ILPC 2026

Understandings of labour struggles in the global south have tended to be filtered through formal channels of union activities (Silver,) and specific nodes of conflict along value chains. While important we require a mapping that takes into account the line of un-official, often unrecorded sites of contestation. This paper will focus of the struggles around the boundaries of salaried and unsalaried labour in Brazil in key sites (agro, industrial extraction and cultivation). When looking, for example, at just a bio-ethanol plant, this registers a relatively straightforward assessment of value added through labour and environmental progress through carbon emission reduction. However, it is precisely such a narrowness of definition that allows multi-nationals to successfully export and certify production while rendering unseen the massive dislocation of paid and unpaid labour, and significant long term environmental devastation. This paper will argue that a more adequate assessment of the value of multi-national activity here has to account of the hidden costs of production, unseen, literally, in the activity of MNCs (Stewart and Garvey, 2016). Empirically, the paper will illustrate how both indigenous companies and MNCs have manged to organise migrant and flexible labour on a scale that prevents the labour struggles of the auto and mining industries of the past from remerging in labour relations more widely. (Virginio, et al) Thus, calls for attention to new forms of organising across a range of sectoral boundaries and social identities are prominently into focus. References Silver, B (2003) Forces of Labor. Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Stewart, P and Garvey, B (2016) Global value chains, organizations and industrial work, in Edgell et al, The Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment. The Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment Virginio, F, Garvey, B and Stewart, P (2017) The perforated borders of labour migration and the formal state: meta-state and para-state regulation Employee Relations Vol 39, pp. 391-407, (2017)