Re-articulating labour in global production networks: The case of street traders in Barcelona

Abstract

The global production network approach constitutes a relational theorising of production processes, incorporating firm and non-firm actors, including the state, civil society and labour. Despite renewed attention to labour, global production network analysis focuses predominantly on formal waged work, giving insufficient attention to growing numbers of precarious workers, including self-employed and own-account workers, who are often the most vulnerable and exploited. This is symptomatic of a persistent, unhelpful dichotomy between formal and informal production practices. Consequently, the ability of precarious workers to navigate and challenge the terms of their engagement with global production networks remains little understood. This paper addresses this by examining the everyday practices of migrant street peddlers – ‘manteros’ – and their interaction with clothing and footwear global production networks as they source, produce, brand and retail products on the streets of Barcelona. We develop recent insights from labour agency and dis/articulation perspectives to conceptualise simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion taking place at the margins of global production networks. We reveal multiple, agentive strategies adopted by precarious, informal workers and demonstrate how, through their engagements with global production networks, they are able to re-articulate their social, economic and political marginalization. Such insights, we suggest, advance critical understandings of labour in global production network analysis and economic geography.

Keywords

Agency Barcelona global production networks labour migrant

Introduction

Street vendors, or ‘manteros’, are a familiar sight in busy tourist areas of Barcelona, along Las Ramblas, the port and the beach. Spreading their blankets on pedestrian walkways upon which they carefully arrange their goods, they sell anything from clothing, sunglasses, bags and belts to passing locals and tourists. Most manteros are from Bangladesh and Senegal, migrants ‘without papers’, for whom Spain is one stop in an often long and extensive migratory journey. Peddling is an illegal activity. Along with their illegal migrant status, this makes them subject to intensive surveillance. As street peddling is a highly visible public activity, much of their time is spent evading the police; being caught incurs a heavy fine and possibly arrest and detention. The life of the mantero is precarious, shaped by racial, class and migrant identities (Bair and Werner, 2011; Phillips, 2011).

Their marginalisation is further entrenched through the kind of economic activity they perform. As street traders, they operate on the margins of more formalised production and retail processes. However, we suggest that while these informal workers have been largely invisible in global production network (GPN) analysis, they encounter, engage with, rework and resist GPNs. As we show in this paper, manteros are able to subtly navigate the precarity of their existence. In part, this is enabled through their appropriation of products from multiple production networks and their ability to connect with their own economic and cultural networks. Additionally, by forging new channels through which products may reach consumers, they play a critical role in extending production networks into new spaces.

More specifically, we reveal the everyday tactics of resilience that manteros perform on the streets of Barcelona to resist and subvert controls over their livelihoods. Furthermore, we show how their unheralded work, instead of being marginal to GPNs, facilitates the successful economic strategies of lead firms and extends the reach of GPNs themselves. This is demonstrated through an examination of manteros’ practices of sourcing, selling and adapting goods and the ways they collaborate with each other. We also show how they seek to challenge the processes through which they are adversely incorporated into or excluded from GPNs, by forging new kinds of formal collective action, specifically through the establishment of a union. Together, these forms of agency undertaken by manteros are beginning to counter their marginalisation and precarity on the street. This study thus contributes to GPN analysis by expanding the critical emphasis on labour that has hitherto been under-conceptualised. Existing GPN analysis largely focuses on formal, waged labour, while the potential agency of precarious and informal workers remains underexplored. We show how precarious workers, through their engagements with GPNs, are able to re-articulate their social, economic and political marginalization by state and civil society actors.

A variety of explanatory frameworks have been proposed to understand the dynamics of global production, including ‘the nexus of interconnected functions, operations and transactions through which a specific product or service is produced, distributed and consumed’ (Coe et al., 2008: 272). In the mid-1990s, the highly influential global value chain (GVC) framework focused on inter-firm relations between lead-firm buyers and suppliers, highlighting the ability and influence of lead firms in governing the value chain, including ‘what components are produced, where and how these are brought together to produce a sellable product’ (McGrath, 2017: 5). Subsequently, the GPN framework developed this conceptualisation by adopting a network rather than chain metaphor to move beyond the perceived linearity and preoccupation with inter-firm governance relations underpinning GVC analysis (Coe et al., 2008; Dicken et al., 2001; Henderson et al., 2002). GPN scholars have therefore widened the conceptual lens beyond firm actors and inter-firm relations, to encompass a broader set of networked actors positioned to actively shape global production processes, including nation states, civil society actors and labour.

While the GPN’s networked approach more successfully captures the complexity of production processes (McGrath-Champ et al., 2015; Rainnie et al., 2011, 2013), it has received sustained criticism for giving insufficient attention to labour (Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Coe et al., 2008; Rainnie et al., 2011; Stringer et al., 2014). However, as noted by Bair and Werner (2015: 119), there exists a significant body of research exploring labour in GPNs (Alford et al., 2017; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Hale and Wills, 2005; Werner, 2012). It is therefore perhaps more appropriate to state that calls for increased attention to labour in GPNs are ‘less a lament of labour’s absence … than an expression of dissatisfaction with the way that labour is being conceptualized in analysis of global production’ (Bair and Werner, 2015: 119).

One such critique of the treatment of labour in GPN analysis refers to an overt preoccupation with more formal forms of waged labour incorporated into GPNs, at the expense of precarious workers, including self-employed and own account workers excluded from and/or operating at the margins of GPNs (Phillips, 2011: 388). Bair and Werner’s (2011) influential dis/articulations perspective attempts to theorise this problematic, by turning attention to the processes and dynamics that incorporate and exclude workers into/from GPNs. A key assertion is that it is not solely capital that determines the dynamics of inclusion into and exclusion from GPNs, but an array of firm and non-firm (state, civil society) institutional actors who play a crucial role in crafting ideological assumptions regarding the availability and value of labour across socio-spatial contexts (Bair and Werner, 2011). In a more recent reflection on the dis/articulations perspective, Bair and Werner (2015: 131) further assert that labour itself plays an active role in shaping dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and the composition of GPNs through everyday practices and struggles. However, we argue here that such dynamics have been insufficiently conceptualised or explored in existing network and labour-related literatures in relation to the ability (or inability) of precarious workers to shape their own terms of inclusion into and exclusion from GPNs.

