Between class conflict and class cooperation: Company welfare policies in Latin America

This dossier gathers eight articles concerned with company welfare plans in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil in the twentieth century. Based on well-researched case studies, they point to the relevance of these programs in the Southern Cone and call attention to their mutable nature. The articles delve into the complex relationship between capital and labor to assess how class conflicts and class cooperation intertwined in the vast diversity of Latin American labor worlds. Although the historical analysis of these studies circumscribes at a local or a national level, the dossier looks for encouraging dialogues and exchanges among scholars interested in comparing and contrasting different national and industrial experiences in this region. The articles remind us of the importance of thinking about industrial paternalism from a historical perspective to recover the trial and error path companies pursued on designing welfare policies toward workers and employees. In the contested process of making these corporative programs, these studies highlight the agency of employers, experts, state officials, white-collar employees, and workers. Lastly, they explore the scope and limitations of these policies in changing economic, social, political, and even cultural conjunctures. In so doing, the dossier invites to rethink how social scientists, particularly historians, conceptualize these policies of extra-salary compensations by revisiting the categories of industrial paternalism, patronage, and company welfare, among others. For its organization, this dossier follows a double criterion. It combines studies that deal with analogous economic sectors in similar historical contexts. At the same time, it underscores the value of assessing changes and continuities in terms of these companies’ programs in the unpredictable and turbulent twentieth century.