1 Latin American Labor Reforms: evaluating risk and security M. Victoria Murillo, Lucas Ronconi and Andrew Schrank Working Paper #11 Introduction This chapter addresses procedural and substantive changes to Latin American employment law in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It covers eighteen Latin American market economies between 1985 and 2009 and pays particularly careful attention to reforms undertaken in the 2000s in light of their variegated—and somewhat anomalous—predecessors. While Latin American policymakers responded to the debt crisis by liberalizing their trade regimes, credit markets, and capital accounts in the 1980s and 1990s, they were reluctant to deregulate their labor markets—and in a number of well- known cases actually adopted new regulations designed to protect workers or appease their political representatives (Lora and Panizza 2003: 127; Pagés 2004: 67; Singh et al. 2005: 17–18). The existing literature therefore holds that the relationship between inter- national competition and labor market reform is mediated by domestic politics, in general, and by the partisan loyalties of governing parties, in particular (Madrid 2003; Murillo and Schrank 2005; Cook 2007). In fact, Murillo (2005) concludes that tradition- ally populist or labor-backed parties and politicians who courted big business with