We address this lacuna by bringing the dis/articulations perspective into conversation with concepts of labour agency, emanating from related labour geography and process literatures. The dis/articulations perspective helps us conceptualise how local actors and particular sets of social relations shape precarious, migrant workers’ terms of engagement with GPNs, and in doing so elucidate the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that facilitate the functioning of GPNs across spatial contexts. We complement this analysis by drawing upon Katz’s (2004) multi-level concept of labour agency, to highlight that processes of dis/articulation are neither static nor secure, but rather contested by precarious workers via evolving individual, collective/associational and community-based strategies. These conceptual tools help us better understand the particular circumstances of manteros working on the streets of Barcelona, who adopt such strategies to engage with GPNs. In doing so, manteros rework and resist their social and political marginalization by state and civil society actors as racialized subjects with precarious legal status. Such insights reveal the conceptual and political significance of labour agency, as precarious workers actively re-articulate their terms of inclusion into and exclusion from GPNs. We therefore make the case for continued critical emphasis on labour in GPN analysis and recognition of the diverse forms of labour that comprise GPNs.

The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, we bring together debates on dis/articulations and labour agency in the sphere of GPNs. Here we identify gaps in current GPN thinking in relation to a pervading ‘inclusionary bias’ underpinning mainstream conceptualisations of labour. We draw upon the dis/articulations perspective and contemporary thinking on labour agency to help consider processes of inclusion and exclusion at the margins of GPNs, and the potential for precarious workers to shape and contest those dynamics. In the ‘Research methodology and context’ section, we outline two phases of empirical research that underpin our argument, and provide an overview of the study location. Our empirical discussion in the ‘Rearticulating labour at the margins of GPNs’ section focuses first on localised, day-to-day tactics of manteros as they engage with multiple GPNs through practices of sourcing and selling, and as they attempt to carve out livelihoods in the face of a series of constraints. It then moves on to address how manteros challenge the terms of their engagement with GPNs via new forms of collective agency. In the concluding section, we argue that insights from our particular case serve to advance critical understandings of labour and the diversity of work relations that exist within and beyond GPNs.

GPNs, dis/articulations and labour agency

Whilst existing GPN debates include analyses of labour, the focus has largely been on formal, waged workers as opposed to precarious workers operating at the margins of global production. Moreover, the potential agency of the most precarious workers to resist and subvert networks of global production remains underexplored. These lacunae stem in part from unhelpful dichotomies between formal and informal spaces of production that persist in existing GPN debates (Bair and Werner, 2011). Our analysis expands the critical emphasis on labour in GPN and broader debates in economic geography by illuminating how workers operating on the fringes of GPNs intersect with informal spaces of production and retail.

Despite the aforementioned shift from the firm-centric GVC framework to the GPN’s multi-actor networked approach, some scholars argue that labour continues to be marginalized in existing debates (Bair, 2005; Bair and Werner, 2015; Coe et al., 2008; Cumbers et al., 2008; Rainnie et al., 2011; Stringer et al., 2014). This is paradoxical, as there has been much empirical research on labour (Bair and Werner, 2015: 119; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Werner, 2012). This has included studies into both the impacts of commercial GPN functioning on workers (Alford, 2016; Barrientos et al., 2011; Posthuma and Nathan, 2010), and the potential agency of workers to contest the terms of their incorporation into GPNs (Alford et al., 2017; Carswell and De Neve, 2013; McGrath-Champ et al., 2015). This latter strand of analysis addresses acritical assumptions in early GVC literature which perceive workers as ‘passive victims’ of lead-firm’s predatory sourcing practices (Smith et al., 2002), arguing they should rather be considered active agents, capable of shaping and contesting their terms of incorporation into GVCs/GPNs.

It is therefore perhaps more accurate to state that the issue is not that labour is under-explored in GPN research, but rather has not been adequately conceptualised (Bair and Werner, 2015; Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Werner, 2012). One particular recurring critique is that mainstream GVC/GPN literature suffers from an ‘inclusionary bias’. That is, it focuses overwhelmingly on actors included into production networks and not on those who are excluded or operating at the margins of GPNs (Bair and Werner, 2011, 2015; Goger, 2013; Phillips, 2011). To address this, Bair and Werner’s (2011) dis/articulations perspective attempts to better theorise ‘the relationship between inclusion and exclusion as ongoing processes that are constitutive of commodity chains’. This perspective calls for ‘a deeper engagement with the processes that engender the forging and breaking of links between circuits of commodity production, people and places’ (Bair and Werner, 2011: 992). In relation to labour in GVCs/GPNs, the dis/articulations perspective therefore requires moving beyond a ‘resilient preoccupation with formal’ waged labour incorporated into global production (which has been the case in much GPN research thus far) (Phillips, 2011: 380), to account for the large and increasing numbers of precarious and informal workers, including self-employed and own-account workers, operating outside of wage relations and at the periphery of GPNs (Bair and Werner, 2015).

The dis/articulations perspective refocuses conceptual and empirical attention on processes that include and exclude workers in and from GPNs (Bair and Werner, 2015: 131), and further asserts that these dynamics are not shaped by capital alone, but also the ‘historically particular sets of social relations to secure commodity production’ such as race, gender, nationality and class, which vary across socio-spatial contexts (Bair and Werner, 2011: 993). In this sense, the inclusion or exclusion of labour from GPNs depends on a host of embedded institutions beyond firms and firm networks, including the labour market, the state and civil society. Moreover, labour actively shapes dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and the very composition of GPNs ‘through everyday practices and struggles over value’ (Bair and Werner, 2015: 131).

