Event Title
Fairness for Whom? Regulating Labor through Voluntary Certification and Labeling
Location
Lindy C. Boggs Conference Center – Room 256
Session
Session Two - Fair Trade: Solidarity through Consumption?
Start Date
17-10-2009 9:30 AM
End Date
17-10-2009 11:30 AM
Description
This paper takes as its point of departure a central problematic of the Fair Trade system, namely that while Fair Trade’s purported goal is to improve conditions at the point of production, it attempts to do so through mediation of the exchange realm. By sidestepping production relations, Fair Trade actors ignore critical structural realities of production organized around the wage labor relation. Drawing on interviews with small cooperative farmers, farmworkers, agricultural technicians, and labor leaders, I explore the role of this voluntary, consumption-based mode of governance in regulating labor relations in Ecuador’s southern coastal banana region, where hired labor is central at virtually all production scales. The research suggests that, on small farms, hired laborers do not share in the benefits of Fair Trade in any formalized way. Furthermore, the farmers who are not structurally dependent on outside labor (and therefore operate most closely to the Fair Trade ideal) are most at risk of losing market access, due to the quality and quantity demands of Fair Trade importers and retailers. In terms of plantation production, initial research suggests that certification has failed to open up new possibilities for workers’ collective action and may, in fact, produce barriers to union organization.
Fairness for Whom? Regulating Labor through Voluntary Certification and Labeling
Lindy C. Boggs Conference Center – Room 256
This paper takes as its point of departure a central problematic of the Fair Trade system, namely that while Fair Trade’s purported goal is to improve conditions at the point of production, it attempts to do so through mediation of the exchange realm. By sidestepping production relations, Fair Trade actors ignore critical structural realities of production organized around the wage labor relation. Drawing on interviews with small cooperative farmers, farmworkers, agricultural technicians, and labor leaders, I explore the role of this voluntary, consumption-based mode of governance in regulating labor relations in Ecuador’s southern coastal banana region, where hired labor is central at virtually all production scales. The research suggests that, on small farms, hired laborers do not share in the benefits of Fair Trade in any formalized way. Furthermore, the farmers who are not structurally dependent on outside labor (and therefore operate most closely to the Fair Trade ideal) are most at risk of losing market access, due to the quality and quantity demands of Fair Trade importers and retailers. In terms of plantation production, initial research suggests that certification has failed to open up new possibilities for workers’ collective action and may, in fact, produce barriers to union organization.