Working through the Past

The contributors to this volume highlight the critical role that authoritarian legacies play in shaping labor politics in new democracies, providing the first cross-regional analysis of the impact of authoritarianism on labor.

Teri L. Caraway is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Assembling Women: The Feminization of Global Manufacturing, also from Cornell. Maria Lorena Cook is Professor of International and Comparative Labor at the ILR School, Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility and Rights. Stephen Crowley is Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. He is the author of Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian and Ukrainian Workers from the End of the Soviet Union to the Post-Communist Transformations.

Combining political, institutional, and economic perspectives, this volume produces a unique exploration of how the effects of authoritarian pasts change over time and vary across national contexts to produce a variety of outcomes for labor.

Rudra Sil, University of Pennsylvania, author of Managing "Modernity": Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia:

Working through the Past is an impressive book that grapples with labor's varied trajectories across different settings in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. This important volume covers a lot of ground in terms of the wide range of important cases analyzed. Yet there is a high degree of theoretical coherence across the chapters thanks to the common framework for tracking how authoritarian legacies can influence the evolution of labor relations. The result is a major scholarly contribution that can serve as a new baseline for anyone interested in labor politics in non-Western settings.