Abstract

Political strikes are a fundamental tool of any labor movement that seeks to impact politics. In contrast to business or economic strikes - which are directed against an employer (public or private) -, political strikes are directed against government authorities to draw attention to a particular political issue or protest against a government policy. The Latin American region becomes particularly relevant to study political strikes if we consider that since the 1990s, the region has been strained by an unprecedented number of labor and economic projects associated with the free market and symbolized by the Washington Consensus of 1989. In this context, political strikes have taken center stage to slow down privatization processes or prevent reforms. Although political strikes have been very present in case studies, we still lack systematic records about this crucial political action. This article presents a proposal for conceptualizing and measuring this type of strike in Latin America. Then, using an original database, the article offers some general trends of political strikes for 30 years (1990-2019) in 12 Latin American countries. The results show that 1) political strikes have had a growing trend over the last decades in the region; 2) this growth has been mainly due to sectoral and local political strikes, not to an increase in general strikes and 3) that there is an important variation in the capacity of different countries to carry out political strikes and the level of generality they have. The article argues that the capacity of countries to engage in political strikes will depend mainly on the cohesion and autonomy of their trade union movement.