Aina Tollefsen

Talking about fear of violence in public space : Female and male narratives about threatening situations in Umeå, Sweden

Geographers may benefit from a narrative approach as it permits insights into both meanings and how stories are permitted and controlled by social conditions. The aim of this article is to discuss methodological aspects of studying fear as a restriction on mobility and use of public space. We have used examples from a study on fear of violence in the city of Umeå, Sweden at the time of threats from a serial rapist, the Haga Man. We employed Labovs model to analyse female and male narratives about fear. Women from all backgrounds reproduced a shared story of experiences of fear. Male stories were fragmented and diverse, especially in terms of ethnicity. The Haga Man was described in the media as a man of ‘normal Swedish appearance’, which put a focus on Swedish hegemonic masculinity and ‘normality’ rather than on commonly reproduced fear of the racialized other. Labovs model was useful in clarifying how narratives differed in their structural components and completeness, but limited in terms of how to interpret the evaluative component: the model needs to be combined with theory in order to understand relations to changing political, institutional and media discourses on crime and fear in public space.

Of Berries and Seasonal Work

A growing field of research has paid attention to new forms of labour migration to and within the European Union (EU). This research has been characterized by increased circularity, flexible forms of employment, guest-worker programmes and seasonal work, often undocumented, primarily within the service, agriculture, forestry and construction sectors (Castree et al., 2004; Castles, 2006; McDowell et al., 2007; Neergaard, 2009). For many years, the media has reported on the inhumane work conditions for berry-pickers (mostly from the Isan region in Thailand but alsofrom Vietnam and China) and on repeated conflicts between berry companies and labour migrants in a number of Swedish municipalities. In light of these problems, labour unions and human rights organizations have criticized Sweden’s new 2008 Law on Labor Migration for its failure to secure protection for migrant labour. The rollout of neoliberal immigration policy (Peck and Tickell, 2002) and the rightward political shift in Europe and Sweden has undermined traditional regulatory and safety net regimes. Even so, Sweden still represents itself as a national identity that is based on democracy, citizenship and modernity (Ehn et al., 1993; Pred, 2000).

Everyday working lives in a transnational corporation in Mexico: The contradictory cooptation of trade unionists

This article aims to contribute to the rich literature on neoliberalization and trade unions in Mexico by providing an examination of the contradictory relationships between capital, trade unions and the workers they represent, in a Swedish-based transnational corporation. The article investigates how the broader international relationships of dependency and exploitation are lived by workers and trade unionists in the everyday of a transnational corporation in Mexico, where the power of the trade unions has been undermined by politics of neoliberalization and by the demise of the ruling party, with which the unions are allied. Its thesis is that trade unions are changing from being power brokers between governments, companies and workers to becoming mediators of subordination to the company. While they still retain some of their power (for instance their participation in hiring and firing), they are becoming unable to secure work security and workers’ rights. In the everyday working life of a factory this means that unionists are torn between their need and wish to protect workers’ rights and their jobs as union officials. In this context, they experience a need to subordinate themselves and the workers they are supposed to represent to the strategy of the management. They employ a number of strategies to legitimate their existence, none of which appears to be very convincing to the workers. While the union’s strategies undermine their ability and that of the workers to organize for their rights, it also produces a dissatisfaction among workers that counters the company’s attempt to organize consent and motivation.

The production of the rural landscape and its labour : the development of supply chain capitalism in the Swedish berry industry

Abstract Increased commercial interest in wild berries in Northern Sweden’s resource periphery has connected places and people to a global berry supply chain that produces goods for world markets. As a part of a wider global food chain, every link in this chain is deeply insecure and partly marked by secrecy and mystification. Contemporary representations of the Norrlandic landscape tend to obscure and hide economic conflicts and power relations connected to resource exploitation and corporate concentration, neglecting workers and local communities. This paper examines how globalization, neoliberal policies and the development of supply chain capitalism drive changes in labour markets and migration policies, which in turn shape/and are shaped by both material and immaterial aspects of the Norrlandic landscape. While many studies of global food chains have focused on abstract patterns of chain governance, business economics and logistics, we analyse the wild berry industry by centring on migrant workers and the production of a distinct spatiality through interconnectedness and historical conjuncture, with a starting point in a particular place in the interior of Norrland. We thereby contribute to a different narrative of the Norrlandic landscape, making visible power and labour relations.

