RFK Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies Lecture "The Rise of Public-Sector Unions in the 21st Century: A Mixed-Methods Approach with Evidence from Argentina"

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Speaker: Sebastián Etchemendy, Associate Professor and researcher at the Torcuato Di Tella University, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Argentina; Senior Researcher at the National Scientific Council (CONICET); Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor for Latin American Studies at Harvard University
Moderated by: Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School

Public-sector unions are the hegemonic contemporary labor actor in terms of militancy and mobilization in both advanced and emergent economies. During the last fifteen years, public-sector unions and teachers (the largest state workers’ group in almost every country) have staged notorious strike waves in places as diverse as the US, Israel, Nordic countries, South Africa, China, and Argentina. The current President of Peru built his career in a teacher union, and public sector labor and teachers played a key role in the Tunisian revolution that sparked the Arab Spring. However, Political Economy lacks a unified theoretical approach to study mobilization by state unions. The analysis of public-sector union politics has undergone divergent paths in the last fifty years, largely separated by regional (US vs. Europe vs Global South) and disciplinary (American Politics vs. Comparative Politics/Political Sociology) divides. My study argues that labor mobilization in the public sector has different foundations than private sector’s union activism. Through the analysis of the Argentine case, it aims to build the first steps of a more unified approach to the study of public unions. I argue that public-sector labor mobilization is essentially driven by the legal status of wage bargaining rights at the national and (in federal countries) subnational levels, by the likelihood of a political-exchange between labor and the government, and by the state fiscal condition. Argentina between 2006 and 2019 provides an ideal laboratory to test this argument through a multilevel (i.e., national and subnational), mixed methods strategy, which includes comparative, statistical and case-study assessments.

Sebastián Etchemendy is Associate Professor and researcher at the Torcuato Di Tella University, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Argentina, and also a Senior Researcher at the National Scientific Council (CONICET). He has a degree in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires (1992). He received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. He specializes in the comparative political economy of Latin America and Western Europe, with special attention to the analysis of business and labor actors. He received the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Fulbright Fellowship for studies in the United States. He has worked and published on the political economy of countries such as Argentina, Chile, Spain, Brazil, Portugal, Mexico, Uruguay, and others. He has published single-authored articles in Comparative Political Studies (2), Comparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society (2), and the Journal of Latin American Studies, and co-authored in Politics & Society and Desarrollo Económico. He also published Models of Economic Liberalization: Business, Workers and Compensation in Latin America, Spain and Portugal (Cambridge University Press 2011, EUDEBA 2015) and Labor Outsourcing in Argentina: Diagnosis and Trade Union Strategies (in Spanish, co-author and editor, Biblos 2018), as well as in many edited volumes. Between 2011 and 2015 he was advisor to the Minister of Labor, and Undersecretary of Labor Policy Planning, at the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security, and in 2020 he was advisor to the Minister of Productive Development, both in Argentina. In his first public office period, he worked and coordinated important social and labor policy initiatives, such as the Private Houses Workers’ Law, which bestowed labor rights on domestic workers for the first time in Argentina, and the Law on Registered Labor Promotion and Labor Fraud Prevention, passed in 2014.

Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at HKS. Sikkink works on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, and transitional justice. Her publications include The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilies; Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century; The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award, and the WOLA/Duke University Award); Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America; Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck and awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and the ISA Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations); and The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance, (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp). She holds an MA and PhD from Columbia University. Sikkink has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the editorial board of International Organization and the American Political Science Review.

Presented in collaboration with Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School