Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with literature on global production networks, food regimes and power. Drawing on fieldwork in a counter-seasonal production site in Morocco, I argue that dynamics of global inequalities in such networks can be best understood by engaging with experiences of workers within them.

Paper long abstract:

Many details of global inequalities can be read from the daily routines of workers in the global production networks that fill our supermarkets and Amazon baskets. This paper focuses on the case of workers picking and packing counter-seasonal crops for the European market in the intensive production site of Chtouka Ait Baha, Southern Morocco. This case often falls beyond focus of British scholarship and press. Moroccan production occurs at the intersection between the EU trade block, the MENA region, and broader African continent. Yet, with post-colonial ties to France and Spain, connections often remain in those countries. With the UK's increasing trade links with Morocco, it is time to listen to voices of Moroccan workers, even if they must be translated through Tamazight, Moroccan Arabic and French before meeting broader audiences in the UK.

Following fieldwork living in this production site, I will draw on interviews, field notes and workshop data to illustrate elements of this production network as seen by workers. Their experiences speak directly to dynamics of inequality. The twelve-hour days of women in pack-houses at high export season illustrate gender inequality in the organisation of work. Their awareness of the 'frigo' trucks which carry away produce, and requirements of different 'clients', show workers' awareness of the global network in which they are enmeshed, and reveals how they understand themselves within this. Furthermore, it reveals power dynamics enforced through time and distance, and reinforcements of inequalities as pressures to produce for supermarket 'clients' fall differently on different workers.