Global Labour Studies

Marcus Taylor, Sébastien Rioux

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509504077, 9781509504060
• eBook ISBN: 9781509504107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

From the rise of fully automated factories to the creation of new migrant workforces, the world of work, employment and production is rapidly changing. By reshaping the global distribution of wealth, jobs and opportunities, these processes are unleashing profound social and environmental tensions, as well as new political movements. As a means to address these crucial themes, Global Labour Studies elaborates an innovative interdisciplinary framework that builds upon the concepts of power, networks, space and livelihoods. This approach is deployed to explore core topics including global production networks, labour market dynamics, formal and informal sectors, migration and forced labour, agriculture and environment, corporate social responsibility and new labour organizations.

Written in a lively and engaging format that draws upon a diverse range of illustrative case studies, the book provides the reader with an accessible repertoire of analytical tools and offers an essential guide to the field. This makes it a uniquely rich text for undergraduate courses on global labour issues across the fields of geography, politics, sociology, labour studies and international development.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Thinking Global Labour Studies

It’s a slightly chilly late September day and we are sitting in a café in downtown Montreal. While chatting and occasionally typing on our laptops, we each sip a cup of steaming black tea. This moment of consumption appears as an isolated act, something we might do on a daily basis without giving it a passing thought. For our part, we simply chose from an extensive list of excellent teas, paid the cashier and thanked the server when the hot mugs arrived at our table. Our actions, it seemed, were localized. After all, they took place in a small corner of a café in a backstreet of Montreal. And yet, through the simple activity of buying tea we are immediately yet unknowingly inserted as one nodal point within a dense web of productive activities that link thousands of people across continents. Although the leaves in our cups are predictably silent about their path from production to consumption, it turns out that they were grown in the Sri Lankan highlands half a world away. If you run a quick Google search, you’ll see that these tea plantations have a rather idyllic appearance, with lush green foliage flowing down across picturesque hillside terraces. Owing to humid subtropical temperatures and a fertile soil that is amply watered by seasonal monsoons, the region provides excellent conditions for cultivating Camellia sinensis, the bush from which all tea is produced. This was certainly the impression of the nineteenth-century British colonial authorities who imported tea plants from China and conscripted thousands of indentured labourers from India to start the first commercial tea operations in Ceylon, now the nation of Sri Lanka. Fastforwarding 150 years, these plantations have risen to become one of the biggest tea exporting sites in the world.

Putting the serene vistas of the Sri Lankan terraces to one side, we can start to map out the complex network of labouring relationships that collectively turn the leaves of a hillside shrub into a marketable commodity distributed to consumers via shops and restaurants many thousands of miles away. Tea, of course, is not an unduly complex commodity, yet the sheer variety of actors involved in this process is notable: from female tea pickers on the plantations, to various workers in the local companies where the tea is dried and processed into teabags, through to managers in international corporations that buy the bulk tea and market it to stores globally. Together, these agents – each with different roles, interests and degrees of power – have collectively shaped the journey of tea through its sequential stages of production, distribution and consumption. In so doing, they form part of a chain of lives and livelihoods that spills over a vast geographical terrain, stretching from the terraces of Sri Lanka to an unassuming café on another continent. Importantly, each actor has an unequal ability to shape the conditions under which they participate in the network. This affects not only the relative gains such as wages or profits that they accrue, but also the type and level of risks they face from their participation.

The tea leaves swilling in our cups, for example, are picked by a predominantly female workforce that is descended from Tamil indentured labourers imported by the British well over a century ago. These workers have spent generations assiduously labouring for poor pay and under arduous working conditions on the terraced hillsides. While tea picking is largely portrayed as women’s work, men from the local villages typically look for jobs in the processing companies that transform the raw leaves into finished teabags. Despite their long hours, jobs on the processing side tend to be slightly better paid and have less punishing working conditions in comparison to the pickers. These inequities indicate how the division of labour in the tea industry is highly gendered. Women disproportionately occupy lower paid, more arduous and less secure tasks and, as a result, experience a strong degree of marginalization with very little power to challenge their conditions of work or pay. Although they actively seek to improve conditions for themselves whenever possible, many women tea workers strive to ensure that their children gain sufficient educational achievements to pursue other paths of work, far away from the plantations on which they themselves often feel trapped.

The production of tea, of course, does not begin and end upon the terraces. It is filtered through the regulatory structures and political power of firms, states and other organizations, each of which exerts its own influence on how tea is made, including the conditions of workers at the foot of the industry. Although the lowly status of pickers is contested by the activities of workers and supportive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to improve conditions within the sector, both plantation owners and processers have often been resistant to such initiatives. Noting the strong international competition in the tea industry – with rival plantations in Assam, Fujian and other parts of Asia – they decry the potential adverse impacts on profitability that substantive wage rises would entail. The plantations themselves form the lowest link in a chain of companies headed by retailing corporations that market the tea internationally. The tea processors occupy a middle tier: buying leaves from the plantations before selling the processed product onwards to the retailers. At the top of the chain, these retailers actively seek to ensure that their suppliers provide low-priced yet high-quality goods so as to maintain their market share and profit line. Most consumers in distant markets, they note, are more interested in the price tag and flavour than in the social conditions of workers on plantations. At the same time, the Sri Lankan government has also provided an extremely facilitating environment for the plantations and processors owing to the status of tea as an important export crop.

