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Loyalty Dilemmas and Market Reform: Party-Union Alliances under Stress in Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Katrina Burgess
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
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Abstract

Market reform has dealt a serious blow to traditional alliances between governing parties and labor unions. This article examines the fate of these alliances by applying a revised version of Albert Hirschman's schema of exit, voice, and loyalty to party-union relations in Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela. After refining the concept of loyalty, the author argues that it is embedded in the principles and norms on which these alliances are based. Market reform places party-affiliated labor leaders in a "loyalty dilemma" in which they have no choice but to behave disloyally toward one set of claimants. Their propensity to respond with either voice or exit depends on their vulnerability to reprisals for disloyal behavior and the party's capacity to retain their loyalty even in the face of sacrifices imposed on workers and unions. Both variables are linked to the authority structures in which labor and party leaders find themselves. In the short to medium run the alliances most likely to survive are those in which labor leaders have significant autonomy from their bases and/or in which the party is able and willing to challenge its own executive. In the long run, however, even these alliances may be vulnerable to collapse because of popular frustrations with the inadequacy of interest representation and the multiple pressures on political organizations to adapt to a more fluid and uncertain environment.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1999

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References

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17 Although the catalyst for the 1988 general strike was a Youth Employment Plan to allow temporary contracts for workers under twenty-five years of age, the UGT demanded a fundamental reorientation in the governmentés economic program. For a thorough discussion of the UGTés demands, see the articles in Claridad 29–30 (1989).

18 Exit did not mean that UGT leaders stopped negotiating with the PSOE, however. Since workers and unions could not avoid the consequences of the party's policies even after the collapse of the alliance, they continued to exercise “voice after exit.” See Hirschman (fn. 1), 101,104.

19 Hirschman (fn. 1), 78. Note that loyalty is not equivalent to silence. A decision to remain with a product or organization does not necessarily lead to the exercise of voice. Instead, an actor may go along “with a deteriorating status quo without engaging in pressure tactics to reverse it. Barry, Brian, “Review Article: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” British Journal of Political Science 4, no. 1 (1974), 95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar But rather than expanding the menu of options to include “silent non-exit,” many scholars mistakenly use loyalty in its stead. This move creates a dichotomy between loyalty and voice that is inconsistent with Hirschman's model.

20 Barry (fn. 19), 95.

21 Ibid., 96.

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26 I recognize that these loyalty dilemmas may not set in immediately when a labor-backed government adopts painful reforms. Like labor leaders, workers are likely to have reserves of loyalty that allow the unions to cooperate with the reforms without being viewed as disloyal. Worker patience will wear thin, however, if the governing party appears to be betraying its principles and/or the union appears to be selling out to the reformers. Moreover, as discussed above, reserves of worker loyalty may already be quite shallow as a result of the secular decline in class consciousness and collective identities.

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46 Author interview with Luis Martinez Toval, Madrid, June 29,1995.

47 Although it is possible that UGT leaders moved more quickly toward exit than the rank and file would have demanded, the timing of their movement suggests they were responding, at least in part, to signals from workers. Moreover, several opinion polls suggest that workers sympathized with the UGT's criticism of the government. See, e.g., Bouza, Fermýn et al., Perfil, actitudesy demandas deldelegado y afiliado a UGT (Madrid: Fundacion Largo Caballero, 1989), 252–53Google Scholar; and REIS 38 (April-June 1987), 358–59.Google Scholar For a good discussion of the radicalism of Spanish labor leaders relative to the rank and file, see Fishman, Robert, Working-Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3945.Google Scholar

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49 Although members of a critical tendency in the PSOE, the socialist left, sympathized with the UGT's position, they lacked any real power within the party because of electoral rules that placed control primarily in the hands of the central party apparatus.

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