Labor Justice across the Americas

Labor history has devoted little attention to the law and legal institutions mediating labor-capital relations. The volume edited by Leon Fink and Juan Manuel Palacio, Labor Justice across the Americas, aims to correct that oversight at least for the countries of the Western Hemisphere with a comparative approach that highlights commonalities as well as significant national differences. Palacio's two introductory essays are insightful in explaining the specific historical context and broad transnational influences that prompted interest among state actors in undertaking labor reforms. The so-called “social question,” in reality a wave of labor militancy with revolutionary overtones that swept the world in the first two decades of the twentieth century, sufficiently alarmed both the ruling oligarchies and the elite bureaucrats to contemplate and then promote new legal instruments to contain worker unrest. Transnationally, diverse social reformers, academics, and intellectuals contributed additional, elaborated arguments favoring such reforms in order to...