This is an important point, bringing the dis/articulation perspective into potentially fruitful (but as yet under-utilised) conversation with parallel strands of labour geography (Coe and Hess, 2013; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; McGrath-Champ et al., 2015) and labour process literatures (Bieler and Lindberg, 2011; Rainnie et al., 2011; Taylor, 2010) that focus on labour agency, referring to the proactive actions of workers in contesting their terms of engagement with GPNs (Alford et al., 2017; Carswell and De Neve, 2013). Influenced by Cindi Katz’s (2004) seminal work on processes of development and global change, labour agency is recognised as comprising resilience – small acts of ‘getting by’ enabling individuals and groups to cope with day-to-day realities (p. 244); reworking – strategies undertaken to materially improve conditions of existence (p. 247) and resistance – direct challenges to capitalist social relations in spheres of production and social reproduction (p. 251). Further distinctions are made between three levels of labour agency: individual, collective/associational and community-based (Selwyn, 2012; Wills, 2009), as we go on to discuss.

In line with the ‘inclusionary bias’ identified by the dis/articulation perspective, this literature also, however, suffers from a preoccupation with waged employees operating ‘within GPNs whose position offers them the potential to exert effective pressure on their employers’, tending to focus on forms of collective/associational agency and trade union representation (Bair and Werner, 2015; Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011: 222). Less attention has been given to increasingly large numbers of precarious and informal workers navigating the interstices of GPNs (Newsome et al., 2015). The preoccupation with waged labour in much existing analysis of labour agency has resulted in a conceptual oversight in relation to the strategies and tactics of precarious and informal workers operating outside of wage relations, and yet whose social and economic activity is fundamental to the functioning and constitution of GPNs (Bair and Werner, 2011).

Despite the overwhelming focus in scholarly work on collective/associational forms of agency, there is increasing awareness of alternative forms of agency exercised by precarious workers. This work, such as Rogaly’s (2009: 1984) discussion of unorganised migrant workers, highlights forms of individual agency. Carswell and De Neve (2013: 8) examine how this agency is ‘rooted in people’s everyday decision making around employment, livelihoods and social reproduction’, and is shaped and constrained by embedded dynamics of gender, age, migrant status and race. Other studies draw attention to community-based and ‘reinvented’ forms of agency (Lier and Stokke, 2006; Wills, 2001), whereby the community comprises a new domain of mobilization for precarious workers operating at the margins of globalised production networks (Alford et al., 2017). In accessing less defined residential areas and community centres to form innovative and strategic alliances with marginalised workers, and in raising issues beyond wages and employment conditions, community-based forms of agency can potentially extend spaces of contestation outside bounded notions of the ‘workplace’ (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011). Whilst these contributions have shed light on individual and community-based agency performed by workers incorporated into GPNs (Alford et al., 2017), there remains scant exploration of the agency of precarious workers operating on the periphery of GPNs, such as self-employed and own account workers, who are often the most vulnerable and exploited.

In extending the domain of labour agency beyond formal workplaces, inter-linkages and overlaps between so-called formal and informal economic practices (Phillips, 2011) are revealed. Geographers have shown that the formal and informal, legal and illegal, are complex, fluid and ‘interwoven sets of economic practices’ (Smith and Stenning, 2006: 192; Round et al., 2008) and that ‘illicit’ practices form an integral part of almost all production networks (Gregson and Crang, 2017). Diverse economies (e.g. Pottinger, 2018) and ‘“non-official” economic practices operate in every context’; they ‘articulate and relate in quite complex ways with the market and, in many cases, are constitutive of market relations’ (Smith and Stenning, 2006: 200). Yet, the types of labour (and the corresponding forms of agency performed) often considered in academic treatments of GPNs do not reflect this diversity.

Gregson et al.’s (2017) recent discussion of logistics further disrupts bounded depictions of labour in production networks. They liken the GPN to a patchwork constituted of seams and frictions in the flow of products, which play a crucial role in the creation and capture of value. Such conceptualisations facilitate the recognition of multiple, and even subversive, forms of labour agency taking place at the seams and fringes of GPNs as they intersect with informal spaces of production and retail. Harriss-White’s (2010: 171) notion of the ‘interstitial informal economy (IIE)’ also furthers the analysis of diverse and marginal forms of labour agency by highlighting the ‘frictions where informal space rubs against the formal, with interstitial practices arising in the cracks and gaps that such confrontations produce’ and in which ‘informal economies emerge, spaces and practices are intertwined and intersecting’ (King and Dovey, 2013: 1022). Foregrounding the co-constitutive nature of practices with different degrees of formality and legality extends the purview of GPN research beyond waged labour, yet it remains vital to attend to how these distinctions of formal/informal, legal/illegal operate in conjunction with processes of racialization, migrant status and precarity and continue to shape processes of exclusion from GPNs in practice.

In this paper, we combine the dis/articulation perspective on the inclusion/exclusion of labour at the margins of GPNs, with recent insights from labour agency literatures to reveal the multiple, agentive strategies adopted by precarious, informal workers that have thus far been under-acknowledged. We conceptualise how local actors and particular sets of social relations shape migrant workers’ terms of engagement with GPNs, and in doing so elucidate the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion that facilitate the functioning of GPNs across spatial contexts. We complement this analysis by drawing on Katz’s (2004) multi-level concept of labour agency, to highlight that processes of dis/articulation are neither static nor secure, but rather contested by precarious workers via evolving individual, collective/associational and community-based strategies. We now advance these debates, first by outlining the methodological approach that informs our arguments and then by exploring how manteros actively shape the terms of their engagement with GPNs. In doing so, we contribute to GPN analysis and broader economic geography debates by highlighting the diversity of labour relations that exist in production networks. Such insights, we suggest, can advance critical understandings of labour in GPN analysis.

