Pablo Pérez Ahumada (2023) Building Power to Shape Labor Policy

Pérez Ahumada, Pablo. 2023. Building Power to Shape Labor Policy: Unions, Employer Associations, and Reform in Neoliberal Chile. Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press.

During Chile’s shift to neoliberalism, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet passed a swath of probusiness labor legislation. Subsequent labor reforms by democratically elected progressive administrations have sought to shift power back to workers, but this task has proven difficult. In Building Power to Shape Labor Policy, Pablo Pérez Ahumada explains why. Focusing on reforms to collective labor law, Pérez Ahumada argues that analyzing how both workers and employers mobilize power to influence government policies is crucial for understanding labor reform outcomes. He examines the relational character of power to explain how different types of power—structural, institutional, associational—interact with each other, and proposes a relational understanding of power and how it is balanced among competing social classes. While workers and employers both have a hand in shaping labor law, their influence is not equal. Analysis of recent events in Chile reveals how the balance of power and the lingering effects of neoliberalism manifest in labor reform.

Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian (2023) The Privatization of Everything

Cohen, Donald and Allen Mikaelian. 2023. The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back. New York: The New Press.

The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian

“An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein

A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.”

From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code.

“Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”

Topics:

• Current Affairs
• Economics/Globalization
• Political Science

A Questão Chinesa [The China Question] 2022 (São Paulo, Brazil: Contrabando Editorial)

Themed collection (translated into Portuguese)

A Questão Chinesa [The China Question].

2022. São Paulo, Brazil: Contrabando Editorial.

Authors (in alphabetical order): AU Loong-yu, Jenny CHAN, Sophia CHAN, JN CHIEN, Yige DONG, Eli FRIEDMAN, Irene Maestro GUIMARÃES, Ching Kwan LEE, Leo Vinicius LIBERATO, PUN Ngai, Ashley SMITH, Richard SMITH, Ellie TSE, ZHUANG Liehong

ISBN #978-65-997188-1-6

The China Question

Over the last century, China has been a place of recurrent social upheaval. From the combative anti-colonial general strikes of 1925-1927 to the mass mobilization of peasants in the 1930s and 1940s, including the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and the student and workers' democracy movements of the 1980s, the Chinese people have repeatedly engaged in struggles against material inequalities and political oppression. However, since the violent crackdown on the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, many people in China, as well as internationally, have come to believe that decades of rapid economic growth have stifled social resistance. This could not be further from the truth: although the Communist Party was successful in extinguishing sustainable political opposition...

The chapters of this book bring enlightening and radical views about these movements. China is indeed a complex society, and connecting to its social struggles is quite difficult for foreigners. However, this volume highlights the commonality of struggles around the world against class exploitation, racial and ethnic hierarchy, and gender oppression. Although these movements take different forms in China and in the Americas or Europe, they are simultaneously linked by the global system of capitalism. The entire working class and oppressed peoples can and must be united in the struggle for an expansion of radical democracy and in opposition to capitalist expropriation and exploitation. In the chapters that follow, we'll look at the heroism, successes, as well as failures of China's experiments.

https://contrabando.xyz/product/a-questao-chinesa/

 

Contrabando Editorial

Rua Itapeva, 490, Conjunto 38
Bixiga, Bela Vista
São Paulo

BRAZIL

 

Nov 2022

https://www.facebook.com/contrabandoeditorial/