ILPC 2027

The global neoliberal set-up must be understood not only as an answer to the burnout of the prior accumulation model (Fordism), but also and particularly as a violent class power reconstitution process that was gradually at stake in the previous decades.  In this sense, the offensive not only has a strictly economic but also a political dimension. This political offensive was undoubtedly against the power that workers acquired through the so called Fordism period, and therefore, workers organizations were the main object of the neoliberal attack.

We already now that subcontracting it's possible de main form of capitalist control framed within the dynamics of the political economy of contemporaneous capitalism, therefor his extension in all the globe is the logic consequence. In these sense, the term “subcontracted capitalism” coined by Jane Wills it’s particularly relevant to understand the dynamics of global capitalism accumulation.

Chile it’s a very good example of these phenomena. Since 1990 subcontracting has grown exponentially in all fields of economy, particularly in mining and services. At the same time, Chilean economy express perfectly the neoliberal project that irrupt in 1973 with the ‘Chicago boy’s’ agenda. These is why we think that Chilean example can be very useful to go from the global Political Economy of contemporaneous capitalism to the Labour Process and vice versa.

In these paper we develop the thesis that the intrinsic logics of labour subcontracting is the dismantling of the classical labour relation, where an employer buys work time directly from the worker and haves him work for him, directly extracting from him the extra work (surplus value) that is not remunerated. We analyse these in several industries through in depth interviews with workers and union members.

With the empirical evidence and secondary data, we rebuild the subcontracting dynamic to make the connection between the big Political Economy and Labour Process.