ABSTRACT
Development Reports, the Bank seems to have undergone a potentially important transformation. In its 1995 WDR (World Bank 1995) the Bank held that trade unions could contribute to economic growth when they contributed to raising worker productivity. However, in its 2013 WDR (World Bank 2012), entitled ‘Jobs’, it suggests that job creation is a developmental policy, that employment protection legislation and minimum wages contribute to reducing income inequality (p. 262), that higher trade union densities also reduce wage inequality (p. 264), and that voluntary labour standards are insufficient to protect and enhance the quality of jobs in an economy (pp. 306-307). The 2013 WDR (World Bank 2012) has been welcomed critically by organizations such as the International Trade Union Confederation and the British TUC.2 However, the report does not discuss strategies of trade union mobilization, and discounts the effects of trade unions on poverty reduction (p. 263). This chapter suggests, however, that these questions are important areas of investigation as they represent core determinants of the development process. Erik Olin Wright (2000) classifies workers’ bargaining power as structural and associational. Structural power accrues to workers on the basis of their position in the production process and their ability to disrupt it, while associational power is a product of workers’ collective organization (usually within trade unions and political parties) comprising ‘the various forms of power that result from the formation of collective organization of workers’ (Wright 2000, 962). It will be argued in this chapter that trade unions that actively pursue their members’ interests, sometimes through militant collective action, can contribute to positive developmental processes and outcomes through enhancing their members pay, working conditions, and ease of social reproduction. The rationale for this single case study is that it exists within a much broader – Latin American and global – context. From the 1980s Latin America has emerged increasingly as an exporter of a wide range of fresh fruits and vegetables, produced counter-seasonally, to meet northern market demands (Ortiz and Aparicio 2007). As in previous waves of increasing global integration, Latin American states have played an important role in helping establish new zones of high-value export agriculture. As Schwartz (2000, 124) noted for successful nineteenth-century export economies, ‘successful . . . development depended on state intervention to position an exporter advantageously in world markets’. This meant responding to evolving demand in metropolitan markets. In many ways the contemporary proliferation of world horticulture production mirrors these earlier drives to create sites of competitive agrarian accumulation. However, the contemporary global food system is dominated, above all, by powerful northern retailers. They have engaged in a global ‘retail revolution’ that has transformed the production, transport, marketing, and consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables in particular. This revolution has come about through a number of transformations (Reardon et al. 2003; Dolan and Humphrey 2000):
1 A huge concentration of retailer power across the global North and now, increasingly, across the global South.
