Trade conditions and labor rights : U.S. initiatives, Dominican and Central American responses /

Frundt's previous work, Refreshing Pauses (1987), was an expose of employer violence used against labor organizers in Guatemala and Central America; it was a journalistic rather than a scholarly exercise, particularly focused on the low tactics of Coca-Cola in Guatemala. Now its sequel, the current work under review, uses the case study method to examine the same territory of labor rights (and internal pressure on them, particularly from the US) in a more scholarly vein and with a wider scope. Using the Caribbean Basin as his frame of reference, Frundt presents a series of case studies dealing with new methods of achieving labor rights, especially the effort to implement labor rights through trade conditions. Examples come from the recent labor history of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua. As US labor unions gradually lend their expertise to help foreign unions negotiate labor law improvements, this effort has taken on more importance, edging into Caribbean diplomacy with the US. Extensive notes; large bibliography. A very up-to-date and valuable work for upper-division undergraduate through research collections in labor history and Caribbean politics. R. W. Kern University of New Mexico