Abstract
This book represents an impressive and welcome addition to the growing literature that seeks to incorporate issues around labour more adequately into global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) forms of analysis. As Ben Selwyn makes clear, much recent work in this vein has been fraught with conceptual problems, but also has been mainly limited to journal-article-length case studies. This, on the other hand, is a book-length extended examination of workers, particularly women workers, in the fast-growing export-oriented grape-production sector in the countryside of North East Brazil. The book is based on fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2008. Selwyn engages critically with the GVC literature in particular, including issues raised mostly in the development studies area to do with upgrading within supply chains.
However, Selwyn’s most important contribution is to develop an extended critique of much GVC analysis and development studies, insofar as when such studies do confront issues to do with labour, they tend to do so in a way that views workers only as passive ‘receivers’ of the positive or negative outcomes of regional development in general, or supply-chain upgrading in particular. Selwyn’s Marxist analysis instead assumes that the nature of capital–labour relations is a fundamental determinant of a region’s (and by extension a state’s, and indeed, the entire globe’s) development trajectory. His hypothesis is that workers’ struggles against capital and the outcomes of these struggles co-determine the local development process.
On capital’s side of the equation, Selwyn examines the impacts of the global retail revolution on developing countries. This revolution, he argues, involves five main transformations:
a concentration of retail power, particularly in the global North
increased global sourcing
the opening up of non-traditional agricultural export zones
penetration of northern retail capital across the global South
increasingly strict governance of global supply chains.
The contradictory effects of this global revolution are investigated through an examination of the actions of workers, particularly women workers, in the São Francisco valley in North East Brazil. Specifically, Selwyn focuses on the organisation and activity of the valley’s rural trade union, the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais (STR). Selwyn’s basic argument is that the global retail revolution, manifesting itself, inter alia, in increasing demands for quality on behalf of northern retailers, led to an increasingly complex production process. This manifested itself as an intensification of the labour process, but also, seemingly paradoxically, provided workers in the grape sector with an important source of structural power, capable of disrupting production. In a chapter devoted to women workers, Selwyn explains how employment conditions changed, but also how the STR women workers themselves became more assertive, fighting for improvements in gender-specific labour conditions. Furthermore, in so doing, women became both more numerous and more influential in the STR leadership, and thus were able to raise still further the importance of women’s work across the sector.
However, Selwyn then goes on to examine how capital–labour relations in the São Francisco valley changed in the 2000s. The emergence of Lula’s PT government alongside an increasingly conservative trade union leadership generally shifted the atmosphere away from confrontation in favour of compromise. Selwyn asks whether the inability of the STR to push for real wage increases for its members, in this context, reflects the STR reaching the limits of its power to make gains for most members.
In the concluding chapter, Selwyn argues that analysis of the formation and evolution of the São Francisco grape sector needs to integrate:
the role of the Brazilian state
the role of Brazilian and foreign investors
interactions between state agencies and private capital
the nature and evolution of the global retail revolution.
But allied to this has to be a dialectical comprehension of capital–labour relations. A Marxist perspective, Selwyn argues, requires a focus on the labour process itself, as well as what he describes as the broader labour regime. This requires a focus on time, space and place representing a welcome acknowledgment of the importance of spatiality in labour process analysis. Most GPN/GVC analysis starts with the network and then seeks to incorporate labour. Selwyn starts from the labour process itself. If there is a criticism to be made, it is that Selwyn engages primarily with GVC rather than GPN forms of analysis. It has been argued that GPN analysis takes issues of value more seriously than does GVC. However, this is a minor quibble with what is a highly readable account.