Natural resource extraction and primary commodity export remain persistent features of the Latin American economy. This edited volume traces the power of labor in extractive sectors in Latin America starting in the 1980s and shows how labor shapes national export sectors, economies, politics, and societies more broadly. Kristin Ciupa and Jeffrey R. Webber bring together a team of international experts who look at labor in several extractive sectors-including oil and gas, mining and agriculture, and migrant labor. They present a variety of viewpoints and case studies, exploring themes of the strategic organizing potential of extractive workers, the rise of informal labor and its impact on organizing and worker solidarity, and migrant labor-power as extraction. The book analyzes relationships between workers, extractive companies, states, political parties, national social sectors, and global commodity markets. The Labor of Extraction in Latin America puts the question of labor organizing to the forefront of discussions on Latin America's ongoing history of extractive capitalism, its effects on nature, and resistance against it.
Kristin Ciupa is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Regina. She is the author of The Political Economy of Oil in Venezuela: Class Conflict, the State, and the World Market. Jeffery R. Webber is an associate professor of politics at York University, Toronto. He is the author or co-author of five books, and co-editor of two books. Most recently, he is co-author of The Impasse of the Latin American Left.
Table of Contents PART ONE - THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Chapter One - Introduction: The Labor of Extraction in Latin America Kristin Ciupa and Jeffery R. Webber PART TWO - REVISITING THE CLASSICAL CASES Chapter Two - The Political Economy of the Labor Movement in Contemporary Argentina Ruth Felder and Viviana Patroni Chapter Three - Oil and the Dualization of Venezuela's Labor Movement Kristin Ciupa Chapter Four - A Labor History of Extractivism in Colombia: From Coffee to Coca and Beyond Phillip A. Hough Chapter Five - Reading Peru from Chile: Examining Mining Unionism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Omar Manky Chapter Six - Capital Accumulation and the Forms and Potentialities of the Labor Movement in Latin America: Critical Reflections on Argentina and Chile Guido Starosta and Fernando Javier Cazon PART THREE - EXTENDING THE FRAMEWORK Chapter Seven - Labor/Nature in (Late) Capitalist Mexico Aleida Hernandez Cervantes and Anna Zalik Chapter Eight - From Sindicalismo to Cooperativismo: The Atomization of the Bolivian Miners' Movement Andrea Marston Chapter Nine - Migrant Labor as Extraction Christopher Little PART FOUR - CONCLUSION Chapter Ten - Conclusion and New Directions Jeffery R. Webber
