ILPC 2026

Scholarship on transnational corporations in the global south tends to investigate forms of overexploitation such like work in the Maquiladoras. For our research, we chose the Swedish TNC Volvo, one of the 100 largest TNCs in the world, promoting itself and being described as a ‘good employer’. We wanted to understand everyday working lives within what are considered ‘normal’ structures of Capitalism.

We conducted 102 interviews with workers and managers in Volvo plants in India, Mexico, South Africa, and Sweden, spending up to two weeks at each plant. The majority of interviews (of between one and three hours) took place within the respective plants, some at workers’ meetings. Most were one to one interviews, a few were focus group interviews.  

Theoretically, our point of departure is Marx’ concept of work as the way in which humans develop who they are in alliance with extra-human nature. We see the labour process not only as a place in which products are produced but also one where workers are constituted and constitute themselves. To capture the subjectivity of workers we enter into a critical dialogue with the work of feminist and poststructuralist scholars in the area of Labour and Labour Process theory (Glucksmann, 1995 Salzinger, 2003, Knights 1990) who reconceptualise the concept of work.

We present the TNC from the standpoint of workers - a decisive perspective if we want to understand how social change happens or why it does not happen. We discuss how workers live their ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) into one transnational corporation when the socio-economic and political conditions of their respective workplaces in the global north and south differ. How is transnational solidarity possible? How do workers relate to the company’s branding as protector of labour rights?

The pleasure of learning and knowing, the ability to contribute to a famous brand were common experiences among workers. But so were boredom, pain, and abandoned hopes. Most of the Volvo workers wanted to do their job well and earn a good salary. Where the managers denied them this, through regimes of subordination including gender regimes, we found resistance, strikes, but also forms of identification with the company and resignation. Through all these differences we also found a common language of workers’ pride, demand for respect, fair wages, as well as anxiety in the face of neoliberal transformations of work content and working conditions.

References

Glucksmann, M.A., 1995. Why “Work”? Gender and the “Total Social Organization of Labour”. Gender, Work & Organization 2, 63–75.

Salzinger, L., 2003. Genders in production: making workers in Mexico’s global factories. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Knights, D., 1990. Subjectivity, Power and the Labour Process, in: Knights, D., Willmott, H. (Eds.), Labour Process Theory. Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 297–335.

Massey, D.B., 2005. For space. SAGE, London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.