through construction (Demirbag and Wood 2018).

Work and labor relations

• Clear progress has been made in developing industry and supporting relatively broad-based overall growth (Abdukrakhamanov and Zokirova 2019).
• A major success has been the preservation and expansion of the motor industry (Demirbag and Wood 2018).
• Surplus labor has been partially mopped up by construction, with inferior security of tenure (Bazin 2008).
• Many workers form small social groupings, mardikor, who jointly rent accommodation (Bazin 2008).
• Many workers have sought employment abroad, most notably in Russia (Kadirova 2015).
• Migrant remittances alleviate rural poverty (Malyuchenko 2015).
• Since 1990, there has still been abiding employment and earnings insecurity.
• A common strategy is engaging in informal sector activities to supplement earnings (Kamp 2005).
• Collective farms have been broken up, to be replaced by private farms leased under concessions (Bazin 2008).
• There is widespread usage of child labor for the picking of cotton (Keller 2015).
• Low costs have enabled the state to capture significant surpluses (Lombardozzi 2019).
• Uzbekistan was the first Central Asian country to adopt a post-independence labor code, in 1995 (Atkamovich 2020).
• Trade unions were assigned the responsibility of monitoring compliance with labor law (Aktamovich 2020).
• Under the law, the official function of trade unions is to support government policy (Fischer-Daly 2019).
• In 2019, a system of mediation was adopted (Aktamovich 2020).
• A vigilant security state means that workers are very reluctant to engage in any activity that could be taken as political dissent.
• Extended clan networks facilitate mobility between jobs and occupations (Bazin 2008).

Turkmenistan

Political economy

• Turkmenistan vies with Equatorial Guinea as the most closed and repressive society on earth (Kuru 2002, Peyrouse 2015, Wood 2004).
• After the 2006 death of Saparmurat Niyazov, Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov attained the presidency (Polese et al. 2017).
• The system became less outlandish (Radchenko 2017).
• All aspects of economic and social life remain under strict political control (Polese et al. 2017).
• The Turkmenistan state has some focus on national development objectives (Peyrouse 2015, Radchenko 2017).
• The country moved to a nominally multiple party system (Polese et al. 2017).
• All parties were established on a top-down basis, meaning that neither labor nor employers possess a genuinely independent voice (Polese et al. 2017).
• The government appears to have learned the lessons of the color-coded revolutions (Polese et al. 2017).
• Turkmenistan's history is rather more fragmented (Edgar 2004).
• The Soviet model strengthened notions of identity and unity (Akbarzadeh 1999, Edgar 2004).
• Turkmenistan has embarked on a program of privatization, notably in terms of construction (Duryev and Ismail 2017).

Work and labor relations

• The 2006 Berdymuhamedov succession revived the welfare state (Peyrouse 2010).
• There is a significant degree of social protection.
• There is no billing for utilities and rents are very low, compensating for low wages (Peyrouse 2010).
• Labor legislation in Turkmenistan centers on the Labor Code of Turkmenistan (Rahimqulova, 2021).
• Turkmenistan has developed as a significant gas exporter (Jakóbowski and Marszewski 2018).
• The country has little in the way of industry, other than in the oil and gas industry.
• This has led to large numbers of guest workers in Russia (Starr 2014).
• Regular purges mean that state power is highly concentrated around the presidency.
• The relative position of labor is further weakened by high levels of unemployment and restrictions on geographical mobility.
• The departure of Russian nationals has opened up new opportunities for Turkmen nationals (Peyrouse 2015).
• There is extensive state regulation of foreign qualifications (Hofmann 2018).
• Agriculture remains a major employer (Duan et al. 2019, O’Hara 1999).
• Labor scandals have led to pressures for foreign buyers to boycott cotton from this country (Natta, 2021).
• The government has sought to improve the labor market position of ethnic Turkmen (Malynovska, 2006).
• Restrictions on foreign travel mean that nationals do not have the same opportunities for overseas migrant labor (Stronski 2017).
• There is widespread evidence of the extensive usage of child and foreign labor in the cotton industry (Stronski 2017).
• The agricultural sector is dominated by peasant associations who get quotas set by the government (Stronski 2017).

Summary

• This chapter examines contemporary labor-management relations in autocratic regimes in Latin America and Central Asia.
• In some autocratic regimes, union activism is heavily repressed (Anner 2015, Gill 2014).
• Two important notions: political consolidation and regime resilience/continuity (Ambrosio 2014).
• There are different types of autocratic regimes with distinct political, economic, and social policy orientations.
• International NGOs and consumer-driven activism have been the main source of external support (Anne 2015).
• Labor movement relies on association power rather than structural power (Fox-Hodess 2019).
• The emigration of skilled workers tends to weaken the collective organizing strength.
• The presence of immigrant workers may weaken the already weak bargaining power.
• How will labor-management relations in autocratic regimes develop in the future?
• It depends on external influence, economic competitiveness, border openness, and the capacity of the domestic economy.
• The rise of digital technology may consolidate the power of autocratic regimes.
• There is insufficient research on labor-management relations in autocratic regimes.
• Future research should adopt a pluralistic approach to investigate collaboration between labor and management.Cross-references of chapters in this volume: Labor-Management Relations in Transition Economies.
• Labor-Management Relations in Emerging Economies and Developing Countries.
• Labor Standards Decent Work and the Quality of Employment.