PUBLICATIONS

Labor Management Relations in Puerto Rico

During the Twentieth Century
Arleen Hernández-Díaz
University Press of Florida

Hernández-Díaz documents the 20th-century history of the Puerto Rican labor movement with this scholarly treatment of labor-management relations on the island. Significant legal, political, economic, and social factors are unique to the region, and the author offers a comprehensive analysis of the similarities and differences between U.S. and Puerto Rican systems. Drawing on official documents and reports from unions and local and federal government agencies, labor-management cases from the executive and judicial branches, newspaper and academic articles, books, and personal interviews, the author examines union organizing, collective bargaining, contract administration, labor-management conflict, and procedures for resolution within the Puerto Rican industrial relations system.

Arleen Hernández-Díaz is professor in the Department of Management of the College of Business Administration at UPR, RP.

Sugar, Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

Luis A. Figueroa
The University of North Carolina Press and La Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico 2006

Contributions of the black population to the history and economic development of Puerto Rico have been distorted and underplayed, contends the author. Focusing on the southeastern coastal region of Guayama, one of Puerto Rico’s three leading centers of sugarcane agriculture, Figueroa examines the transition from slavery to freedom after the 1873 abolition of slavery. While some historians assume that after emancipation in Puerto Rico, as in other parts of the Caribbean and the U.S., former slaves acquired land and became subsistence farmers, Figueroa finds that both capital and land available for sale to the Afro-Puerto Rican population were scarce. His account of how libertos joined the labor market revises our understanding of the emancipation process and evolution of the working class in Puerto Rico.

Luis A. Figueroa earned his master’s degree in history at UPR, RP and is associate professor of history at Trinity College.

The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth

Susan M. Collins, Barry Bosworth, and Miguel A. Soto-Class, eds.
Brookings Institution Press and the Center for the New Economy 2006

A non-incorporated territory of the U.S., Puerto Rico operates under U.S. legal, monetary, security, and tariff systems. However, it has experienced economic stagnation and large scale unemployment since the 1970s. The island’s living standards are low, with a per capita income only half that of Mississippi, the poorest state. In this book, economists address policy issues affecting the island’s economic development. They begin by assessing Puerto Rico’s past experience with various growth policies. They then analyze several reforms and initiatives in labor, education, entrepreneurship, fiscal policy, migration, trade, and financing development, which they incorporate into a proposed strategy for jumpstarting Puerto Rican economic growth.

Contributors include Orlando Sotomayor, Luis Rivera-Batiz, Ramón Cao, María Enchautegui, José Joaquín Villamil, Eileen Segarra, Marinés Aponte, and Juan Lara of UPR, RP.