Transnational Corporations from the Standpoint of Workers

N. Räthzel, D. Mulinari, A. Tollefsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137323040
• eBook ISBN: 9781137323057
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book explores the history and global expansion of AB Volvo, one of the hundred largest corporations in the world, through the experiences of its workers in Sweden, Mexico, South Africa, and India. It investigates how neo-liberalisation has transformed the company into a promoter of lean production, at the expense of the workers' needs.

Part I

Theories and Histories of Labour

1

In Search of Labour in Labour Studies

Contrary to a number of new trends in sociology, which we discuss below, we think that work is central to people’s lives. Not only for the simple reason that we spend most of our lives at the workplace, but also because our own experience tells us how central work is to the way we lead our lives, to the way we think and feel about ourselves and the people and the world around us. Making such a statement begs the question of what we mean when we talk about work. We will discuss this in more detail below. For the time being it may suffice to say that we understand work in a very general way and in reference to Marx’s definition as any activity, which creates something new, that fulfils human needs (without judging whether these needs are ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, ‘right’, or ‘wrong’). This includes services and care, paid and unpaid, formal and informal work as well as voluntary work. Our research focuses on paid work in industry and thus on one segment of work in people’s lives that occupies the better part of their days during the major part of their lives (if we assume that they are in paid employment between the ages of 20 and 60).

Taking the importance of work as our point of departure we bring our interest in multiple inequalities (gender, class, ethnicity, and age) and forms of resistance/subordination, and our interest in globalising processes of spatial economic restructuring, to bear on our analyses. Our common interest in forms of resistance and in perspectives for more horizontally organised and equal societies allows us to integrate our approaches.

We wanted to know how working life contributes to the capacity of people to resist subordination and how it might also contribute to forms of self-subordination, assuming that it does both and both simultaneously.

If transnational corporations are becoming increasingly influential in all things that matter to our lives, then it is important to understand how their workforce is thinking, feeling, and acting about being part of such an entity. Rather than laying the responsibility for change on any single social movement, new or old, we were interested in understanding the new forms in which workers and their unions lived their ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) into one transnational corporation when the socio-economic conditions of their respective local workplaces in the global north and south differed.

Looking at the automobile industry (Bieler et al., 2010) state: ‘As a result, capital gained new options being able to select between different industrial sites depending on a variety of criteria including marketability, economic infrastructure, stability, floating currencies and, often most importantly, the cost of labour. This brings, for example, the Japanese, US, South African, and German automobile workers into a direct competition, while they are living miles apart and do not know anything about each other’ (2010: 250). Would that be different, we wanted to explore, for workers belonging to one and the same corporation active in different parts of the world? Would they know about each other and how would working for the same company impact on their self-conception as workers? Would it enable cross-national solidarity or would it increase cross-national competition? Would the company aim to create the same working conditions in all its factories or would it be shaped by the place into which it settled, and/or be shaped by this place?

We therefore decided to investigate an area that is one of the most important production sectors operating in the north as well as in the south: the automotive industry. It is emblematic for the history of industrialisation in the north and is becoming one of the central sectors of production in the emerging economies of the south. It has lent its name to the two most pervasive forms of work organisation: Fordism and Toyotism. Choosing as our case study a transnational corporation producing commercial vehicles with factories in the north and in the south would therefore enable us to investigate interdependencies between working life in the north and in the south and allow us to explore the ways in which this traditional sector has been transformed by new technologies, new forms of work organisation, and globalising processes. While there is (as we discuss in Chapter 2) a broad literature on transnational corporation strategies as well as a growing literature on trade union responses to globalisation (Bieler and Lindberg, 2010; Bieler et al., 2010; Bronfenbrenner, 2007; Cohen and Rai, 2000; Silver, 2003) to mention just a few, our interest is more specific.

We want to understand the ways in which workers experience working for a transnational corporation. This includes their relation to the content of their work, their horizontal (gendered and racialised) forms of cooperation at the workplace, their vertical forms of cooperation with supervisors and managers, and their relation to their local trade unions and the ways in which they are seen by workers to represent (or not) their interests. We are interested in the ways in which workers represent their experiences. In other words, we are interested in the life and functioning of a transnational corporation from the standpoint of workers. This is a perspective we find decisive to understand if we want to know how social change happens or why it does not happen.

Our research on the working life of workers in transnational corporations was designed as an attempt to understand the ‘normality’ of a transnational corporation today and through it, the ‘normality’ of globalising neoliberal capitalism. Much, and much needed, research has been conducted in so-called export processing zones (EPZs) (McCallum, 2011) across the countries of the global south. In 2008, the World Bank estimated that there were 3,000 of these zones in 135 countries, accounting for over 68 million direct jobs (World Bank Group, 2008). In spite of their enormous growth over the past 20 years, these areas of production and the over-exploitation taking place in them (extremely long hours at extremely low wages, where trade unions are usually not allowed) are seen as exceptions and the struggles of workers, supported by movements and unions are about achieving ‘normality’, coined ‘decent work’ by the ILO and trade union movements. Equally, the literature discussing the proliferation of ‘precarious’ employments criticise these working conditions against an ideal of ‘normal’ working conditions, meaning the conditions of core workers in the Fordist system, who earned a salary on which they could survive, enjoying social security, and contracts that were supposed to guarantee permanent employment. What we are interested in is how this normality that is to be achieved looks. How do workers in a transnational corporation, known and promoting itself as a ‘good employer’, experience their everyday working lives?

This perspective is motivated by Marx research question in Capital. Explaining his quest for the origin of ‘surplus-value’ he states that he wants to find it by assuming that the market system works correctly, without fraud or crises. Marx was not aiming at a critique of the malfunctioning of the capitalist market economy, but at a critical analysis of the system under conditions where it functioned according to its own formulated ideal. In reality, such ‘normality’ never exists, since it is only the point of gravitation towards which the deviations strive, or are supposed to strive: in Marx’s case, the exchange of products according to their ‘true’ value. Similarly, we were interested in working lives where workers earn their ‘true’ wages, that is, wages that allow them to reproduce themselves and their families physically and psychologically. We selected the Swedish Volvo Company, knowing that in Sweden they had traditionally been one of the best employers, paying high wages and allowing workers a higher degree of self-determination at work through organisation centred on teamwork. We wanted to know how their policies towards their workers had developed in Sweden and to compare this to the ways in which they operated in countries of the global south.

With these questions in mind, we began our search for the literature in which we would find labour, that is, accounts and analyses of the ways in which workers experienced their everyday working lives. In the literature presentation that follows, we restrict our search to those publications in which we found or expected to find analyses of workers’ subjectivities. Instead of listing an abundance of texts on the sociology of work, we have decided to select just a few ethnographic studies of factory work and to discuss them in more detail, paying specific attention to the ways in which workers’ experiences are analysed. Some of these works are relatively old because in-depth studies of factory work have diminished considerably since the 1970s and 1980s.

We begin our discussion with a sociological tendency that stands in contrast to our search for labour, namely with the discussion about the disappearance of work or its diminishing importance in people’s lives.

The disappearance of work?

One of the first authors to declare that in contemporary societies work has disappeared was Rifkin (1995). Sociologists in the global north argue that it is no longer work around which people form their identity, but consumption (Bauman, 2005). While consumption and lifestyles might have become more important in people’s lives than they were before WW II, we argue that this does not mean that work has disappeared as a central practice and reference point in people’s lives, whether this work is taking place in factories, offices, retail shops, or at home. People have multiple identities that assume different levels of importance at various stages of their life.

Concepts like ‘information age’ (Castells, 2000) or ‘immaterial labour’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000) capture the emergence of new forms of work and living, but they cannot imply that ‘old’ forms, material work, have disappeared. Surely, the world is still populated by an unlimited number of material objects that have been produced by somebody? If they are not made in countries of the global north (and many of them are)¹ then they must have been made somewhere else. It is a truism that the world has become more connected, producers at one end of the globe supplying the means of life to consumers at another end. As Glucksmann states: ‘It would be parochial to portray the shift to consumption in the global North in an international vacuum, as if it were self-contained or self-explanatory, without acknowledging its interdependence with changes in other parts of the world’ (Glucksmann, 2009: 879). To state the obvious, without work there is nothing to consume.

A number of authors have discussed the marginalisation of work and labour studies within sociology. From the point of view of Labour Process Theory (LPT) Thompson and Smith argue that insofar as work has become marginal in mainstream sociology, this is not due to the marginalisation of work itself: ‘Despite gloomy predictions, employment and job creation rates have continued to rise, albeit unevenly across the industrialized world, fuelled, in part by significant increases in the participation of women in the labour force. Moreover, whatever the reason – the work itself, the material rewards, the sense of identity and self-respect – authoritative surveys show high levels of positive association with work (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 2007)’ (Thompson and Smith, 2009: 914). Glucksmann, in contrast, maintains that societal change lies behind the marginalisation of work in sociology: ‘Relative prosperity combined with a decline in manufacturing employment and transfer of jobs to the service, finance and knowledge-intensive industries means that production in the global North is no longer even symbolically synonymous with work, whilst culture and aesthetics assume greater salience as features of late modernity, work and identity included’ (Glucksmann, 2009: 879). The authors, it seems, are talking about different things: while Thompson and Smith talk about employment in general, Glucksmann speaks about production, that is, about employment in manufacturing. In societies of the global north and especially among researchers in a (however critically reconstructed) Marxist tradition, work in industry has almost become synonymous to work as such. However, even where manufacturing is relocated to the global south, it does not mean that work disappears from the global north. There is no reason to think that employment in the service sector or in finance and knowledge-intensive industries would be any less central to people’s lives than work in manufacturing. In all sectors we will find exploitative work, which can nonetheless be fulfilling, strenuous, boring, demanding, and several things simultaneously in different combinations. Why should a hairdresser, a shop assistant, or a waitress not construct their identity around their work (in addition to other practices or social positions) as much or as little as a toolmaker or a worker on the assembly line in heavy industry?

