 Thesis Appendices |
Pressures to modernize the Mexican and Argentine economies and correct the fiscal deficits in each country were`v)tal issues in attracting the private capital needed to grow the economy during the 1980’s. It is not surprising that Carlos Salinas of Mexico furthered these aims by initiating broad-scale privatization programs to improve the dominant infrastructure industries. However, an over-reliance on debt or modernization-based explanations of the privatization record simply does not well explain how the electricity industry in Mexico (la Compañía de Luz y Fuerza de México), unlike Telmex, escaped privatization. This thesis advances the claim that an analysis of government response to a third theory, the labor-strength theory, is a necessary component of explaining much of the variation in the privatization record in the infrastructure sector in Mexico and Argentina as well as for providing insight on why Teléfonos de México was privatized. This argument explores this question by varying the labor power argument in two ways. The first, a comparison within Mexico, looks at the role that union concentration played in the Mexican government’s evaluation of labor strength. The divergence in outcome between Teléfonos de México and Luz y Fuerza despite the relatively high labor union density of each points to the relevance of another indicator of union strength—concentration. The impact of labor union concentration on Mexican government privatization decisions is then applied to the broader privatization record, and a moderate correlation is found between the date of privatization and union concentration. The second facet of this argument holds this union concentration variable constant, and compares labor power across a variation of union-state relations (corporatism) between Mexico and Argentina. This corporatist argument finds that despite the somewhat lower level of unionization densities and concentrations among state industries in Argentina, much less correlation exists between union strength (as defined by concentration) and the actual privatization record than is true in Mexico. Collier and Collier’s 1979 analysis of corporatism in Mexico and Argentina translated to include the 1980’s and 1990’s would argue that Mexican government’s level of state corporatism remains considerably more intact than in Argentina. This finding implies that the impact of union concentration on state decisions will be smaller in a less corporatist state. |