Through this cursory glance at the journey of a simple teabag, we can lift the lid on an intricate web of labouring activities and livelihood struggles that link production in the hills of Sri Lanka to the consumption of a warm beverage in Montreal. We’ve noted diverse power relations at play – between workers with limited options and employers seeking cheap labour; between genders; between different tiers of firms – and we’ve taken note of the different connections and networks that cross space, to link producers and consumers across the globe. There are many more steps we could add to make this web more complete. Think about the activities of transportation, advertising, retailing and even the post-consumption question of who deals with the waste. All of a sudden, it becomes clear that a teabag is never just a bag of tea! It is a nexus point for a complex array of relations between thousands of people labouring in different corners of the world.

Why Global Labour Studies?

As an academic field, global labour studies seeks to map out precisely these kinds of relationships in order to analyse their contrasting implications for the actors involved at each node. By exploring the interconnections that link the production, circulation and consumption of goods and services, we seek to open up essential questions concerning who is producing what, for whom, under what conditions and with what long-term effects. This makes global labour studies an extremely useful way of engaging some of the most pressing concerns facing us in the present era. Several compelling issues stand out. First, the networks that link production, distribution and consumption have become increasingly intricate, creating a more unified global economy that is able to produce vast amounts of diverse commodities and distribute them across long distances. Looking out at any university food mall, for example, you can easily discern the globality of contemporary production and consumption. You’ll find a mix of foodstuffs for sale, with ingredients sourced from around the world: from fresh bananas to ramen noodles to cans of Pepsi. Electronic goods are also in clear display, such as cellphones and laptops designed in North America, Japan or Europe, but most likely assembled in East Asia. Even the standardized tables and seats we’re sitting on turn out to have been produced in locations ranging from Mexico to Indonesia.

That this zone of consumption is a meeting place for commodities from all over the world seems very natural and we likely don’t give it much thought. That said, when we reflect a little more deeply, the logistics involved in making all this happen on a daily basis suddenly appear breath-taking. Take, for example, that fresh-sliced mango in the package sitting next to the bananas. Less than forty-eight hours ago that fruit was hanging from a tree in central Brazil. After being picked, it was transferred by van to a refrigerated facility where a workforce of 184 Brazilians can process close to 200,000 mangoes per hour. There, the workers cut, skinned, sliced and diced the mango before sealing it away in its own personal plastic container. Once stacked in crates, those containers were loaded onto planes in São Paulo airport and then shipped outwards and onwards to retailers across Europe and North America. From tree to table across the length of a continent in just two days – now that’s fast food!¹

Despite this incredible productivity, however, the workforce that underpins the global economy is stratified by vast inequalities in income and working conditions both within and between countries. A quick glance at working conditions in the Brazilian fruit picking and processing sector, for example, shows how low paid and arduous such occupations are. Under conditions of intense competition for contracts with European and North American supermarkets, juice producers and other fruit retailers face strong downward cost pressures. These constraints are frequently transmitted onto those at the very bottom: i.e., the labourers who have little power to shape the terms of their employment. In the orange picking sector, workers are typically paid by volume so they must collect a huge amount of fruit per day in order to make a minimum wage. They do so by working long hours on temporary contracts in difficult conditions, wrapped in cloth despite the heat to protect themselves from the blazing sun, yet nonetheless exposed to a range of chemicals used in production.² In short, the social context of precarious labour in Brazil is intimately connected to the fresh fruit sitting in our university food mall.³ In this respect, we need not only to understand who has the opportunity to enter into relatively well-paid and secure work, but also how different forms of employment sustain uneven patterns of consumption at a global scale.

By exploring the tangible processes that create astonishing levels of wealth alongside persistent poverty, global labour studies offers crucial tools to better decipher the ways in which individuals and households work towards a more materially secure life, while also highlighting the many barriers and constraints to such outcomes. To do this, global labour studies provides a framework to better understand the structures and forces that shape lives and livelihoods across the globe. This is done explicitly in order to seek more equitable and sustainable forms of production, distribution and consumption in our increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world. Examining these questions requires us to ask how goods are produced and exchanged through the daily activities of people who work, communicate, cooperate and conflict within diverse and contrasting circumstances. For this task, we use a series of concepts and approaches drawn from fields that include political economy, sociology, geography and development studies. Building upon these foundations allows us to understand what we might term ‘economic life’ outside the quantitative reductions of mainstream economic analysis.

This kind of quantitative economic analysis certainly has its place in our understanding of the world, but it must be kept in its place. It would no doubt be possible, for example, to transform the processes that underpin the production of Sri Lankan tea into a set of dollar values regarding gross domestic product (GDP), trade flows, per capita income and so forth. Yet to do so would be to produce a decisively weak brew. We would immediately rule out understanding the complex social and political dynamics that operate between plantations and their workers; between genders in production; between the international tea companies and their localized suppliers; and between those who consume goods and those who make them. In short, we would turn a blind eye to all the social, geographical and political processes through which the global economy functions on a day-to-day level. This book, in contrast, seeks to excavate precisely those processes and bring them to light. Before we can move on to that task, however, two definitional questions need to be addressed. What do we mean when we refer to ‘labour’ and why is it prefaced by the term ‘global’?

What is the ‘Labour’ in Global Labour Studies?

To grasp the significan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Thinking Global Labour Studies
• Chapter 2 The Toolkit of Global Labour Studies
• Chapter 3 Labour Regimes
• Chapter 4 Global Production Networks
• Chapter 5 Formal Work in Transition
• Chapter 6 Labour in the Informal Economy
• Chapter 7 Agrarian Labour
• Chapter 8 Migrant Labour
• Chapter 9 Forced Labour
• Chapter 10 Environment and Labour
• Chapter 11 Corporate Social Responsibility
• Chapter 12 Organizing Global Labour
• Chapter 13 Conclusion: The Futures of Global Labour
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement