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1991 | Book

Practices and Strategies — Workers in Third-World Industrialization: An Introduction Read chapter Read first chapter

Workers in Third-World Industrialization

Editor: Inga Brandell

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Book Series : International Political Economy Series

Included in: Professional Book Archive

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About this book

In third-world countries an increasing number of people have been drawn into the process of industrialization as wage workers. The analyses here presented cover the limits set by workers to exploitation in workshop production, ethnicity as a workers' strategy, the role of workers' absenteeism and turnover, and labour strategies in a situation of recession and de-industrialisation. Using a historical approach labour migration, union strategy for democratisation, and the world-scale pattern of labour unrest are studied as outcomes of social conflict.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
1. Practices and Strategies — Workers in Third-World Industrialization: An Introduction
Abstract
This book addresses a classical and central topic in the social sciences — wage-labour in an industrial and capitalist work organization — in fact the very focus of social science theory for authors otherwise as different as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. As Claus Offe (1985: 2061) puts it:
Wage work, separated from the home and from traditional communitary forms, without political protection and integrated into the capitalist organisation of work, into the impoverishment, the alienation and the rationalisation which have an impact on it, has clearly constituted the center around which all research and all theory in social science have been organised. Together with the forms of economic, political and cultural resistance developed by labour (with or without organisations) or on the contrary the forms for its social integration, all other aspects of society — politics and culture of knowledge, family and moral systems, forms of living and religion — have found their theoretical development there.
Inga Brandell
2. Workers’ Perceptions and Practices in Algeria: The Cases of the El Hadjar Iron and Steel Works and the Rouiba Industrial Motor Car Plant
Abstract
The concept of strategy from which the focus of this volume emanates (and of which it occupies a central part), seems to us to be problematic enough to justify some preliminary epistemological and methodological reflections.
Said Chikhi, Ali El Kenz
3. Day-to-day Struggles in Mexican Workshop Production
Abstract
In the 1980s a handful of Mexican researchers discovered evidence of a major growth in small-scale industry and sub-contracting in rural western central Mexico. Their findings were intriguing. They suggest not only the onset of a new period of industrial deconcentration and diffusion but also that significant changes are taking place in patterns of capital accumulation and forms of production in the Mexican countryside. Characteristically these are ‘non-traditional’ industries employing a predominantly female labour force, producing consumer goods in new ways for distant markets. Though the situation is still far from clear, it appears that processes are at work which to some extent contradict the assumptions generally made about rural social and economic relations.
Fiona Wilson
4. Basotho Miners, Ethnicity and Workers’ Strategies
Abstract
The October 1987 AKUT seminar on ‘Workers’ strategies and third world industrialization’ encouraged us to return to a body of material collected between 1982 and 1985 by the Oral History Project of the National University of Lesotho from a group of ‘third-world’ workers; in this case men from the Kingdom of Lesotho who spent much of their working lives as migrant labourers in South Africa, predominantly in gold and diamond mines, but also in industry.
Jeff Guy, Motlatsi Thabane
5. Feuds, Class Struggles and Labour Migration in Calabria
Abstract
The main purpose of this chapter is to analyse the formation of a wage labour force in a peripheral environment, in this case one of the poorest regions of southern Italy, Calabria.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, a system of land tenure known as the latifondo contadino (peasant latifundium) had come to predominate throughout the region. The system was not the same everywhere. Arrangements between peasants and landlords showed great variations from place to place, but all had one characteristic in common: large landed estates were partly farmed by the landowner, predominantly with wage labour, and partly subdivided into plots and farmed by peasants who paid rent in cash or kind. In the second half of the nineteenth century (roughly from the 1860s up to the First World War), the latifondo contadino tended to disappear, giving rise not to one but to three distinct social formations.
Giovanni Arrighi, Fortunata Piselli
6. Textile Unions and Industrial Crisis in Nigeria: Labour Structure, Organization and Strategies
Abstract
By 1980, Nigeria had developed the third largest textile industry in Africa, surpassed only by Egypt and South Africa, with some 100 factories and some 100000 workers, not including vast numbers of small garments firms and crafts producers. The industry faced major difficulties, including fierce competition from smuggled Asian products and a fast receding domestic raw material base. Five years later, by 1985, the industry had lost about 40000 workers and was operating at some 40 per cent of its capacity (Andræ and Beckman, 1984 and 1987).
Gunilla Andræ, Björn Beckman
7. Steyr-Nigeria: The Recession and Workers’ Struggles in the Vehicle Assembly Plant
Abstract
On 10 October 1985, the workers of Steyr-Nigeria in Bauchi force-marched the managing director of the company out of the factory premises and told him not to return to the factory until he was ready to negotiate with their union officials. Other management staff, local and foreign, either took to their heels or went into hiding to avoid coming into contact with the highly provoked and agitated workers. The workers were protesting against the deteriorating conditions of work and management’s anti-labour rationalization policies, following the decline of the Nigerian economy and the massive reduction in import licences, necessary for the importation of parts. Similar demonstrations took place a week before, on 4 October, at Peugeot Automobile of Nigeria (PAN) in Kaduna and a few weeks later at Volkswagen of Nigeria (VON) in Lagos in December 1985.
Yusuf Bangura
8. Trade Unions and Democracy — Chile in the 1980s
Abstract
By labour we mean in this chapter the trade union movement organized in the Comando National de Trabajadores (CNT) which has coordinated since 1982–3 the most important labour organizations of employees and workers in Chile. It has continued the tradition of the Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT, dissolved in 1973), in order to unite all the wage workers of the country with a perspective of social transformation and internal ideological—political pluralism. By democracy we mean here the system of government based on plural representative institutions commonly called ‘bourgeois democracy’.
Bosco Parra
9. World-Scale Patterns of Labour—Capital Conflict
Abstract
Two trends stand out in a survey of the world scale patterning of labour unrest in the 1980s: the weakening and subsequent decline of militancy among workers in the advanced capitalist (or core) countries and the simultaneous emergence of strong and effective labour movements in numerous newly industrializing (or semi-peripheral) countries. Thus, while workers in US mass production industries have been on the defensive as companies close plants and cut real wages, a wave of worker militancy in the summer of 1987 shook the South Korean economy, and won major concessions from employers and the state. And while British mine workers were decisively defeated after a long and bitter dispute, deepening the overall crisis of the labour movement, black South African miners have, through a series of extremely disruptive strikes, become perhaps the most strategic force directly and indirectly challenging the apartheid structure. Poland, Brazil, Spain and other examples would only further illustrate the point: that is, by the 1980s the centre of gravity of world labour unrest had shifted from its historical epicentre — the core countries — to the semi-periphery of the world economy.
Beverly Silver
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Workers in Third-World Industrialization
Editor
Inga Brandell
Copyright Year
1991
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN
978-1-349-21679-6
Print ISBN
978-1-349-21681-9
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21679-6