COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND INEQUITY IN LATIN AMERICA: A BALANCE SHEET OF RECENT LITERATURE

• Autor(a) principal: Cardoso, Adalberto
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: preprint
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: SciELO Preprints
• Texto Completo: https://preprints.scielo.org/index.php/scielo/preprint/view/1067
• topic: Negociação coletiva; Redução da desigualdade; América Latina; Literatura recente; Latin America; Collective Bargaining; Reduction of inequality; Recent Literature

This paper aims to study the role of collective bargaining to reduce inequality in Latin America from the 2000s onwards. The impact of unions and collective bargaining on wages and income distribution is analyzed, considering that the results in these two areas generally result from the interplay of changes in multiple macro and microeconomic processes and that general income inequalities are profoundly (though not exclusively) related to labour income, which is mainly defined in labour markets. A comprehensive (albeit not exhaustive) assessment of recent research in Latin America is carried out in this study, first showing the results of comparative studies, and then going down to detail in four selected countries, namely Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. The choice of these countries took into account distinctions in terms of collective bargaining traditions, degrees of coordination and centralization of bargaining and degrees of coverage of bargaining. The bibliographic balance sought to associate the degree of centralization of collective bargaining and its results in reducing inequalities in these countries. The general hypothesis, derived from research in the richest countries, is that greater centralization and/or business coordination is directly associated with a reduction in inequalities.