Hostile Conditions Might Increase Cycles of Labor Unrest in the Global South

There is a common belief that strong market forces combined with precarious conditions for workers tend to make labor-based conflicts less likely. The general decline in strikes across the world following economic globalization in the 1980s is usually cited as evidence. The reasoning goes like this: because capital is in a stronger position than labor, it’s easy for employers to replace workers, thereby disincentivizing them from engaging in coordinated oppositional action. This logic should hold even more true in the Global South, which—on average—is more authoritarian than the Global North, and where there are more restrictions on civil society organizations like unions, thereby undermining workers’ capacity to organize, protest, and force social and political change.

However, new evidence is challenging this claim. In a recent study with Paul Almeida, we examined in detail the variable conditions which led to a wave of labor protests in El Salvador in the 1970s, which were a major factor that lead up to the country’s 1980–92 civil war. We found that, at the local level, places where employment was less secure and political persecution was more common were more likely to experience labor-related protests. Based on our findings from El Salvador, the world could be headed for similar bouts of labor conflict.

El Salvador in Transition

El Salvador in the 1970s was a nation at a crossroads. Ruled by military dictatorships since 1931 and with its experiment to transition its economy from agriculture to industry in shambles, the country was in a vulnerable position at the onset of the 1974 global economic crisis, which caused mass joblessness, inflation, rising public debt and trade deficits, and a dearth of investment.

In response to the crisis, the Salvadoran government sought to integrate itself into transnational supply chains. This was intended to produce economic growth and create industrial jobs by increasing the local presence of corporate multinationals.

This program resulted in the expansion of manufacturing and agro-industrial production in the country. New laws and institutions, including special economic zones, were created to incentivize foreign direct investment.

This economic transformation happened while government security forces and paramilitary death squads fiercely persecuted preexisting labor organizations and their members through arbitrary arrests, torture, forced disappearances, and massacres. Despite this, our study found that the chances of labor conflict increased in localities that experienced greater repression, as well as those that were more connected to transnational production.

Mobilizing in Hostile Contexts

What can explain this outcome? The theory of threat-induced mobilization suggests that negative incentives such as the loss of rights—whether civil, political, or economic—can spark social movements to respond through defensive collective action.

The Salvadoran case is not an outlier. Authoritarian forms of economic globalization have fostered labor unrest in other societies, including in more heavily industrialized nations of the Global South.

Brazil from the late 1970s to early 1980s was under the rule of a closed military dictatorship that made a similar economic bet as El Salvador, which resulted in a cycle of labor mobilization. In the same years, organized workers challenged the rule of Apartheid South Africa, which was integrating quickly into global supply chains.

All these cases proved highly consequential in terms of social and political change. El Salvador fell into civil war, while labor movements in Brazil and South Africa were pivotal in those countries’ democratic transitions.

There are contemporary examples as well. The 2011–12 Arab Spring included waves of labor protest in Tunisia and Egypt, two authoritarian regimes that had embraced structural adjustment policies programs and economic globalization while clamping down on dissent. More recently, in Bangladesh, a wave of strikes in 2023 erupted against low wages and unsafe conditions in clothing production for multinational brands. The conflict contributed to unrest before and after the revolution of 2024 that dethroned the authoritarian government of prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

Today’s Potential for Labor Conflict

Based on this historical precedence, economic and political changes may foster an increase in labor conflicts in the Global South. The growth of authoritarianism and automated production makes labor unrest a real possibility in several parts of the developing world.

Since the 1970s, globalized supply chains have relocated manufacturing from the Global North to the Global South on a massive scale, growing the industrial workforce in developing nations exponentially. This process was accompanied by precarious conditions for workers: low wages, intense work hours, contract instability, weak social security infrastructure, and attacks on unionization. The weaking of social and environmental protections to attract foreign capital has given transnational market forces a predominant position in influencing state policies, threatening the economic conditions for workers.

Political conditions in the Global South vary, but overall, these nations lean toward authoritarianism and are hostile to workers organizing. As the third wave of democratization swept across the Global South and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, new democracies—as well as surviving autocracies—deepened transnational production links. However, many of these democratic experiments were weak or unconsolidated, and authoritarian regressions became more frequent after the 2008 economic crisis. Autocracies launched cycles of repression against civil society organizations or anyone who posed a threat to their rule, which made mobilized workers a frequent target.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a noticeable continuity in the hostility toward organized workers in the Global South. Production is becoming more automated and finance more mobile, despite labor remaining relative immobile. Meanwhile, autocratization has endured and even strengthened after the COVID crisis, increasing the repressive threats to labor organizations. Authoritarian governments have expanded and consolidated, pushing forward with repression against organized opposition using more sophisticated control and surveillance tools than in the past.

An open question is how workers will respond. Historical precedents suggest a possible increase in labor conflicts. In this scenario, policymakers and civil society organizations interested in the advancement of social rights and democratization and will face the challenge of mobilizing resources in support for workers’ organization: coordinating transnational actions such as boycotts and sanctions, demanding the expansion of their national labor protections to Global South workers, bringing public attention to labor campaigns abroad, among other things. Such support should extend to creating the conditions that allow workers of the Global South to enunciate their demands safe from repression—in other words, through a commitment against the current authoritarian turn across the globe. As before, labor struggles could become a cornerstone of social and political change—and democratization—in the developing world.

Luis Rubén González Márquez is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. A recent PhD graduate in sociology at UC Merced, he was awarded with a 2023–24 IGCC dissertation fellowship.

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