Labor Justice across the Americas

This collection of essays, based on archival work across the Americas, offers an innovative, comparative look at a significant yet surprisingly understudied facet of modern labor history: the development in the first half of the twentieth century of state institutions for adjudicating labor laws, from arbitration and conciliation boards to civil courts, criminal courts, and ultimately, in some cases, specialized labor courts. The editors of this volume, Juan Manuel Palacio and Leon Fink, are leading labor historians who have long promoted transnational understandings and practices of American hemispheric labor history. Here they present findings from a multiyear collaboration among regional specialists who themselves live, work, and communicate across both the Americas and Europe. Fink and Palacio, in their opening and concluding chapters, lay out an admittedly tentative shared narrative of central issues and historical developments, or what Palacio describes as “Elements for a Chronology of Labor Regulation in the Americas”...