Suchergebnisse

From hotel luxury suites to working-class lunchboxes -- The United Fruit Company in Latin America: business strategies in a changing environment -- The United Fruit Company and local politics in Colombia -- The Labor conflicts of the United Fruit Company in Magdalena in the 1920s -- Nobody's triumph: labor unionism in Magdalena after World War II -- The United Fruit Company's relationship with local planters in Colombia.

For well over a century, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) has been the most vilified multinational corporation operating in Latin America. Criticism of the UFCO has been widespread, ranging from politicians to consumer activists, and from labor leaders to historians, all portraying it as an overwhelmingly powerful corporation that shaped and often exploited its host countries. In this first history of the UFCO in Colombia, Marcelo Bucheli argues that the UFCO's image as an all-powerful force in determining national politics needs to be reconsidered. Using a previously unexplored source—the internal archives of Colombia's UFCO operation—Bucheli reveals that before 1930, the UFCO worked alongside a business-friendly government that granted it generous concessions and repressed labor unionism. After 1930, however, the country experienced dramatic transformations including growing nationalism, a stronger labor movement, and increasing demands by local elites for higher stakes in the banana export business.In response to these circumstances, the company abandoned production, selling its plantations (and labor conflicts) to local growers, while transforming itself into a marketing company. The shift was endorsed by the company's shareholders and financial analysts, who preferred lower profits with lower risks, and came at a time in which the demand for bananas was decreasing in America. Importantly, Bucheli shows that the effect of foreign direct investment was not unidirectional. Instead, the agency of local actors affected corporate strategy, just as the UFCO also transformed local politics and society

The United Fruit Company (UFC), an American corporation, monopolized the banana trade in the British colony of Jamaica for most of the 20th century, despite efforts by the British to establish a foothold (see Clegg 2002). While the British colonial government focused its efforts on challenging the UFC's domination in Jamaica; in 1923, a UFC subsidiary called Swift Banana Company began undertaking the commercial export of bananas in the then British colony of St. Lucia. Research on the St. Lucia banana industry, during the period 1923 to 1942, was very limited, and has largely dismissed the decline of the banana industry as the result of its inability to survive the Panama disease epidemic. This paper challenges this explanation; arguing that UFC subsidiaries contributed significantly to both the rise and decline of St. Lucia's banana industry from 1923 to 1942.