Protest and Social Dialogue in Democratic Chile, 1988–2006

Abstract

Advocates of labor market reforms argue that East Asian economic success has largely resulted from a significant degree of labor market flexibility. This compares to the experience of many Latin American nations, which cont inue to rely on fairly protect ive labor market regulations.¹ If ratification of International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions is one measure of a government’s willingness to regulate labor markets, we would have to conclude that South Korea, having ratified only twenty conventions, has a much more flexible labor market than Chile, which has ratified fifty-nine.² Yet when compared to Chile, involuntary labor mobility in Korea has been quite low, around 9 percent throughout the 1990s. Chile, on the other hand, is characterized by a high degree of employment and wage flexibility, as demonstrated by its extraordinary level of involuntary labor mobility.