IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-05579-1_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Development of Latin American Unionism

In: The Political Role of International Trades Unions

Author

Listed:
  • Gary K. Busch

    (Multirees Ltd)

Abstract

There has been no more important factor in the development of Latin American trades unionism than the relations between the movement and the forces of political activism on the continent. Much as in Africa. and Asia, the leadership of the Latin unions has come from the educated and largely middle-class strata of the society. The prime differences which distinguish Latin American unionism from the unionism of Africa and Asia has been that, for a large part of its formative period, Latin unions were formed almost exclusively from among immigrant groups from Europe. These immigrants formed the unions and radical political parties which they also led. For the bulk of the indigenous workers of Latin and Central America the politico-economic forces unleashed by militant unionism passed them by, and continue to pass them by. In much of Latin America the national language, Spanish or Portuguese, is spoken by a minority of the inhabitants as their first language. Indian languages, dialects and linguas franca suffice for the bulk of the rural population. Only very rarely have there been efforts made by trades unionists or radical politicians to proselytise or organise in languages like Quechua which, in some countries, is the major national language. In fact, in most of Latin America the formative period of unionisation was conducted through recruiting drives, propaganda and organising strikes conducted in Italian, German, English and only later Spanish. Unionism was brought by immigrants and recruited immigrants.

Suggested Citation

  • Gary K. Busch, 1983. "The Development of Latin American Unionism," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: The Political Role of International Trades Unions, chapter 8, pages 134-180, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-05579-1_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-05579-1_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-05579-1_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.