Suchergebnisse

AbstractWhat is required for sustaining an alliance between union and environmental activists? Applying grounded theory to a case study in the Costa Rican banana sector, this article reveals five historical phases. First, unions and environmentalists identify common opportunity structures for joint action. Second, a preexisting network becomes a resource for mobilization. Third, the new coalition engages in communicative action that leads to shared identity and cultural framing and a foundation for handling exogenous global forces. Market policy changes in the fourth phase stimulate a transnational activist network and framing linkages. Dramatic supply disruptions in the fifth precipitate autonomous organizational approaches that require reframing, identity extension, and flexibility. This study argues that the Costa Rican case can be generalized to other labor-environmental coalitions if such alliances create simple, open structures that agilely adapt to external opportunity structures and expand frames that encourage collaborative autonomy and dualistic collective definitions.

Free and fair trade can assume various meanings, depending on who defines the terms. This study draws on the Gramscian notion of hegemony to link meaning and social structure. Taking bananas as a test case, the study employs documents, interviews, and on-site observation to explore five meanings of fair trade: supporting smallholder markets; assuring historical shipping arrangements; encouraging national development; guaranteeing decent working conditions; and preserving ecological balance. Structurally, the first two meanings emerged within the banana trade's competing hegemonic systems, one dominated by three US-based transnational corporations and the other by former colonial powers in the European Union that favored their own shipping. Although the battle finally required WTO intervention, as Gramsci points out, hegemony can also comes from below. Independent national banana growers made direct trade arrangements with supermarkets. Militant unions became especially active within the TNC system, while small-scale producers and "Fair Trade" advocates refined the EU approach. They each have forced fresh approaches to product certification. As TNC domination weakens and independent producers cultivate supermarket outlets, the expiration of EU banana quotas in 2006 may determine which of these competing approaches to trade prevails. A bottom-up alliance among labor, smallholders, and consumers/environmentalists threatens to inspire a fresh hegemonic trade discourse.

AbstractGlobalization has exacerbated the impact of three Northern-driven forces on Central American unions. Transnational firms have restructured or enhanced their levels of subcontracting. Governments, while weakening labor-code implemention, have launched extensive privatization schemes. And international supporters of unions have espoused new priorities and rechanneled funding. Although all three trends have caused major difficulties for unions, this article assesses whether or not their traditional spirit of "social-movement unionism" has been undermined. Based on extensive interviews and primary and secondary data, the study documents union resilience in the banana and maquila sectors despite problematic corporate behavior and market conditions. Stung by state privatizations, unions that fragmented following the Central American Peace Accords have partially regrouped to resist public-health takeovers and labor-code harmonization. Facing losses in Northern funding, unions have painfully adapted to fresh organizing strategies and sensitivity to women's issues, which they found to be fundamental to successful collaboration with corporate campaigns, trade pressure, and NGOs. Despite losses, unions have tapped a broader solidarity in their struggle against the demons of globalization.

In response to private sector's utilization of 'free trade agreements' to unbridle corporate investments in union-free environments, North and South American labor unions have attempted at least five types of responses: developing activist networks; campaigning for corporate sourcing codes; advocating trade-based labor standards; coordinating with developing country unions; seeking women's empowerment. After assessing each response, the study evaluates the US Guatemala Labor Education Project as a model that combines them all. It argues that with various degrees of success, such labor strategies extend beyond traditional class boundaries.

The author examines the advancement of democratization in Guatemala through the class analysis model, which assesses the nation's popular movements as they forge alliances or class-based blocs of power within a variety of economic, political and socio-cultural conditions. He argues that, in spite of the genuine differences among its diverse cultural traditions, the Guatemalan working class has undergone a process of increasing consolidation

In the political debate which swirls around "democratization" Guatemala must be counted. The policies of its first civilian government since the 1960s, now completing its term, have been important for the success of regional peace. Yet a new wave of violence surrounds the preparation for elections and is testing the government's fragile accomplishments. Underlying such phenomena is Guatemala's struggle to discover what democracy really means in the Latin context where elected officials often serve as a façade for ongoing military control.The contest extends the debate beyond bourgeois and popular conceptions of democracy, especially when Guatemala's civilian-military government is characterized as a "permanent counter-insurgency state" (see Anderson and Simon, 1987; exchange of letters in The Nation, 1989; Guatemalan Church in Exile, 1989). Such a portrayal effectively reduces the nation's democratic manifestations to a charade.

Factors in the increased consolidation of the working class in the 1980s. Examines alliances or class-based blocs of power within a variety of economic, political and sociocultural contexts and their relation to democracy as a type of behavior.