Qualitative Methods: What We Did and How We Did It

‘The material’ is the term with which scholars trained in qualitative methods name the nearly impossible amount of places, voices, memories, events, and crises that they have encountered and gathered during the research process. Metaphors such as journeys are also frequent, providing a time-space dynamic that creates boundaries (fieldwork/ analysis) as well as a sense of beginning and end (Fonow and Cook, 1991; Lim and Thiranagara, 2004). The ‘material’ for this book has been gathered through a period of more than five years, from 2005–10. The final writing up showed the need for clarification and several interviews and short trips where undertaken until 2013. That is to say, we never stopped collecting ‘the material’.

Production Regimes — Producers’ Pride

When we researched the impact of automation on workers’ qualifications, horizontal cooperation, hierarchies, and work content in the 1970s and 80s we were alerted to the way in which workers spoke about their work, about the loss of old qualifications, but also about gaining new qualifications within an automated system, where they were less immersed in specific parts of the immediate manufacturing process but had more responsibility for, and needed more knowledge of, the process as a whole. We called this relationship towards work ‘producer’s pride’ and found that it could work in different ways: it could put workers in conflict with the profit orientation of capitalist production, where the quality of the product is often sacrificed to cost-effectiveness; on the other hand, management was also able to use the workers’ interest in their work as a means of identifying with the company and alienating them from the trade unions, who were not expecting that workers would develop an interest in the content of their new work.

Production Regimes — Women’s Pride as Producers

We have discussed several ways in which workers feel connected to their work and develop what we defined as producer’s pride: being proud to contribute to a useful product, enjoying teaching others, advancing from working on the line to a position of teacher, enjoying unpredictable variation, being able to exert influence on the production process, enjoying horizontal cooperation, learning new things. The other side in which we saw producer’s pride at work, was in workers’ boredom and dissatisfaction where their work was not challenging. Women and men experienced their work similarly. There was one aspect though, exclusively narrated by women, which was their experience of doing ‘a man’s job’ in a context where their workmates were predominantly men. In all the four factories we visited women in production were the exception. In the case of India, only one woman was working in production and even the administration was staffed only by men. In Mexico and in Sweden management had an explicit policy to increase the number of women on the floor. In the following we discuss the ways in which women talked about doing ‘a man’s job’. In contrast to Chapter 6, where we discuss doing a man’s job in the context of gender relations in the plant, the following chapter focuses on women’s relation to their work content.

Regimes of Representation: Trade Unions in Sweden and Mexico

This chapter will only discuss workers’ representation in two of our countries of investigation. The reason is that we do not have enough information from South Africa and India to write comprehensively about the regimes of representation there. In South Africa the union had just begun to organise the workers and the only information we have is of a strike happening after our first investigation and described to us by one of the managers. We have analysed this in Chapter 11. In India we have had a rewarding relationship with the union representatives and their struggles. Their strike and its results are described in Chapter 11. However, the history of the unions in the three Volvo factories is a recent one and it is interwoven with the complex structure of Indian unions, which are organised through political affiliations. We do not feel in a position to do justice to these societal contexts. What was important for our investigation, was to describe in more detail the actual strike we witnessed and its outcomes.

Production Regimes — The Wage Labourer’s Discontent

Silvio in Mexico expresses the dual position of the wage-labourer and producer: The buses are good and the work itself is interesting. The problem is that they do not recognize our work well. There is no recognition. There are different wage groups, C, A, AA, AAA, and they give the best salaries to their friends. (Silvio)

Three Gender Regimes — Gender Relations at Work

Paradoxically, while Volvo constructs itself as a family to which its workers can belong as equals (see Chapter 8) working class families confront fractures due to men’s unemployment. In Mexico the solution pursued is emigration to the US (Singer and Massey, 1998; Tollefsen Altamirano, 2000), while in South Africa survival is sought through a network of family ties. The centrality of the job for household and community survival (Alarcon-Gonzalez and McKinley, 1999; de la Rocha, 2001) was a central theme expressed by the Mexican women workers. We spoke with eight women, three of whom had husbands, who had migrated to the north searching for work.