TRADE UNION STRATEGIES AND POWER RESOURCES. PRESENTATION AND EMPIRICAL PROOF OF A FRAMEWORK FOR THE ANALYSIS OF TRADE UNION VARIETIES IN CHILE AND LATIN AMERICA

Abstract

In Chilean and Latin-American academic labour debates, since the middle of the last decade, the idea of a union’s revitalization and the irruption of a “new unionism” has emerged with strength. Particularly this last concept acquires multiple meanings, having been used to refer diverse empirical manifestations. Despite this, the analyzes, at least in Chile, share high expectations regarding such phenomenon, given their involvement in struggles for social justice beyond work, support for leftist and progressive political projects, the use of methods of disruptive action, its forms of democratic organization, its mostly youth composition and its alliances with other social movements.

Synthesizing the theories of power resources, union revitalization, labor precariousness and those of the Marxist work process, this work looks forward to offer and prove empirically an analytical framework to analyze both new mentioned expressions of “new unionism” as well as its old forms, in order to overcome this and other generic and ahistorical typologies. The offered frame characterises the union varieties starting from its strategies and resources of power that workers mobilize in them. This, especially taking into account the different degree of performance of the strategies and resources enjoyed by workers and workers depending on their position at work. The empirical test is carried out through the multicase study of three processes of union organization in the economic sectors of retail and of salaried domestic work. Specifically, 20 semi-structured interviews were analysed, a participant observation along more than one year was made with one of the unions, as well as press revision, documents of one of the companies, collective and individual contracts, web pages of the organizations and scientific productions that have addressed this issues.