Empowering Labor

A comparative study of Chile, Portugal, and Uruguay that analyzes the underlying dynamics shaping the use of wage policy as a pre-distributive instrument of leftist parties. Focuses on large-scale political practices that (de)legitimize labor as a political actor, enabling or disabling social dialogue for social cohesion and political inclusion.

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Empowering Labor uses a comparative study of Chile, Portugal, and Uruguay to analyze the underlying political dynamics that shape the use of wage policy as a pre-distributive instrument of leftist parties in power in unequal democracies. The book theorizes that the unity of the Left and labor's political legitimacy are two main drivers for relating on wage policy as a pre-distributive instrument for promoting inclusion. These factors are shaped by elite long-term strategies towards labor. Such strategies, when dominant for long-enough periods, create path dependency, shaping differential opportunities for further options down the road. The book integrates large-scale historical processes with frequently analyzed short-term and agency-based factors to elucidate variation in the crafting of wage policies and reshapes the debate on the politics of pre-distribution in unequal democracies by situating the cases in a longer historical arc.