Título: Entre huelgas y máquinas: salario industrial en la República Peruana durante la Sustitución de Importaciones 1940 – 1970

Autor: Julio Rosales Rosales

Directora: Raquel Llorente Heras

Universidad: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Fecha de defensa: 27/11/2025

Comité: Felipe Sáez Fernández, Inmaculada Cebrián López, Mariano Castro Valdivia

Calificación: Sobresaliente Cum Laude

 

This doctoral dissertation analyses wage setting and wage differentials in the Peruvian manufacturing sector during Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), 1940–1970, focusing on how wages were determined in a developing economy marked by significant labor frictions during structural transformation.

 

The thesis’s first contribution is a new theoretical framework for wage setting in Peru’s manufacturing sector, tracing its evolution across the period. Operating far from a free-market model, the wage-setting mechanism shifted from an era of firm monopsonistic power and paternalism toward collective bargaining marked by heavy government intervention. The framework shows that worker characteristics—particularly differences between general and firm-specific human capital—are essential to understanding wage dynamics. In an expanding urban labor market, wages under firm paternalism were not set arbitrarily: at least for high-human-capital workers, firms had to align compensation with outside options available across the broader urban market. Under later collective bargaining and state intervention, egalitarian union policies raised wages for unionized workers overall while generating additional premiums for low-skilled workers and for skilled workers with high firm-specific human capital.

 

The thesis’s second contribution is methodological: despite substantial data scarcity at individual level, it applies quantitative methods using the available data to rigorously assess wage differentials and their evolution in this period, isolating the roles of institutions and market forces linked to the rise of modern firms.

 

Differences in union power help explain wage differentials among blue-collar workers. During the 1940s, textile blue-collar workers raised their wages through active mobilization; egalitarian policies pursued by a powerful, centralized union delivered a higher wage premium both to workers with high specific human capital and to low-skilled workers. Over the following two decades, as the modern manufacturing sector expanded and unionization spread beyond Lima, the wage gap between Lima-based and provincial blue-collar workers narrowed.

 

Between 1950 and 1970, the narrowing wage gap between white-collar and blue-collar manufacturing workers contributed to a reduction in overall income inequality within Peru. This contraction reflects diverse market forces across the two labor-market segments, the regional expansion of modern manufacturing, and shifts in union power. Decomposing wage differentials across the income distribution—comparing ISI-sector workers to the rest of manufacturing—reveals that observable and unobservable characteristics matter differently depending on where in the distribution one looks: for high-income workers (those in ISI and export-oriented firms), nearly all of the ISI wage gap is attributable to unobservable factors, possibly reflecting differences in union leverage, regional cost-of-living variation, and non-salary compensation.

 

The study of car-assembly workers in 1960–1970 shows that active unionization, as in textiles, was not the only driver of blue-collar wage differentials in manufacturing sector of Peru: firms with substantial market power—such as major American car-assembly plants in Peru—could set relatively higher wages as a deliberate strategy to reduce industrial conflict.

 

In sum, wage setting in Peru’s manufacturing sector during ISI resulted from a complex interaction of market forces, union mobilization, institutional arrangements, and firm-level strategy—never from competitive market dynamics alone. Wage structures evolved from monopsonistic employer power and paternalism toward institutionalized, state-mediated collective bargaining. While union activism and market concentration produced distinct wage premiums and regional convergence for some segments of the workforce, they also introduced structural rigidities. Overall, the thesis shows how human capital, labor market frictions, and institutional power jointly shaped wage distribution during a pivotal era of structural transformation.