Notwithstanding their differences in the work they describe, Thompson and Smith as well as Glucksmann challenge the thesis that work has become marginal in social sciences, pointing out that analyses of work have been carried out in critical management studies, often in business schools as opposed to sociology departments (Thompson and Smith, 2009), as well as in studies of globalisation, gender, consumption, rights, race, and ethnicity (Glucksmann, 2009).

However, the problem is that the most read and used theorists within the social sciences, like Bauman, Castells, Harvey, Lash, and Giddens for instance, have turned their back on labour and the fate of workers. While there are studies of workers in the fields that Glucksmann mentions, they have not taken centre stage in the theoretical debates within the social sciences.

In the global south we find discussions questioning the centrality of paid work for people’s lives based on the fact that formal employment as it has developed in the industrialised north is a marginal occurrence. To take the countries in which we conducted our research as examples: according to estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the proportion of non-agricultural workers in informal employment was 32.7% in South Africa (2010), 53.7% in Mexico (2009), and 83% in India (2009/2010). This includes informal employment in the informal as well as in the formal sector, whereby the majority of informally employed workers are to be found in the informal sector. Because the notion of ‘decent’ work as formulated by the ILO defines work as paid employment in the formal sector, it seems a far cry from the reality in many countries of the global south.

There are basically two consequences that can be drawn from this situation: to try to stem the tide of informalisation (in another term, precariousness) and fight for formal, safer, and more human working conditions, even within the exploitative conditions of capitalist relations of production, or to give up the idea that paid work is worth fighting for. As an example of the latter trend we want to discuss an author, Franco Barchiesi, who is important to discuss here for two reasons: firstly, he writes about South Africa, one of the countries in which our research takes place and secondly, his ideas are opposed to our point of departure, namely that work needs to be rescued from the exploitative and inhuman forms it takes on under today’s form of Capitalism (and not only there) because it is a central part of our humanity.

Franco Barchiesi has written an excellently researched book about labour policies in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa (Barchiesi, 2011) that includes rich material from interviews he conducted with black workers in the area of Gauteng. What the workers he interviews demonstrate is how work has deteriorated in post-apartheid South Africa, not only in terms of precarious forms of employment but also through de-skilling in some workplaces, including the augmentation of work and the decrease of wages. Barchiesi also shows convincingly how governments use and have used the concept of ‘employment’ and ‘work’ to discipline citizens and convey conservative images of the properly employed worker, with his dedicated wife and well-educated children – an image that the neo-liberalised economy relegates increasingly to a mere phantasy, serving only the purpose of rejecting alternative strategies to provide for people a decent life that is de-coupled from employment demands, namely ‘social redistribution’. ‘The possibility seems however to emerge, on the contrary, that the centrality of “job creation” in an imagination that calls itself progressive, but is increasingly unable to argue for radical redistribution and the types of conflict that make it possible, normalizes indeed the precarity not only of jobs but of the very existences that are forced to depend upon them’ (Barchiesi, 2012: 233). While the author focuses on the global south, his arguments are relevant for the global north as well.

Barchiesi demands that ‘the left’ has to let go of its historically defended idea that ‘work’ is something progressive and start embracing redistribution instead of fighting for ‘decent work’, which he sees as illusory under Capitalism. In his 2012 article he underlines his argument with examples of how conservative to reactionary groups embrace the idea of stable jobs with benefits. His insistence that because ‘stable jobs’, ‘permanent employment’ and the benefits of work for personality, social cohesion etc. are used as arguments by the right, and thus discredited for anybody who wants to be ‘on the left’, is surprising. Somebody who is so well read in Foucault should be aware that meanings change with the context in which they are articulated and so do practices organised around those meanings. If everything that is today commoditised and is used to oppress, exploit and denigrate should be given up in order for people to become liberated, then we should all stop eating, living in houses, dressing, loving, having sex, and indeed, working. The problem is that Barchiesi does not differentiate between the form in which work is organised and work as an activity that can be practiced in different forms under different societal conditions. There is no safe place; there is nothing, not a community, a collective, a self-determined cooperative, yes, not even radical redistribution that cannot be used for just the opposite of what people intended it to be. It does sound radical and progressive to ask for a political strategy that discards the idea that work could be meaningful and satisfactory and thus to say goodbye to any struggle for ‘decent work’. However, if we look at it more closely what such a strategy does is just to reproduce the processes of dispossession that are happening anyway. Barchiesi documents the sadness and desperation of workers who lose meaningful jobs. What he has to say to them is that they should not care about their loss but give up the idea of meaningful work and instead wait for (or struggle for) a redistribution that allows them to be happy w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Theories and Histories of Labour
• Part II  Entering the Factory Gates
• Part III  Subjectivities at Work
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index