(Un)Cooperative Labor? Women’s Work, Cooperatives, and the Foundations of Austerity in Bolivia

My paper explores the long history of the Bolivian cooperative movement as a form of ambivalent, gendered development that allowed the Bolivian state to promote economic growth without risking state investment in infrastructure or social welfare costs. While Bolivia's mining cooperatives have garnered international attention in recent decades for their violent protests against globalization and the government of Evo Morales alike, my paper suggests how worker cooperatives came to be such mercurial actors in Bolivia's political scene. Cooperative mining emerged from a longer history of precarious women's labor practices dating back to the colonial period, encouraged and ratified by the state beginning with the legal recognition of mining cooperatives in 1959. Over the next two decades, the state began to encourage consumer and credit cooperatives among communities near the mines excluded from access to state welfare benefits and protections. In particular, I examine the crucial link between cooperative miners, credit unions, and female-dominated consumer cooperatives and mother's clubs in the development of a neoliberal consensus in Bolivia during the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. In these years, military and civilian governments alike tried and failed to curtail the power of influential miners and industrial workers' unions. Even without formal state power, these unions still had the ability to destabilize and topple governments up until Bolivia's return to democracy in 1982. In 1985, however, the democratic government successfully enacted a series of economic austerity measures that gutted public services and shut down the mining economy, despite significant attempts by unions to coordinate popular protest. My paper shows how such cooperative and credit networks provided new opportunities for indigenous women excluded from the organized labor movement during the late 20th century, but also undermined the bases of solidarity between these communities and worker and indigenous allies in subsequent years.