Research methodology and context

Our discussion draws on two phases of empirical research undertaken in 2005 and 2017, both of which focus on manteros’ engagement with GPNs as they source, and in some cases modify, a range of products that they sell on the streets of Barcelona. The majority of manteros are single ‘unaccompanied’ Senegalese and Bangladeshi men aged between 30 and 40 years, with a range of different work–life trajectories and aspirations. While they are all performing an ‘illegal’ activity, and although some are ‘undocumented’, others already have their ‘papers’ or have applied for them. Some of those who have been granted their papers may continue peddling for various reasons. For many, Spain is only one stop in an often long migration trajectory and so they may continue peddling until they can arrange to move on to another country. For others, their continued exclusion from the primary labour market, often due to racism, prevents them from obtaining other forms of employment. Additionally, some peddlers have developed networks and a sense of camaraderie on the streets and so prefer to remain in a more familiar environment.

At the time of the first research phase, the movement of Senegalese and Bangladeshis into Barcelona was a relatively recent trend. This can be attributed to Spain’s more relaxed immigration controls relative to other parts of Europe at that time combined with the strengthening Spanish economy from the 1980s through the mid-2000s and the relative ease of access to informal street trading in Barcelona. However, ‘illegal’ immigrants were increasingly criminalised and persecuted by mainstream media and governmental authorities. This situation worsened following the global economic crisis in 2008 that prompted a national discourse of austerity in Spain, creating significant political tensions for manteros. Despite this, immigration into Spain continued.

In August 2015, circumstances for manteros changed dramatically following the death of a Senegalese street peddler, Mor Sylla, during a police raid. This was a significant turning point, prompting street traders, with the support of local activist groups Tras La Manta and El Espacio del Inmigrante, to form in October 2015 what is now recognised as the first union of informal street vendors in Europe, The Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes de Barcelona (Popular Union of Street Vendors of Barcelona). However, members lacked experience and training in unionising and faced significant difficulties due to their informality and precarity. Local activist groups thus began to assist the Union helping to organise demonstrations, giving talks, addressing local governmental and police institutions and challenging adverse media and public rhetoric.

To understand these significant changes in the experiences of Senegalese and Bangladeshi manteros, we carried out a follow-up study in 2017. These two research stages enabled us to reveal and document manteros’ multiple engagements with GPNs, and to follow their practices and actions over time. This includes how manteros source, in some cases modify, and sell products; moments of collaboration to evade police persecution on the streets of Barcelona and the collective and community-based tactics they employ to make themselves visible and to legitimise their engagement with clothing and footwear GPNs. Both phases of the research entailed a combination of interviews and participant observation: walking around Las Ramblas and the port area, talking to manteros and observing their day-to-day activities selling products. It is in these informal urban spaces, next to fashionable cafes and bars and expensive retail stores that large numbers of manteros can be found working and collaborating to sell their wares to passing locals and tourists.

While GPN and GVC typologies have tended to emphasise the ‘vertical’ trajectories of products to a ‘final’ consumption destination (Herod et al., 2014: 421), our methodology draws from cultural approaches which typically emphasise the semiotic and material dimensions of commodities. Cultural geographers have traced the circuitous travels, shifting consumer meanings and biographies of products (Bridge and Smith, 2003; Crang et al., 2003; Kopytoff, 2014) as they circulate ‘laterally’ (Jackson, 2002) through a multitude of phases, spaces and states. Methodologies centred on ‘following’ commodities have proved particularly influential as one alternative approach to understanding production networks (e.g. Cook, 2004). They have, however, been criticised for prioritising flows of goods to Western consumers and for focusing predominantly on circulations of material that is ‘successfully stabilised’ in commodity form (Gregson et al., 2010: 848). The ethnographic methodologies often drawn upon by cultural geographers and adopted in this study can, however, draw attention to producers’, retailers’ and consumers’ intimate, networked and on-going relationships with things and with one another (Bridge and Smith, 2003; Pottinger, 2017). In foregrounding the practices (Warde, 2005) and actions of manteros rather than the things they sell, as Lepawsky and Mather (2011) suggest, opportunities arise for addressing the inherent boundedness of GPN ontologies, and for understanding the diversity of labour relations and process existing at the interstices of GPNs.

The first research phase involved approximately 40 interviews with street traders, focusing on their everyday activities and the global and local migrant networks they formed in order to source and sell belts, scarves, sunglasses and pirate DVDs. In the early stages of this research, one of the authors worked as a street trader to gain a deeper understanding of the everyday practices and strategies adopted by manteros. This included observing the interactions among street traders and between street traders and consumers and the volatile nature of their day-to-day work given police hostility and lack of regulatory protection. The second phase, undertaken in 2017 looked in more detail at manteros’ engagements with clothing and footwear GPNs, including the multiple roles they occupy and activities undertaken to source, modify and sell (re)branded products. An additional objective was to understand manteros’ evolving connections with local activist groups in the city in order to visibilise their working lives and challenge their precarity in GPNs (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011). This involved 18 in-depth interviews with Senegalese manteros, activists from local trade unions and community associations and wholesale retailers operating in the nearby port of Badalona. This was combined with participant observation of manteros during their daily activities, and attending community-based events and film screenings aiming to raise awareness of manteros’ vulnerability and attract support from local residents.

Rearticulating labour at the margins of GPNs

In this section, we consider manteros’ engagement with GPNs through their everyday practices of sourcing, selling and on-street collaboration. In the first part, we illuminate informal vendors’ roles in shaping and extending GPNs. We focus here on their resilience to, and reworking of, the terms of their engagement with GPNs. In the second part, we address how manteros, in collaboration with local activists, are challenging their invisibility and precarity within GPNs and forging new collective associations and community-based forms of resistance and re-articulation. We find that the everyday practices of street vendors are significant in ways that extend beyond individual acts of everyday survival, and that precarious workers can, to some extent, shape the terms of their inclusion into production networks. Furthermore, manteros have begun to resist their marginalisation, raising public awareness of their mistreatment through the formation of a union and the establishment of Top Manta, a new line of branded products.

