Marion Werner

The Place of Disarticulations: Global Commodity Production in La Laguna, Mexico

Studies of the shifting social organization and geography of global garment production have been critical to the development of the commodity chains framework as an important field of study for scholars of political economy in various disciplines. Our paper intervenes in this literature by proposing what we call a ‘disarticulations’ perspective, an approach attentive to historical and spatial processes of accumulation, disinvestment and dispossession that produce the uneven geographies generative of transnational production networks. We make the case for disarticulations as an approach to commodity chains via a case study of a region in north-central Mexico called La Laguna—a celebrated center of export dynamism in the 1990s, following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and of rapid decline in the 2000s. Rather than offer a conventional commodity chain analysis of the boom to bust cycle in La Laguna, which would look to the dynamics of the contemporary apparel chain to explain the causes and consequences of La Lagunas NAFTA-era trajectory, we instead follow La Lagunas ‘travels’ through the cotton, textile, and garment industries over 150 years. We show how the recent NAFTA-era boom was premised on this layered history of engagements with the cotton–textile–apparel commodity chain. The disarticulations approach to commodity chains that we develop here foregrounds the processes of dispossession, accumulation and disinvestment through which not only commodity chains, but the uneven geographies that are their conditions of possibility, are reproduced.

Beyond Upgrading: Gendered Labor and the Restructuring of Firms in the Dominican Republic

Abstract In the literature on global commodity chains, industrial upgrading describes the process whereby firms shift to more secure or more profitable niches within or between industries through organizational learning facilitated by networks. While the framework of upgrading identifies key dynamics of competition between capitals, it nonetheless sidelines inquiry into how such imperatives condition and are conditioned by labor. To address this conceptual weakness, I argue that studies of the restructuring of production networks can be enriched through a feminist analysis of value. In particular, the efforts of firms to reposition themselves in networks should be considered in light of struggles to rework the basis of labor’s value to capital, a process of reproducing and recombining interlocking social differences into novel combinations of exploitable workers. I explore this process through an in-depth case study of a large garment firm in the Dominican Republic, in which upgrading involved the reworking of skilled and unskilled work, animated by gendered practices and norms, that led to the masculinization of skilled sewing and the feminization of new service engineering functions.

Embodied negotiations: identity, space and livelihood after trade zones in the Dominican Republic

In this article, I analyze socio-spatial processes of subject-making at the center of the restructuring of export industries. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘embodied negotiations’ to explain the spatial and corporeal experience of trade zone workers reproduced as migrants with the collapse of garment exports in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine ‘rural return’ as both a livelihood strategy and a discourse shaped by inter-related gender and racial ideologies of labor as well as the uneven transnationalization of rural and urban localities. I show how the negotiation of social position by subjects marked by race, gender and class is always also a negotiation of spatial position in and between localities structured through raced, gendered and class relations. Mens efforts to remain in urban areas as a form of social ‘whitening’ are compared to womens resistance to rural return as an attempt to stay in circulation as paid labor. Overall, I argue that feminist research on global production should be ‘spatialized’ by attending to livelihoods and practices of subject-making that emerge in parallel to export restructuring.

After Sweatshops? Apparel Politics in the Circum-Caribbean

T hroughout the spring of 2007, women and men made almost ritual rounds looking for jobs at fewer and fewer garment factories in the main free trade zone of Santiago de los Caballeros, the second-largest city in the Dominican Republic. The sounds of steam trouser presses and bachata music emanated from increasingly isolated islands of production, subsumed by the idled space around them. Between the closure of 23 garment factories and the suspension of another four, this trade zone, like many in the country, had a spectral character. Lone security guards sat outside vacant factories, many still housing machines embargoed by creditors or in the process of sale. Old presses draped in blue tarps sat on silent loading docks; dust-caked lunch tables stood empty next to dented lockers. “It’s not a trade zone,” said Edi Álvarez, a would-be worker. “It’s a cemetery.” Garment and textile factories all over the circum-Caribbean have been shutting down in recent years as owners, undercut by competition from Asia, seek to cut labor costs by moving production elsewhere. The most direct cause of the industry’s decline was the expiration in 2005 of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), a quota system to manage international trade in textile products that dates back to the 1970s. Without the quotas, the circum-Caribbean now directly competes with export powerhouses like China for a slice of the still lucrative, although increasingly flat, U.S. market. The Dominican Republic– Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), implemented in 2005, was once touted as a way to save jobs in the apparel industry, but it has been of little help. The downturn has been most dramatic in the Dominican Republic (see chart, page 9), where garment exports have fallen by more than half since 2005 and 73,000 jobs have been lost. Most of the other DR-CAFTA countries also saw their exports to the United States drop between 2005 6 After Sweatshops? Apparel Politics in the Circum-Caribbean

