Description
We often consider workers and consumers as separate, binarised actors in systems of global production – workers produce, and consumers consume. Ostensibly, when it comes to struggles to improve working conditions for producers, those binarised sets of actors have adverse or even fundamentally divergent interests, with workers wanting higher wages and consumers lower prices. Research on labour agency has identified myriad forms of agency that workers exercise in this regard (both individually and collectively), while other literature has identified marketplace decision making and more direct forms of activism as forming the core repertoire of consumer agency.
What is the relationship between worker and consumer agency? At the empirical level, we have observed alliances between worker organisations and consumer activists, with diverse outcomes between cases. Further, consumers often feel they understand something of workers’ experience through engagement with ethical certification and other corporate affirmations of decent work in global supply chains. This paper seeks to intervene at the conceptual level, however, to problematise the binarised identification of workers and consumers, when in capitalist economies, the vast majority of us are in fact both, potentially opening up space for solidarities. Focusing on food supply chains, it theorises the possibility for mutual formation of demands on the most powerful actors – namely supermarkets – and the barriers to doing so in the context of geographically dispersed industries, racialised worker repression and a global cost-of-living crisis.
Moving beyond industrial relations, market-oriented and social movements approaches to worker and consumer agency, the paper advances a political economy of worker-consumer relations and agency in an unstable global production regime. It argues for an everyday approach that foregrounds the potential and contradictions of combined worker-consumer agency for both disrupting and reproducing broader social relations of capitalist production and persistent, intensifying exploitation.