Everyday tactics of resilience on the streets of Barcelona

Although informal and ‘illegal’ workers tend to be invisible in GPN analysis, manteros tactically exploit local opportunities to acquire, and sometimes rework, products from multiple production networks. Pirate CDs and DVDs were at one stage the most lucrative product sold by manteros, with blank discs bought locally and then burnt in their homes (Kothari, 2008). However, as consumption of films and music moved online, many now sell only souvenirs, watches, footwear and clothing. These products are largely sourced from wholesalers in the nearby port of Badalona where approximately 700 businesses supply goods manufactured in South East Asia and elsewhere to traders across Europe. At this site, multiple GPNs intersect. This logistical space provides opportunities for individual entrepreneurs to form working relationships with trusted suppliers, to deliberate over many thousands of products, and to circulate these items beyond formal GPNs into ‘illicit’ economies such as street vending. As Gregson and Crang (2017: 212–213) suggest, the illicit is ‘a quality produced in circulation’ that does not sit separately from the formal GPN but rather ‘logistics makes a space for the illicit that is right in the heart of the practice of global trade’.

Manteros’ decisions over which products to buy from wholesalers and which to source via established contacts or friends (Kothari, 2008) depend on multiple factors. These include the time of year, where they intend to sell, their physical capacity to carry certain items and the varying levels of risk involved. As Souleymane, a mantero who has been residing and working in Barcelona for nine years explains:

Each person decides what to sell, and it changes a lot. Now, I sell a lot of sunglasses. In winter, a lot of Barca shirts, because of the league. Near Christmas, I sell watches, and other things that people buy for Christmas gifts. It’s very seasonal. But it’s individual choice. I prefer to sell things that don’t weigh too much, like the watches. (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017)

With daily access to thousands of footwear, clothing and souvenir products in close proximity to the centre of Barcelona, manteros can respond quickly to shifting consumer demands. In traversing the interstices between formal production networks and informal spaces of retail (McGrath, 2017), individual street vendors have temporal and spatial advantages over lead-firm retailers. This requires the development of specific skills and competencies to ‘distinguish between the styles, likes and dislikes of different kinds of consumers’ (Kothari, 2008: 508). Additionally, manteros must be able to adapt their sales techniques and develop ‘concrete cultural competencies’ (Pécoud, 2004) to interact with global tourists and local customers. Through this sourcing and selling activity, which entails the development of complex knowledges about products, suppliers and seasonal variations in demand, manteros are to some extent able to negotiate and shape the terms of their incorporation into GPNs. This tactical action at the interstices of production networks extends GPNs by creating new retail spaces on the street or the beach (Edensor and Kothari, 2006) and forging novel ways for consumers to acquire clothing, shoes or sunglasses.

These skills and competencies, are, however, performed in the context of multiple constraints and risks, compounded by the ‘illegal’ status of many undocumented Senegalese and Bangladeshi traders and the illegality of street selling. The precarity of street traders in Barcelona has been compounded by Spain’s anti-immigration policies (Martinez et al., 2015). Such State policies have been fuelled by anti-immigrant discourses, with immigrants blamed for contributing to Spain’s domestic economic downturn following the 2008 global economic recession (Martinez et al., 2015). For undocumented migrants, their foreigner status and lack of historical connections to the city’s mobilisation networks have severely weakened their ability to articulate demands and claim formal citizenship rights in an era of economic crisis (Pradel-Miquel, 2017). In turn, this has rendered them more susceptible to repression by the city government, who have increasingly utilised judicial and legislative channels to repress street vending of copyrighted material. This has led to undocumented migrants being further excluded or ‘dis/articulated’ from more formal production networks (Bair and Werner, 2011). As such, street selling remains one of the very few options available for those ‘sans papiers’ to earn an income. Malik, a Barcelona resident for five years, explains:

We don’t have papers, so we can’t get jobs. We don’t want to be street vendors […] We want equal rights to be able to get jobs like normal citizens in Europe. We are doing this, the street vending, in the meantime, until we can get papers. (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017)

Police harassment and threats of violence or deportation are part of the everyday experience of manteros. To minimise the risks of injury or arrest, manteros collaborate on the street taking turns to look out for plain-clothes police officers. Occasionally, as Idrissa explains, they agree to congregate in one location believing there is safety in numbers: ‘Sometimes we organise a ‘rebel market’, where we all go to Las Ramblas at the same time. With so many of us there we know we won’t get charged as bad’ (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017).

Despite the limitations imposed by the illegal status of their work, manteros physically and visually transform urban spaces, producing dynamic and vibrant arenas of informal retail and consumption (Kothari, 2008). And, in doing so, they extend and re-shape GPNs and the terms of their inclusion within them, albeit fleetingly.

To create livelihoods in challenging circumstances, manteros perform multiple forms of individual agency that draw upon resources and opportunities existing in the interstices of GPNs as they intersect with spaces of global tourism (King and Dovey, 2013). Manteros’ varied activities of sourcing and selling show GPNs to be porous and dynamic. Products move beyond formally recognised spaces of the GPN and circulate via established wholesalers, through diverse economic and collaborative exchanges between friends and into the illegal practice of street selling. Indeed the embodied, everyday practices of street vendors are significant in ways that extend beyond individual acts of resilience to manage day-to-day existence to those that rework and improve material conditions. Manteros are, thus, not merely subject to the exigencies of Western consumers (Edensor and Kothari, 2006; Kothari, 2008), rather their work contributes to the constitution of GPNs as they respond to consumer desires, account for and exploit seasonal opportunities and provide a new route for products to reach consumers.

