This article examines how organized labor has responded to and sought to influence privatization of the public sector. In order to explain the variation in labor organizations' influence on the process of privatization design and implementation it examines the interaction between reforming governments and organized labor in Poland, Egypt, Mexico and the Czech Republic. The article argues that we can more fully account for organized labor's influence on economic restructuring policies by considering the historical legacies of state-labor interaction. Those interactions affect the resources available to labor, such as legal prerogatives, financial autonomy and experience. These resources in turn affect the relative power between organized labor and the reforming government and thus influence the ability of organized labor to shape privatization policies.