Bridges and boundaries for a red-green alliance - a materialist approach to analyzing the struggles around the glocal salmon industry in southern Chile
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
Global Labour University Conference - Globalisation and the Transition to an Egalitarian World
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The ?glocal? salmon industry in southern Chile illustrates the changing focus in global value chain (GVC) research. In the 1990s, the salmon cluster was hailed as a successful insertion into a global value chain. Studies illustrated that firms were successful in product and process upgrading. When social upgrading became an issue, research showed that industrial upgrading did not ?automatically? lead to an improvement in working conditions. This was achieved by local organizing and persistent struggles of the labor movement. The (for now) final episode of the story is about the ecological frontier. Since the outbreak of a virus in 2007, the industry has been regularly hit by ecological crises and subsequent restructuring. The reactions to this multiple crisis are the focus of my presentation.
I argue that upgrading parameters are unable to capture the political, social and ecological frontiers of this glocal industry. In contrast, I combine GVC research tools with theoretical concepts from political ecology, the dependency approach and social movement research to analyze how ?red? and ?green? actors dealt with the crisis. The case study adds to the literature on how local social actors adapt to crises and how they define their political goals and strategies. A micro-analytical examination of actors` responses and organizing efforts can thus shed light on the unifying and dividing factors between laboring classes and environmental activists. Examining the processes of how and when communalities between labor and environmental groups emerged and why they eroded again is important for future protest events and alliances.
My presentation is based on the year-long study of the global salmon production network in Chile; concerning social actors` strategies, I draw on field data collected through interviews in January/February 2020.
Forschungs-