Effects of Privatizations on Labor

Abstract

Many students of political economy argue that privatizations, by being standard recipes for shrinking an overarching and inefficient state, produce similar sociopolitical consequences in different countries. Privatizations, in this view, enable a better allocation of resources, the efficient use of market resources, and possibly, political liberalization.¹ Other students of political economy, on the other hand, take a sociological neoinstitutionalist or even a culturalist perspective to argue that privatizations produce divergent results depending on the country or the region implementing them.² They argue that increasingly uniform institutions, practices, and policies brought about by privatizations do not mean that there is a unifying paradigm for analyzing the effects of privatizations on workers and labor unions (Candland and Sil 2001, 285).