Social Partners for Social Upgrading? On Corporate Strategies in Argentinian Agro-Industrial Value Chains

Abstract

While global value chain (GVC) studies originated with a critical analysis of the global political economy, today’s mainstream GVC research has sidelined issues of exploitation and instead focuses on upgrading as a development strategy. This is often accompanied by the implicit assumption that upgrading translates into more and better jobs. Responding to critiques of this assumption, GVC scholars have highlighted the need for an additional social upgrading agenda. However, this paper calls into question this agenda’s often unreserved invocation of public-private-civil society partnerships to achieve social gains for more than just firms. It argues that there is a need to pay greater attention to capitalist social relations and how actual corporate strategies contradict workers’ interests. Taking GVC upgrading strategies in agro-industrial value chains in Argentina as an example, the paper looks at the stance that corporate actors take on social upgrading. It shows that the labour conditions and salaries vary in different chain links and that organized workers in processing industries have achieved improvements in labour struggles. Corporate actors, on the other hand, do not consider themselves responsible for social upgrading beyond their role in economic growth, which then allegedly results in job creation. In fact, they rather portray trade unions as barriers to capital-led agribusiness development. The paper concludes by advocating for a value chain approach that analyses questions of indecent labour as existing in-relation-to-capital, making antagonistic interests visible.