ACADEMIA Letters The rise of public servant organizations in Puerto Rico in the 20th Century Carlos Carrión-Crespo This article summarizes the fndings of my PhD Dissertation on the development of collective action by government workers in Puerto Rico. Collective conficts arise in an institutional con- text because, as Müller-Entsch argues,[1] institutions establish the parameters within which actors operate, while cultural ideas and the interests of actors construct institutions. Collective bargaining is one such institution, which we defne as a process in which two or more parties exchange proposals on an issue with a view to reaching an agreement. When the interests discussed involve a group of workers with common elements that defne their group identity, they bargain collectively. The International Labour Organization (ILO) classifes collective bargaining as a form of social dialogue, separate from and at a higher level of discourse than information-sharing and consultations. Jorge Rosenbaum Rimolo describes collective bargaining in its origins as “an action di- rected by certain actors that enable to establish social work regulations in the industrial world on the basis of an application and enforcement voluntary or conditioned by means of pressure inherent collective action,”[2] but later became dependent on positive law systems rather than an autonomous sociological institution. Collective bargaining is a relatively recent phenomenon in the public service. It has been the focus of many debates, particularly in light of the reluctance of governments to share the power to determine working conditions of public servants. One of these debates addresses whether collective bargaining exists where no enabling law compels the parties to discuss specifc subjects or to set their agreements in writing, as was increasingly the case in the private sector since the turn of the 20th century. The discourses and institutions that shaped the exchanges between the Puerto Rican gov- ernment and Puerto Rican government employees regarding working conditions illustrate this. Academia Letters, August 2021 Corresponding Author: Carlos Carrión-Crespo, carrion-crespo@ilo.org Citation: Carrión-Crespo, C. (2021). The rise of public servant organizations in Puerto Rico in the 20th Century. Academia Letters, Article 2550. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2550. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0