RE-SCALING STRATEGIES: THE TRANSFORMATION OF LABOR DYNAMICS IN THE GLOBAL MINING INDUSTRY

Abstract

This dissertation compares subcontracted workers’ organizations in Chile and Peru. While these countries share several institutional features, and labor organizations in both countries face similar employer strategies, the workers’ responses have been divergent. Between 2000 and 2015, Chilean miners formed a robust and militant national union that coordinated successful countrywide strategies. In Peru, on the other hand, workers organized at a more decentralized local level, and, despite high levels of mobilization, failed to create a stable labor organization. Drawing on union revitalization, economic geography, and social movement literatures, along with eighteen months of fieldwork in several mining camps of each county, I account for these responses. Specifically, I argue that traditional explanatory variables, such as bargaining structure, industry characteristics, and labor legislation do not account for these varying strategies. Rather, my explanation focuses on: (a) differences in how social reproduction is organized in each country and (b) labor’s links to political activists. Peruvian workers use their sense of a peasant identity, one rooted in the collective land tenure system, to organize themselves, whereas Chilean workers, a very mobile workforce with no communal access to the land, organize in more traditional working-class unions. Regarding union-activist connections, leftist Chilean organizations helped unions to develop a class-based identity, providing networks that forged collaboration amongst miners at the national level. In contrast, Peruvian miners avoided “doing politics,” given the country’s recent history of political violence.