So far, we have shown that though manteros have been invisible in GPN analysis, they are involved in GPNs through the sourcing and selling of products. Another important way manteros engage with GPNs is through the manipulation of meaning and value associated with brands. Many manteros have been able to capture value at the interstices of GPNs by acquiring products from multiple production networks, and then customising them to create ‘fake’ branded goods. This merchandise is termed ‘top manta’, colloquially and in the popular press (e.g. Congostrina, 2018) in reference to the blanket on which vendors lay their goods. The term has long been associated with street peddlers.

Although they seldom feature in GPN analysis, informal vendors exploit opportunities to capture value within GPNs by consuming the ‘export overruns’ that result from subcontracted global labour and which spill into domestic markets. Described by manteros and activists as a ‘well known secret’, counterfeit brand labels are readily available to purchase, often from the same retailers who sell unbranded goods in Badalona. Valeria, a local activist and Barcelona resident involved in setting up the Sindicato described how: ‘Manteros can buy the goods and brands together. Sometimes the Chinese wholesalers will brand the goods themselves, or other times the manteros will buy the products and branded logos separately and stick them on at home’ (Local activist, interview, May 2017).

The GPN is spatially extended into domestic settings by manteros’ sourcing and modification practices, as apartments in the city centre or in the nearby Barrio de Besòs are transformed into ‘non-official’ spaces for productive economic activities. Products are stored on lower levels of apartment buildings shared by several manteros, while the risky practice of adding brands to shoes, handbags or clothing takes place within the home.

Selling ‘fake’ branded items, however, is not a strategy adopted by all, given the high risks involved. Punitive policing has led to numerous high-profile legal challenges against those caught infringing intellectual property (Kersey, 2017). Manteros determine individually the levels of illegality and risk they are prepared to take, with many choosing to sell only unbranded items or those they can prove have been legally sourced. For example, Ousmane, a relative newcomer to Barcelona, street vending for just under a year, explained that ‘every time I buy stuff, I get a ticket to show that I bought it legally, to the police’ (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017). Similarly, Souleymane, a more established mantero with nine years’ experience stated that since assuming a higher profile as a spokesperson for the manteros union, he minimises the risk of legal challenge by only carrying small quantities of lightweight, unbranded items.

Tracing the appropriation and customisation performed by manteros not only elucidates the diversity of labour processes and spaces making up the GPN, but demonstrates how precarious workers shape the terms of their own inclusion into production networks and enact localised forms of resilience that enable their everyday survival. In the next section, we develop this discussion by looking at how manteros are challenging their representation and marginalisation by the local and national state and labour market through localised engagements with branded products and through the formation of networks with local activists. In these varied networks and practices, we identify manteros as modestly and yet ‘continuously (re)negotiating their connections to power-holders within networks of production and distribution’ (Edensor and Kothari, 2006: 323).

New forms of collective agency: Top Manta and The Sindicato

Manteros have long drawn on informal and locally embedded community-based networks to source and sell products. In recent years, they have begun to develop more formal associations in order to address their precarious status. Together with local activists, they have formed political networks and developed novel forms of resistance by engaging creatively with the materials of GPNs. These new forms of association have enabled them to mitigate negative perceptions by state and media actors who persist in criminalising manteros. We show here that through the formation of a new union, the Sindicato, manteros have begun to challenge their invisibility and unfair treatment both locally and beyond by making more public their mistreatment to local civil society.

In October 2015, they formed the first union of informal street vendors in Europe, The Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes de Barcelona (Popular Union of Street Vendors of Barcelona). It grew out of collaborations with local activists including Tras La Manta and El Espacio del Inmigrante. Idrissa, a mantero and member of the union explains the important role of local activists in raising awareness of manteros’ situation and in countering negative public perceptions in the city: ‘They help by getting us information, with learning the language and communicating with the city council. There are also lawyers in the union who have helped us’ (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017).

Unlike a labour union representing adversely incorporated waged labour, a primary function of the Sindicato is protecting manteros from police brutality, extending, reworking and making more formal the organic forms of on-street organising amongst manteros. However, it has also changed manteros’ self-perception as they have begun to acquire a sense of pride and self-worth:

Before the union, we were much more scared, we were weaker in front of the police, but we also suffered due to what people thought about us. There was a lot of stigma, a lot of racism, a lot of discrimination. People said that we were a mafia. The union helps us to organise, it helps with solidarity, but it also helps with the public debate. It helps us to tell people that we’re not a mafia, but these are legal products we’re selling. (Seydou, Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017)

With the Sindicato there are less labour aspects of normal unions, it’s more to do with self-defence. The manteros are proud of carrying a union card. (Nicolás, local activist, interview, May 2017)

Although the formation of the union changes neither the illegality of street vending nor the precarious legal status of undocumented migrant sellers, it has enabled manteros to challenge how they are publically perceived and to highlight the forms of their marginalisation. As Malik explains: ‘We can’t vote, so we don’t have rights. We have no voice. We needed to make ourselves public, so that our voices could be heard. This is the reason for the union’ (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017).

It is significant for Malik that manteros are now seen to be speaking for themselves, and therefore beginning to shape their own representation. The embodied medium of manteros’ voices is significant in re-articulating and thus reframing their portrayal by powerful actors. As Malik emphasises, gaining increased visibility and prominence within political debates is seen as crucial to claims to legitimacy.

