The Political Economy of Local Labor Control in the Philippines

Labor market processes in sites of peripheral capitalism are all too frequently represented as the straightforward exploitation of abundant, cheap, and place-bound labor by space-controlling international capital. Extensive literatures exist that deal with national regimes of labor regulation and the subjugated subjectivities of workers in locations of rapid industrialization in the developing world. The complex regulating institutions operating at a local scale in such sites have not, however, received the same sensitive attention as labor markets in the industrialized world, on which research has advanced considerably in recent years.In this paper I seek to address that discrepancy by focusing on the institutions and actors involved in creating a local labor control regime in a site of rapid industrialization in the Philippines. These include the national state, corporate investors, individual workers, industrial estate management companies, recruitment agencies, village and community leaders, municipal officials, provincial governments, and labor organizations. In exploring the relationship between these various players I develop two arguments. First, the relationship embodied in the labor process of newly industrializing spaces cannot be conceived simply as an antagonism between “global” capital and “local” labor. Instead, the wide range of local players described here act to mediate that relationship and to embed specific global capitals in a local political economy of power relations. Second, these localized relationships often exist outside of formal regulatory institutions, and indeed may directly contravene them. In this way the mechanisms employed in the local labor control regime are frequently more informal, more fluid, and more geographically variable than an analysis of formal regulatory institutions would reveal.