Big Idea #1, 1/13/14

Fligstein and McAdam (2012) use the concept of interconnected, embedded fields to describe the environments through which individuals interact with and are influenced by the world around them.  Though overzealous definition of  these meso-level fields can create a multitude of divisions among people in the world, the interconnectedness of many of these fields can helpfully describe how one person's experience in their own workplace can be translated and understood by others in different workplaces.

The general fields of politics and the workplace are two of the most important places that people personally interact with each other and connect to and interact with their larger society.  The state can connect people with different identities,  through a unifying mode of citizenship.  who have little in common besides begin from one large geographic area; similarly the world of work can connect people across the world through similar experiences and identities.

Politics and work are important to people because they shape everything from a person's individual day to the society around them.  Though they are not exhaustive of the experiences of many people, still many come to define themselves through their political acts and their work.  In doing so, however, people also tend to demand a voice in both of these spheres.  Few choose to be under the sway of a tyrant, be it an authoritarian president or an authoritarian manager.

Starting at the turn of the century and extending well through the middle of the twentieth century, many Latin American countries undertook efforts to incorporate the growing urban working class into the national political system.  Elites, the general narrative goes, dealt with possible groundswell threats to their leadership by first repressing, then attempting to coopt the working class.  In many places this resulted in a national system through which the working class was organized into workplace-level unions, and those unions were subsequently incorporated into the political sphere.  In this way, unions gave workers a voice both in their workplace and a voice in civil society. (Admittedly this is oversimplified:  unions were often undemocratic, mitigating the actual voice workers had.  Nevertheless, these channels existed and at times worked in favor of workers.)

The shift in development policies in the 1980s, from ISI to economic liberalism, essentially broke the mechanism of the union as the organization of political incorporation.  Starting in the 1980s and lasting through the 1990s, presidents enacted structural changes to the state and economy that served to divorce unions from their previous political allies.  (This would be expanded to include the more specific histories of the countries I would include in the study.)  As unions and workers lost their privileged channels to the government, they also lost the political and economic resources that allowed them to maintain their voice in the operation of the workplace as well.  In this way workers also lost much of their voice in the workplace.

In the current era the neoliberal project is in many ways complete; though certainly no economic development policy is ever truly "finished" in its work, neoliberalism has become a stable and institutionalized state policy. (That is not to say it is hegemonic, nor irreversibly institutionalized, as some countries with recently-elected governments from the Left and Center-left are proving.  Nevertheless, neoliberalism is for most countries the dominant, status quo economic policy.)  The end of the reform-era of neoliberalism has still left important questions for voice of the popular classes in their work and their society.

Important context for work and politics:
The world of work has changed a great deal.  With the collapse of ISI and dawn of neoliberalism workers did not jut face restructuring in public state-owned enterprises.  Rather neoliberalism often resulted in more flexible work arrangements for workers in almost all sectors.  Firms began locating and relocating production to greenfield sites, far away from the urban strongholds of unions.  Countries also began creating export processing zones, places where labor law and blah blah blah...Whereas the government had attempted to homogenize much of the working class in the working class, at least politically, now workers were hired and labored in increasingly remote locations, with irregular yada yada yada...the workforce is divided, heterogeneous.  In the current era these new work arrangements have brought into question the use of class, and specifically the working class, as a concept that has any roots in actual society.  Though one can find class cleavages in a broad sense, mainly in the form of inequality, it has become harder to find a coherent working class identity group (Roberts 1999, Kurtz 2004?).
The world of politics has also changed a great deal since the initial incorporation period.  During the initial period of working class incorporation into the state and politics, creating alliances with unions gave political parties important access to workers in a number of senses.  Perhaps the most important form of access was the preferential channel of communication political parties gained by allying with (and/or coopting) union leaders.  Before the era of mass communication these union-party connections allowed parties to effectively communicate with, educate, and mobilize workers across the country, and without having to recruit these members through more arduous means (setting up party offices, building local machines, etc.).   The alliance allowed the party to collaborate with, and often coopt, the almost ready-made political chapters that were unions at the time.  Now, however, party systems have changed to the point where well-institutionalized parties do not have as large a competitive advantage in nationwide elections.  In many specific cased economic or political crises have weakened institutionalized parties, or worse delegitimized them (is this helpful?).  But across Latin America the consistent expansion of mass media has also allowed political candidates to reach those in areas where they (or their party) have little or no on-the-ground presence.  ... Hmm, where am I going with this.
Overall, then, political incorporation and voice in the workplace were coupled during much of the 20th century, but since the neoliberal turn these two forms of incorporation have become decoupled.  In a very broad sense citizenship used to include a voice in politics and in the workplace.  In the current era, however, citizenship/political incorporation guarantee only a voice in political elections, not a voice at work.  And though there have been some moves in the opposite direction, even the rise of the left has not brought with it a strong renewal in union power at the workplace.
Can political voice and/or power replace voice at the workplace, and vice versa?  [[When/where/why do political outcomes matter more than process?]]  That is to say, will workers accept authoritarian regimes in the workplace if they feel that they have a voice on the national stage, or an ally in the government (this should probably be state, not national).  Similarly, are workers more likely to demand workplace voice if they feel the state government does not represent them?