The Sindicato has also challenged the stigma and negative perception of manteros in Barcelona by highlighting the connections between manteros and global brands. They identify the ways in which lead firms may benefit from the sourcing and selling practices of illegal street sellers and their victimisation. For example, the systems of subcontracting in branded apparel and footwear GPNs that allow lead firms to exploit cheap labour often result in excess production (Edensor and Kothari, 2006). Market vendors, small shops and illegal street vendors each provide avenues for the excesses of globally outsourced production to reach a wider spectrum of consumers. Ousmane, a mantero who has worked as a street vendor for six years, claims that he sells the same Nike branded FC Barcelona shirts found in tourist shops across the city. He believes the shirts he sells and those available in the shops are produced in the same factories and arrive in the same shipments to the port of Badalona. He suggests that by retailing shirts at a reduced price, his on-street selling activity extends Nike products more widely, enabling the firm to reach a broader demographic of consumers. He says,

I know the FC Barca shirts sell a lot. 40% go to tourists, 60% to locals. The tourists pay much more. With the shirts, there’s such a big difference, because they’re very expensive in the shops. It doesn’t make sense to pay 90 Euros to buy a shirt just to go to a Barca match, so they’ll buy from me instead. (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017)

Nicolás, a local activist, also argues that lead firms, such as Nike, deliberately import unbranded items which incur lower rates of taxation than branded goods when they arrive at the port. As he explains:

The tax paid is much cheaper if they come through the port without the brand. Some of this [unbranded stock] goes to factories in Europe where the branding is legally added later on […] Some goes to market without the brand; and some has the branding added later by small shops or street vendors, who may or may not pay Nike for the right to put the brand on. (Local activist, interview, May 2017)

Thus, the formal and informal are intertwined in complex ways as lead firms and the state ‘turn a blind eye to an informal sector that it needs yet does not wish to see or service’ (King and Dovey, 2013: 1025). It would seem that the informal channels of distribution and retailing are an acknowledged cost of doing business set against the higher taxes applied to branded goods and the lower labour costs associated with outsourced production. Significantly, the interweaving of the formal, informal and illicit is actively performed through the agency of manteros. This reflects the diversity of labour relations that exist in interstitial spaces and the agentive power of precarious workers to navigate those spaces and therefore to shape the very constitution of GPNs. Thus, the activities of lead firms can be seen as intimately connected with those of manteros via multiple illicit practices and the ‘customary illegality’ running through the network (Gregson and Crang, 2017).

Since the formation of the Sindicato, an increasingly coherent narrative has been developed by union members about their experiences of marginalisation by the local state and some civil society actors, and its relationship with the practices and products of street vending. Many manteros now openly reject the distinction between ‘fake’ and authentic branded products associated with the formal/informal binary. Souleymane, a Sindicato spokesperson argues the reason manteros are persecuted has little to do with the qualities of the products themselves:

In the shops, they sell the same products. The same! I’ve seen them, the shop around the corner is selling the same sunglasses as me. They don’t prosecute us because our products are false. They prosecute us because we don’t pay tax, because we are immigrant, and because we are black. (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017)

Making a similar argument, Malik, who no longer works as a mantero but is actively involved in the union, claims that racism and discrimination permeate discourses of fakes and falsification:

When they stop us, they say we’re selling falsifications, that we’re occupying public space. These are bullshit little excuses. We’re selling the same shirts, the same sunglasses as other shops in Barcelona. This isn’t the reason the police stop us, it’s not because of falsification. It’s because we’re poor and we’re black. And every time they give us a different crappy excuse. Tourists also occupy public space! It’s because of racism and discrimination. (Senegalese street vendor, interview, May 2017)

Manteros argue that illegality is not an attribute of the products being sold, but more a quality associated with their race, class and immigrant status. Furthermore, they claim discourses of illegality are invoked by powerful state and private interests, the police and local right wing politicians to further marginalise manteros and for political gain. Thus, processes of inclusion and exclusion are clearly not determined solely by capital, but are also the effect of historically specific social relations including race, gender, nationality and class, which vary across socio-spatial contexts and are necessary to secure commodity production (Bair and Werner, 2015).

In addition to raising the profile of the manteros through public events and positive press coverage (e.g. Burgen, 2017), the Sindicato launched its own brand of clothing and trainers, Top Manta. The brand’s launch was covered in the local and international media in which the Sindicato outlined their intention to apply the new Top Manta logo to unbranded t-shirts and shoes, sourced legally through existing supplier networks. At the launch, mantero and union spokesperson Aziz Faye explained the role of the new products:

What was once an act of discrimination, calling us ‘top manta’, no longer is. Now we’re reclaiming and dignifying the concept. For us it’s a term of solidarity, struggle and acceptance. […] I’d like the T-shirts to carry our slogan – survival is not a crime – on the back. (Faye, quoted in Burgen, 2017)

Practices of counterfeiting and (re)branding (Pike, 2015) hold the potential to disrupt and unsettle the power of lead firms in GPNs offering significant opportunities for rethinking how and by whom the meanings associated with commodities are appropriated, crafted and contested (Bridge and Smith, 2003; Klein, 1999). The name Top Manta subverts and reclaims the derogatory local term for counterfeit merchandise. Its logo represents both a blanket and a canoe, referencing the precarity of many migrants’ journeys into Spain and their current occupation. Although the initiative was still in the early stages of development during our research, organisers anticipated that up to 400 street vendors would soon start selling the products.

Significantly, Top Manta collectively addresses the daily marginalisation experienced by street vendors, but it is also framed by manteros themselves as resisting the exploitative nature of the global brands that they have been accused of emulating. As Sindicato member Aziz asserts, ‘we wanted to stop selling branded products that exploit their workers’ (quoted in Gil, 2017). Participating in the purchase and resale of goods does not inherently upset power relations with lead firms or other powerful actors within GPNs. While it would be unrealistic to expect the Top Manta project to directly contest exploitative capitalist relations at global sites of production, it does represent a form of political and symbolic action against branded lead-firms, much like consumer boycott movements of the 1990s (O’Rourke, 2005).