Geographies of production I: Global production and uneven development

Serial crises in the global economy have spurred renewed debate over contemporary transformations in geographies of uneven development. Global production network (GPN) studies have not been inured to this trend; indeed, in both geography and development sociology, a variety of approaches have emerged to grasp the multi-scaled, relational process of uneven development through the lens of global production. This progress report parses three of these: firm-centric scholarship that increasingly incorporates disinvestment and devaluation as an empirical ‘dark side’ to global production network participation; Marxist approaches that explore the evolving relationship between global inequality and global production; and neo-Marxist studies of regional conjunctures that highlight the constraints, contingencies and colonial legacies shaping uneven development in both long-standing and new ways. While their epistemological differences and normative assumptions are mostly incommensurable, more dialogue across these positions is nonetheless warranted if scholars are to grasp the vicissitudes upending received patterns of uneven development and portending uncertain futures.

Forcing change from the outside? The role of trade-labour linkages in transforming Vietnam's labour regime:

Do trade-labour linkages improve the conditions and rights of workers in low-wage countries? We consider this question in Vietnam, a market economy with socialist orientation that has seen rapid growth in export manufacturing and foreign direct investment, while signing regional trade agreements, which include labour rights provisions, with high-income trading partners. Our paper focuses on two such agreements – the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement. We ask how, if at all, these negotiations have influenced changes in Vietnams labour regime, particularly regarding the representation and participation of workers in the countrys system of industrial relations. Comparing binding and nonbinding provisions, we find that the effects of trade-labour linkages are mediated by their enforceability, and prospects for strengthening associational rights are improved by the possibility of commercial sanction. Overall, we find that gains for workers in Vietnam continue to be made by collective action, despite a context hostile to freedom of association, and that external influences to improve labour standards and conditions have had a minimal effect.

The Devil Wears Dockers: Devil Pacts, Trade Zones, and Rural-Urban Ties in the Dominican Republic

AbstractThis essay examines popular narratives that a spirit demon or baca lurked in an export garment plant in the Santiago trade zone of the Dominican Republic in the early 2000s. By interpreting the baca story, and the transformation of the baca itself from a rural context to an urban factory, we unpack the changing nature and meaning of employment under neoliberal capitalism, and tease apart complex geographies of status, exploitation, technology and debt.

Trade governance at a crossroads: Continuity and change in uncertain times:

The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 represented a watershed in international trade governance. The agreement set precedent in new trade disciplines, such as intellectual property rights, that had hitherto remained outside of the traditional trade realm. It was also credited with rescuing then-stalled multilateral trade talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and shaping their outcome (Wilkinson, 2014). At least equally significant is what the agreement achieved in terms of political discourse. In the United States, for instance, debate over NAFTA was central to the 1992 Presidential election. Independent candidate Ross Perot famously croaked from the edge of the debate stage that if NAFTA were passed, ‘you are going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country’ (quoted in Mayer, 1998). His opponents, Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party and the incumbent George H.W. Bush of the Republican Party, were unfazed. Both mainstream parties had signed on to the free trade agenda. Opposition from sectors fighting for the wellbeing of US, Canadian and Mexican workers alike in the face of lowest common denominator environmental and labour regulations, and the then new, binding investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, were delegitimized in the face of this mainstream consensus, dismissed as a facet of the billionaire-turned-presidential candidate’s parochial nationalism (Sparke, 2005). In the years that followed, far-reaching regional trade agreements (RTAs) would become principal tools to organize a new global trade and investment order amid continued protest from labour and progressive social movements. A quarter of a century later, another billionaire, Donald Trump, revived the discourse of Ross Perot, this time from the centre of the Presidential debate stage as the candidate for the Republican Party. Trump mixed racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric with a potent message on trade: NAFTA had been ‘the worst trade deal ever’ (quoted in Hirschfeld, 2017), responsible for huge losses in US jobs, leaving disinvested communities and disenchanted workers in its wake. To bring ‘their jobs’ back, Trump pledged not only to renegotiate NAFTA under the threat of US withdrawal (Appelbaum and Thrush, 2017), but also to cease participation in what he argued was a continuation of the same bad strategy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (Swanson, 2016). The TPP had been touted by the Obama Administration as the next