Globalization and Labor: Reflections on Contemporary Latin America

As the editors note in their introduction to this special issue of the journal, for more than 500 years, indeed since the conquest, Latin-American economies and societies have been profoundly affected by developments in the world system. Over the past century alone, watershed moments such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the oil shocks and international debt crisis of the 1970s and 80s, have rocked Latin-American economies, transforming development paradigms and with them the circumstances of the many millions who inhabit the region. Today, a quarter century has passed since Latin-American economies embarked, unevenly yet largely irreversibly, on the path of market-oriented reform. Designed to stimulate growth through insertion into global markets, structural adjustment programs swept Latin America in the wake of the debt crisis and were followed by a panoply of measures that sought an enduring restructuring of economies in the region. The pursuit of these so-called Washington Consensus policies did away with the inward-oriented strategies that had shaped development in the region throughout the postwar period. However reluctantly, Latin America staked its future on a renewed engagement with the world economy, and became a player in the highly contested processes of globalization that are reshaping societies and economies around much of the planet.