The Top Manta brand represents an evolution in manteros’ skills in rebranding and designing. This takes place alongside having to navigate legal constraints and policing tactics that impact on their everyday lives and livelihoods. In applying their own label to unbranded clothing and footwear sourced legally from wholesalers in Badalona, manteros obtain materials through existing GPNs, but then give them new meanings, values and identities (Crang et al., 2003; Warde, 2005). Through new activist networks and creative engagements with brands and products, manteros also challenge how the Spanish state and parts of civil society criminalise them through discourses of illegality and falsification. Their agency thus extends beyond everyday acts of resilience to direct acts of subversion that attempt to mediate the power and authority of established local and GPN structures. As such, manteros are challenging their immediate and localised conditions and also beginning to critique the globally extended systems of exploitation upon which their vulnerability is built. By creating and publicising their own brand, the manteros of Barcelona make a series of interrelated claims about the legitimacy of the products they sell and, importantly, of themselves as workers, designers, entrepreneurs and political activists.

Conclusion

The number of manteros on the streets of Barcelona is increasing. Yet, while they remain vulnerable due to their illegal status and the illicit work they perform, they are exercising various forms of individual and collective agency. These strategies are beginning to be effective in reworking their precarity and challenging how the Spanish state and civil society have constructed them as racialised subjects with precarious legal status. This has involved reshaping their relationships with the city and the spaces in which they work, with the products they buy and sell and with each other. In this paper, we have focused specifically on how manteros are transforming their engagements with GPNs.

By challenging the separation between formal and informal labour permeating much scholarship on labour relations we have brought to light the significance of precarious workers to the workings of GPNs. Through an examination of recent changes in the practices and agency of manteros, we have shown how an understanding of their work in the informal economy can reveal much about the ‘functioning of the formal sector’ (McGrath-Champ et al., 2015: 637). Specifically, we have demonstrated how their illicit and hitherto under-acknowledged activities form a constituent part of GPNs. Furthermore, and importantly, these precarious workers are extending GPNs into new, dynamic retail spaces such as the streets of Barcelona.

The individual, collective and community-based agentive strategies of these migrant workers further reveal the permeability of GPNs. Manteros are exploiting the excesses of global production (Edensor and Kothari, 2006) and actively customising and re-branding a variety of products. Moreover, their practices extend beyond individual acts of everyday survival. The recent establishment of manteros’ own label, Top Manta, formed in association with local activists, has enabled them to create new products and networks. As such, manteros are beginning to actively shape the terms of their inclusion into production networks. Additionally, the publicity they have received following the formation of the Union has raised awareness of their situation and has slowly begun to challenge their social stigmatisation.

Such insights help us to advance the theorisation and understanding of labour agency in several ways. Firstly, our focus on precarious workers’ agency helps move beyond the overt preoccupation with collective strategies adopted by waged employees in existing labour geography and labour process literatures, to show the multiple creative forms of agency performed by workers on the fringes of GPNs. Secondly, we have shed light on the temporality of individual, collective and community-based strategies drawn on by precarious workers, expanding understanding of how these forms of agency are dynamic, evolving over time and in conjunction with a range of different actors beyond the formal workplace (Coe and Jorduhs-Lier, 2011). Most significantly, building on Katz’s (2004) triadic conceptualisation, in the context of GPNs we have demonstrated an additional form of agency beyond resilience, reworking and resistance, that of re-articulation. Here, we refer more specifically to the strategies and tactics of precarious workers not only to improve the material conditions of their everyday existence or to resist capitalist exploitation. We suggest there are also moments in which precarious workers might re-articulate their position and reframe stigmatising narratives relating to their social, economic and political marginalisation through creative engagements with GPNs.

On a broader level, this study of manteros contributes to GPN analysis by developing and further expanding the critical emphasis on labour. To date, much GPN analysis has focused on formal, waged labour and its incorporation into production networks, while the potential agency of precarious and informal workers remains largely underexplored. As discussed above, we show how precarious workers, though acting on the margins, are an active constituent of GPNs. This study also has implications for how the boundaries of GPN analysis are delimited (Lepawsky and Mather, 2011). Mapping production networks has often resulted in significant omissions in terms of conveying the complexity of the circulation of products through multiple states and processes and of the erasure of actors who fall outside formal and bounded categories of labour. This article has drawn attention to the role of precarious, informal workers in GPNs and the diversity of work relations existing within and outside of GPNs. Importantly, it has illuminated the multiple and intertwined power relations that constitute the complex and interwoven journeys of products (McGrath, 2017).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to all participants who gave up their precious time during fieldwork. We would also like to give special thanks to Lucas, Chloe and Lorenzo for their help and logistical support in Barcelona.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Matthew Alford is a Lecturer in International Business and Management at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. His research interrogates questions of development in the context of globalization, transnational trading networks and labour. Alford’s research focuses on the role of national laws and regulations in governing labour, and how they interact with lead-firm driven private codes of conduct and civil society initiatives across geographical scales. Having secured a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant with colleagues at the University of Manchester, he will advance this agenda by exploring public–private governance dynamics in regional value chains driven by Southern lead firms across sub-Saharan Africa.

Uma Kothari is a Professor of Migration and Postcolonial Studies in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester and is currently Vice Chancellors Fellow (2017–2019), School of Geography, University of Melbourne. Her research interests include colonial histories and discourses of international development, humanitarianism and solidarity and migration and mobility. She is the principal investigator on an ESRC-DfID funded project on Everyday Lives and Environmental Change and on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on Everyday Lives in Small Island States. Her current research is on The Cultural Geography of Seafarers. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and was conferred the Royal Geographical Society’s Busk Medal for her contributions to research on global development.

Laura Pottinger is a Research Associate in Geography at the University of Manchester. Her research explores consumption, alternative economies and everyday forms of social and environmental activism, with a focus on food, gardens and young people’s politics. Her doctoral research examined the sharing practices and economies of community seed savers in the UK. Her current research is funded by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account and looks at young people’s political participation in Manchester’s devolution and the Northern Powerhouse.

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